Stephen Phillips

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28 JUL 2010

What Government is About

In 2008, BERR published a ‘Code of Practice on Government Consultation'. BERR, incidentally, is what BIS was called that day, before, that is, the Right Honourable the Baron Mandelson of Foy in the County of Herefordshire and Hartlepool in the County of Durham, First Secretary of State and Lord President of the Privy Council and Secretary of State for Business and Secretary of State for Innovation and Skills again rebranded it (though I always just call it the DTI since I at least know what that stands for). This 2008 Code of Practice began thus, "Ongoing dialogue between Government and stakeholders is an important part of policymaking. This dialogue will, at times, need to become more formal and more public. When developing a new policy or considering a change to existing policies, processes or practices, it will often be desirable to carry out a formal, time-bound, public, written consultation exercise." (Before anyone asks, I add at this point that I don't really know what a stakeholder is - other, presumably, than an assistant to a fencing contractor. Nor, for that matter, do I know what ‘time-bound' means, though we can probably all agree it sounds jolly fun.) This week, the House of Commons has been debating the Academies Bill, a fantastic piece of legislation which will free up headteachers to lead , teachers to teach and all schools who want Academy freedoms to drive up standards. But the main focus of the opposition in relation to the Bill appears throughout to have been on the consultation provisions of the Bill. Why? I suspect because we disagree fundamentally about the role of government in our country. Ed Balls and others on the Labour front bench wanted a long list in the Bill of people who should always be consulted if a school wants to become an Academy. Their focus, as always, was on process. We thought - and I have to say it seems pretty obvious - that if the Bill contains a requirement to consult, as it did (and as is now the law), headteachers and governing bodies were probably smart enough to work out who they needed to ask for their views as to whether conversion to an Academy was a good idea. So the Government's focus throughout was on driving up standards, not on box ticking and form filling. Consultation has always been my particular poster child for what was wrong with government in this country before 6th May this year. As the last government's Code of Practice indicates, it was always very keen on saying that it would ask people for their views, but never, to my mind at least, so keen on actually listening to them. What Britain needs, and what it has now got, is a new way of doing government, so that we don't tell people the blindingly obvious and instead leave it up to the professionals to get on with their jobs. That's what the Academies Bill is about. It's also what this government is about.

15 JUL 2010

Police Funding

Whoever you are and wherever you sit on the political spectrum, there is broad agreement that the structural deficit which the country has been running was unsustainable. Anyone who runs a household budget knows that you have to live within your means. Every political party at Westminster now agrees. This agreement masks a harsh reality about the cuts which have already been made and those which are to come however. Since 6th May, I have been focussed on how those cuts are going to affect us here in Lincolnshire. Don't get me wrong - I am not asking that we should receive special treatment. But I do say, as I said throughout the general election campaign, that it is about time we got our fair share of whatever resources there are. It's not about a bigger cake. It is about how you divide what cake there is. Last week, MPs debated the police grant for this year. Some of us have also sought to open up the question of the money which is going to be available for the police in the coming years. To be able to argue our corner, I had the opportunity to meet with Richard Crompton, our Chief Constable, as well as with Cllr Barry Young, who chairs the Police Authority. What they told me came as no real shock, though it is shocking. So stand back and digest the following: here in Lincolnshire, with all our problems of a sparse population and a huge rural area to police, we get a worse police settlement from central government per head of population than any other county in the UK. Why? I have to tell you that I have no real idea. It's something I'm determined to try to change however. To do so, I met this week with the new police minister, Nick Herbert MP. Nick is an old friend. Indeed, he was the first shadow minister to visit the constituency after I was selected to fight the seat. Yet there are no favours from ministers at the moment, even for friends. So I had to make our case on its merits. Putting it simply, under the present funding formula, Lincolnshire's police grant is ‘damped'. That means we get less than we are supposed to under the funding formula, whilst other counties get more. There is no good reason for this that I can see. More importantly however, it means that when cuts are made, we do even worse than we would do if we were receiving the money which we should have had in the first place! This is so obviously unjust that even Nick, as a government minister with hard choices to make, had to accept that we have a case. He can give no guarantees. But he has promised me that the government will look carefully at the funding formula and this ridiculous damping as part of the comprehensive spending review. That, at least, is a start. And I will keep a close eye on where things go from here. As I say, we don't want special treatment. We do want the fairness of which we have recently heard so much.

27 JUN 2010

Six Weeks On

It is a great privilege to have been elected as the new Member of Parliament for Sleaford and North Hykeham, even if it means I have to get back to blogging! It is only a little under two months since the election and I have certainly been kept very busy. Everyone in the constituency has been kind and supportive, whether they voted for me or not. It is my job to represent us all and I intend always to try to do that conscientiously, making clear to the bureaucrats and city folk down in Westminster that communities like ours have had enough of being forgotten. My main message has been that we want our fair share of whatever resources there are and that London would do well to start listening to decent hardworking British people like us. Many people have asked me what's it's like as the new boy. I tell them that it's a little bit like going back to school. Go here for this induction; go there for your pass; don't talk to him or her, they can be trouble. Most of that I've ignored. My generation is here to ensure a fresh start. I hope we can do it. One advantage I had was arriving here on the day after the election, even before we were told to. That meant that I could get done on that Friday just about everything which took the other new members most of the following week when there were long queues for laptops, security briefings and the like. It also meant that I've been able to start as I mean to go on, answering correspondence promptly and lending a hand with constituents' problems. I'm not a great fan of being told what I can and can't do. So getting here early also means that I've been able to get my feet under the desk and ignore some of the sillier edicts which come out of the Westminster village. Except, I have to say, that I've only just got a desk this week. Apparently I have a phone number too, though not yet a phone. Goodness only knows where my number goes to at the moment! But even this hasn't stopped me doing what I came here to do: fighting for the voters of Sleaford & North Hykeham. It's a battle I've only just begun and one that I hope everyone will help me with by keeping in touch in the months and years ahead.

30 MAR 2010

Time for Change

This will be my last blog this side of the election. That's because there is real and all-consuming work to be done in the constituency when the starting gun is finally fired. This is my time; a time to help change things; a time to start to reverse everything which has been done wrong for the last 13 years, a time to make our country a better place - one that we can still recognise as the one in which we grew up. On 6 May 2010, we will all have the chance to say what we think of what Labour has done to Britain and, finally, to vote on whether Gordon Brown should stay in the job to which he was never elected by anyone; the job which he coveted for so long but of which he has proven himself incapable. If we wake up on 7 May with Labour still in power, it will not be because Britain has not voted for change, but only because of Labour's dishonest campaign to frighten people. Everyone I speak to has formed a clear view about our prime minister, even those who have voted Labour in the past. They simply do not want him or what he stands for anymore. There is therefore a clear choice in this election between five more years of Gordon Brown and the transformational change which only the Conservatives can deliver. As I say, it is my time: time to make sure that we get the change which the country I love deserves, time when only a vote for the Conservatives can ensure Britain gets the result we are all crying out for.

22 MAR 2010

Trust in Politics

One of the questions I am most frequently asked - and, let's face it, with some justification - is why on earth I would want to be a politician. Latterly, we had the expenses scandal. This week, we had, first, the lobbying scandal, and now, what I suppose might be called the boondoggle scandle. MPs swanning off around the world at the expense of foreign governments and then, the BBC reveals, asking questions and lobbying on behalf of those governments without properly declaring their interest. I despair. Mine is a new generation. We tell people we want to restore trust in politics, that we want to serve our country. Few believe us, or at least few seem to believe me. I don't know how I can change this. Really, I don't. Frankly, given what seems to have been going on at Westminster, I cannot but share the feelings everyone seems to have about politics and politicians. Perhaps, in a few years, people will look back at the current Parliament and say that this was the low point. Certainly, I hope so. For now, I can only soldier on and say, as I will say again and again to those prepared to listen and to give me a chance, that I am not in this for myself; that I believe in a tradition of public service which has underpinned our democratic institutions for centuries; that if elected, I intend to be one of a new sort of politician - the sort that intends to serve the people who put them in Parliament, never themselves.

13 MAR 2010

The World Gone Mad

If there was ever any doubt that the world has gone mad, I had it confirmed this week. Spending Friday with the police in North Hykeham, I happened to notice that one of their cars parked up in front of the police station had a flat tyre. A jocular remark to that effect that someone was going to have a fun job changing the wheel was met with peals of laughter. The reason? It emerges that officers are not now allowed to change the wheels on police cars on health and safety grounds. They have not, it seems, been trained to do so, and the same goes, believe it or not, for headlight bulbs. On one level, this would all be terribly amusing were it not for the cost of having to take police cars away (and out of action) to remedy the sort of things that we all have to deal with day to day. And joking apart, it's even more serious than that in fact. In May 2007, for example, ten-year-old Jordon Lyon drowned in a pond in Wigan after rescuing his younger sister because uniformed officers were instructed not to intervene on health and safety grounds. And it has yet to be satisfactorily explained to me how and why the Metropolitan Police were prosecuted under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 for the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes even though health and safety law was never designed for the scrutiny of counter-terrorism operations and is self-evidently a poor means of holding the police to account where that needs to happen. This Government's regulatory zeal has now fuelled a health and safety culture which risks paralysing officers tasked with protecting the public and undermining the trust our police rightly enjoy. Oh, and don't let your cat get stuck up a tree any more either. Although the fire brigade are allowed to use ladders - it's part of their job apparently - they are not, I am told, trained in feline handling techniques at all.

01 MAR 2010

The Task Ahead

There is one poll that matters this year. It's the one where we increase the size of the sample from the usual thousand or so to something in the order of fifty million. It's the one that Gordon Brown ducked in the election which wasn't two years ago. It's the one where the British people get to say whether they can stomach another five years of leadership from the man they never chose to be Prime Minister. It's the one which Conservatives like me have been saying for months is nowhere near in the bag, whatever the media previously said. Those who attend constituency functions will know that recently I have become a complete bore on this topic. Again and again, they hear me say, the mountain we have to climb is Everest-like: 117 seats to gain a majority of just one; a bigger swing than 1945, 1979 or 1997; the sort of vote against a sitting government we have not seen in British politics for nearly 80 years. And so I regard the latest polls, accurate or not, as helpful. For make no mistake, if you are a Conservative, you are now in the fight of your life. This weekend, David Cameron spoke in Brighton about our patriotic duty as Conservatives, a duty to our country, a duty to win. The choice is stark. Change under a Conservative government, or no change under Labour. No change means, of course, the end of those of the things which we value which remain; the things that Labour has not already destroyed. I love my country. That's why this weekend, when I could have been with the leadership in Brighton, I was here, at home in the constituency, spending time with my family and campaigning for the things which matter, which matter so very very much.

17 FEB 2010

Sport Forgotten

Speaking to Tony Farrow in the Solo Club last week - for those who don't know, he's the Chairman of Sleaford Town - I was reminded about some more broken manifesto promises by this government. In their 2005 manifesto, Labour said that they would ‘broaden participation [in sport] as widely as possible, making the links between sport and health, and culture and well-being'. What happened to that one exactly? Even for the Olympics, there remains no coherent legacy plan. All the DCMS seems to want to do under this government is to mount ever larger raids on lottery funds to make up for its own miserable underfunding of grassroots sport. Tony rightly asked me what we'd do. Apart from returning the National Lottery to its founding principle of supporting the arts, sport, heritage and the voluntary sector with funding they wouldn't otherwise have, the next Conservative government will create a cross-departmental Cabinet Office Committee on sport, based on the Australian Sports Commission, to ensure joined-up government thinking. And that's just the start. We also intend to bring together UK Sport, the Youth Sport Trust and Sport England under one roof to develop a fully integrated approach, albeit that the three bodies will retain their distinct remits. What Labour would do remains unclear, but I think we can all agree that we'll get some more promises on this and many other things before the election, promises which it's pretty clear we can't trust.

05 FEB 2010

The Abuse of Rights

We do not hear much these days about the Bill of Rights of 1689, or, more properly, ‘An Act Declaring the Rights and Liberties of the Subject and Settling the Succession of the Crown.' But its provisions, in force today, are clear and important as regards parliamentary privilege. They enable Members of Parliament to speak their minds, to unmask the abuse of power, to defend the interests of their constituents, to hold the government and its officials to account. So it is, the Act tells us, that ‘the freedom of speech and of debates or proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament." Three Labour MPs now charged in relation to their expenses - but, I remind everyone, at present convicted of precisely nothing and therefore presumed innocent - apparently intend to use the Bill of Rights to argue that they are immune from prosecution. They do so, we are told, on the advice of their solicitors - solicitors who frequently act for the Labour party - and that of ‘eminent QCs'. I do not know who these eminent QCs are supposed to be. As a QC myself, what I can say is that the advice they have given is far from eminent. Indeed, it is wrong, idiotic and plain old fashioned stupid. It comes down to the suggestion that these MPs should argue that they are above the law; that they are not susceptible to a trial by a jury of their peers for the offences with which they have been charged. If that is a defence which is going to be run to these charges, it has nothing at all to do with the Bill of Rights. It has everything to do with the abuse of rights; rights which generations of our countrymen have fought to preserve; rights which these Labour MPs, if they go down this road, entirely dishonour.

02 FEB 2010

Power at any Cost

If you're not going to win the election - or at least you think you can't without a bit of help from others - what on earth can you do? Well, if you're a Labour Prime Minister who promised that you had abolished boom and bust and had then taken the country ill-prepared into the biggest recession in living memory, you could try to win power by an attempt to appeal to the Liberals and those foolish enough to support them. And so it has proven to be. Today, Gordon Brown announced that IF he wins power again - and God help us all on that one - we will have a referendum on changing to the ‘Alternative Vote' system for general elections. The Liberals quite like that one too, though it's worth pointing out that in 1997, research by Democratic Audit showed that such a system would be more distorting than the first past the post system. That hasn't stopped our poor Prime Minister from his latest gamble to try to hang onto power however. The gamble is that there will be a hung parliament and that he can ignore democratic legitimacy by relying on the Libs for a coalition by giving them a taste of something they want. Nick Clegg would do well to recall that in its 1997 manifesto, Labour promised just such a referendum, and then conveniently forgot all about it. I cannot be the only one to despair at just how cynical Labour seems to be. Our country cries out for change, but not, I think, the sort of change which transparently tries to hold onto power at any cost.

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