Author: johnredwood

Do not send motorway sit down protesters to prison

October 29, 2021 223 Comments

I have no wish to load the prisons with the protesters who block main roads. Some of them want to be sent there to heighten their newsworthiness. There are often too many to send them all. Why should we taxpayers have to pay more to keep them in prison to increase the coverage they get?

A friend this week suggested to me a punishment for deliberately blocking the highway as part of a protest which might  better fit the crime and might be more of a deterrent to many of them. Why not make the penalty the loss of your driving licence? The crime would be deliberately blocking the road as a protest. The police and courts could remove as many licences as there were protesters with licences.

The protesters should welcome this. As they want us all to create less carbon dioxide we would be enabling them to do just that themselves, by banning them from using personal transport in future. It would force them to do as they preach, going by bike or public transport. The ones who do make their own sacrifices already would not mind, whilst many of them who lecture the rest of us how to live but do not follow their own advice would face a disagreeable penalty that did inconvenience them .

What do you think about this?

The Environment Bill and the issue of storm overflows

October 28, 2021 0 Comments

A number of constituents contacted me recently about the Environment Bill and the issue of storm overflows. I have now received the enclosed update from the Government:

Dear John

This Conservative government is the first government to set out our expectation that water companies must take steps to significantly reduce storm overflows. We will now put that instruction on an enhanced legal footing.

The Environment Bill will allow us to deliver the most ambitious environmental programme of any country on earth. I am grateful for the scrutiny that you have provided to date, and I would like to address the issue of storm overflows. The amount of sewage discharge by water companies into our rivers is not acceptable. We have made it crystal clear to water companies that they must significantly reduce sewage discharges from storm overflows as a priority.

If we do not start to see significant improvements, we will not hesitate to take action through a swathe of new measures directly on water companies in the Environment Bill. None of us voted to allow water companies to pump sewage into our rivers as some campaigns have caricatured in recent days. We actually voted in favour of a package of measures to reduce harms from storm overflows including:

• a new duty directly on water companies to produce comprehensive statutory Drainage and Sewerage Management Plans, setting out how they will manage and develop their drainage and sewerage system over a minimum 25-year planning horizon, including how storm overflows will be addressed through these plans.

• a power of direction for the government to direct water companies in relation to the actions in these Drainage and Sewerage Management Plans. We will not hesitate to use this power of direction if plans are not good enough.

• a new duty on Government to produce a statutory plan to reduce discharges from storm overflows

• a requirement for government to produce a report setting out the actions that would be needed to eliminate discharges from storm overflows in England, and the costs and benefits of those actions. Both publications are required before 1 September 2022.

• a new duty directly on water companies and the Environment Agency to publish data on storm overflow operation on an annual basis.

• a new duty directly on water companies to publish near real time information on the operation of storm overflows.

• a new duty directly on water companies to monitor the water quality upstream and downstream of storm overflows and sewage disposal works.

Following the debate in the House of Commons last week, we have also announced that we will bolster the measures we are already taking.

In July of this year, this Government set out, for the first time ever, its expectation that Ofwat should incentivise water companies to invest to significantly reduce the use of storm overflows in the forthcoming pricing review period. Ofwat will be required to act in accordance with this expectation.

Our amendment will place this policy position in an additional clause in the Environment Bill to underline the action the government is taking. We are simply placing an existing statement in legislation. The reasons as to why we were unable to accept the Duke of Wellington’s well-intentioned amendment still stand. The complete elimination of discharges from storm overflows would be extremely challenging. Initial assessments suggest that total elimination would cost anywhere from £150 billion to £600 billion.

This process could involve the complete separation of sewerage systems, leading to potentially significant disruption for homes, businesses and infrastructure across the country. Customer bill increases, potentially amounting to many hundreds of pounds, and other trade-offs against other water industry priorities would be unavoidable. We need to understand what such trade-offs might be.

I have been very clear that water companies need to step up. Equally, we should acknowledge what they have done. Between 1990 and 2020 the water industry has invested about £30 billion in environmental improvement work, much of it to improve water quality in rivers.

A further £7.1 billion is planned to be invested between 2020 and 2025, of which £3.1 billion will be on storm overflows. Labour’s plans to renationalise water would have rendered this investment impossible, whilst passing an additional cost of £90 billion to our constituents.

Yours sincerely,

Rebecca Pow

The timing of tax cuts

October 28, 2021 172 Comments

The main point I was able to make yesterday in the short speech Parliament allowed was that we need the cuts in tax rates now to promote faster growth. The Chancellor rightly says he wants them in due course. They should not be a reward for managing to grow against the headwind of high taxes. They should be a necessary part of a growth strategy. They will speed  growth and make the rest easier to achieve.

The budget moved huge sums of money thanks to a major rethink over the official forecasts from just six months ago. The OBR has lifted its forecast of growth this year by a massive 2.5% or more than £50bn. It has raised its inflation forecast for next year from 1.8% to 4%. It has slashed its unemployment forecast from 5.6% to 4.9%. It has discovered £44 bn more revenue in the first six months of the year that it forecast in March. I argued that the March forecast was wildly pessimistic. Now the economy is slowing the forecasters have decided to up the projections for this year!

The OBR expects growth to slow to an average of just 1.5% a year in the three years  2024-26. Despite this it proposes a 3.8% per annum real growth in public expenditure. To make such large sums more affordable it is imperative to lift the growth rate. That will require the various measures I have written about to boost underlying capacity in many things from energy to food, from transport to engineered products.

The Treasury needs to review public spending to secure value for money.

Spending priorities

October 27, 2021 74 Comments

I am all in favour of the government spending money to obtain high quality health and education services, to ensure our country is properly defended, our law upheld and all those in need offered financial help. Governments understandably concentrate on making announcements where they are planning to spend more, and claim that the mere fact that they are spending more means things must be better. Opposition parties from the left of centre encourage this thinking and usually oppose on the grounds that not enough is being spent, making it impossible for things to be better. A badly run part of the public sector will usually blame a lack of cash rather than any error of policy or misdirected effort on their part.

This budget needs to go beyond stressing where the government is spending more, to examine where it can spend less or where it can spend to better effect. It needs to remind us all that simply spending more cash can be inflationary, or can fail to deliver what is wanted. Higher public sector wages are often desirable but need to be offered against a background of working smarter. They are affordable if backed by productivity gains, they might prove to be inflationary if more money chases the same output.

There are many areas where spending can now come down. The government is rightly ending the Furlough and other special income support measures it brought in to handle lockdowns. It needs to come up with a new plan for the railways to avoid spending a subsidy fortune on sending many nearly empty trains around the country to service patterns of work demand that have disappeared with the homeworking revolution. The government will doubtless think it too late to cancel HS2, but its poor business case has just been undermined more by the big reduction in passenger rail travel. The railway can be repurposed for more freight travel, to contribute to the green initiatives and to take lorries off congested roads.

In the health budget the huge sums committed to finding a vaccine, setting up a vaccination programme, designing and implementing a test and trace system, and putting in more testing capacity can in part be redeployed to getting waiting lists down and doing the day job as the pandemic wanes. There will also be the saving on putting in and then closing the extra Nightingale capacity. All of these sums stay in the overall budget and are rolled over for the years ahead as if these commitments would repeat.

In areas like energy, transport and housing where we need more capacity we can finance more of these through private sector investment.

The sooner the government stops illegal migration and regulates economic migration at sensible levels the better. Everyone we welcome to the UK needs a major investment in housing, public services and transport infrastructure to make their lives decent. Reducing these pressures would ease budget difficulties in several areas.

My Question to the Government about NHS England Funding – Announcement to Media

October 26, 2021 0 Comments

Sir John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): Given that in the last two years very large sums of money have been spent on test and trace, establishing a successful vaccine programme, Nightingale capacity and other one-offs for the pandemic, how much of that money will become available to spend on the other work that is now so desperately needed in the NHS?

Minister of State (Mr Edward Argar): My right hon. Friend will know that by far and away the overwhelming majority of that money was one-off spending to tackle the pandemic in its most acute phase. We will need to continue to spend some of that on therapeutics, vaccinations and similar.

On other things, such as the significant increase in infrastructure and understanding that we have built in test and trace and in testing and diagnostic capacity, I am looking at how a long-term legacy can be born of that and how we can transition the learnings and infrastructure from that to continue to deliver for patients in more normal times.

My Question to the Government about Large Goods Vehicle Drivers – Driving Licences

October 26, 2021 0 Comments

Sir John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, by what date his Department expects the backlog of HGV licence applications to be cleared.

Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Ms Trudy Harrison): The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) is prioritising applications for vocational driving licences, including those for HGV entitlement. There is no backlog for provisional vocational licences and these are being processed within the normal turnaround time of five working days.

The DVLA has significantly increased the processing of vocational licence renewals and has moved more staff into this area. Given this, the DVLA expects to be processing applications for both provisional vocational licences and renewals within normal turnaround times by early November. The large majority of those applying to renew an HGV licence can continue driving while their application is being processed.