Category: Blog

Yesterday the government was busily destroying democracy again. They decided to take their bullying, hectoring stance into the realm of planning, setting up a super-quango to make the decisions about big projects, and introducing yet another tax by the back door of secondary legislation under a general permissive power in the Planning legislation.

The Bill had already been through Committee, where none of the Opposition amendments had been accepted, despite strong support for them from local government and professional opinion. The Bill was represented to us with almost 100 pages of print on the Order paper full of government amendments and New Clauses, as they effectively sought to rewrite the Bill at the last moment during its Commons stages. Colleagues asked why they had bothered to sit on the Committee, when their views had been outvoted, only to discover the government wished to make big changes at a later date.

The government, as always, introduced a timetable or guillotine motion. These are now accepted, partly because there are so many newer MPs in the House who do not realise how much less democratic this system is than the old system where the House had as much time as it needed to deal with each clause and issue. Only if the Committee considering a bill took, say, 50 hours on the first clause, and showed no signs of wanting to make progress, did a government Minister then come to the main Chamber and ask for a timetable to be imposed. Even then, it was more likely to be an overall limit on time, than the present detailed timetable telling us how much time we could spend on each group of proposed changes. Yesterday the issues most likely to attract Labour rebels were given limited time, often at inconvenient times of the session.

The guillotine was imposed on a Bill which takes away powers from elected local and national government and gives to a quango, and takes away powers from people and Councils and gives to central government. Under it the Secretary of State can decide on national planning policy statements which require development of a certain type and scale in a specified location whatever local people and their Councillors may think. The Infrastructure Planning Commission has wide-ranging powers to make decisions regardless of local opinion and its democratic expression.

Why do the government think we need this centralising bullying measure? Mainly because they have failed to come up with the plans, permits and projects necessary for this country’s energy and transport requirements over the last eleven years and are now in panic mode that they have run out of time to put through large schemes in the normal way. They must be dreading that the lights could go out for want of power, or the country grinding to a final halt in massive gridlock.

I agree that some planning decisions for large projects in the UK have taken too long in the past, and would like to see some of them determined in a shorter time. This does not mean we need a new super-quango to do so; nor need it mean ignoring all local opinion and proper consideration of the issues. The best way to expedite decisions about necessary but unwanted big projects is to allow or require proper compensation to anyone whose amenity and home value is damaged by the development. Where there does need to be a national decision about growing or creating a new national asset – like London airport – Ministers should lead the debate, listen to the options, and ensure that their final decision includes proper treatment of those who will be adversely affected. That surely is what Ministers are for.

Hidden away at the end of the Bill are the proposals for a so-called “Community Infrastructure Levy”. There are few details in the legislation. The full force of this measure will only become clear when the government publishes the regulations which will tell us who can charge what. The Bill does show that this could be a new national as well as a local tax, as the Secretary of State ranks alongside councils, the London Mayor and Welsh Ministers as someone who is a “Charging authority”.

This is no way to introduce yet another Labour tax. Such a tax is worthy of its own Bill and proper examination. Parliament should know how much and how often the tax will be charged before it has to decide the principle of whether we want it. Yesterday was another bad day for democracy. It all goes to show that Mr Brown’s pledge to restore power to Parliament was so much spin and bluster.

If Labour still thinks we need more taxes and more quangos they still do not get it. We have been force-fed on quangos and higher taxes for eleven years, and have had enough of both.

For the speech on the Planning Bill made by John in the House yesterday, go to the Debates section of this website.

The Prime Minister’s “ fightback” announced in yet another Prime-Ministerial newspaper article, tells us he is going to “stick by his principles” over 42 days’ detention without trial. Which principles might these be, and how can they be reconciled with the traditions of Labour down the years? Is the principle that he now intends to be decisive? In which case, why are his Chief Whip and Home Secretary busily going round whispering about concessions and test marketing packages of changes to see if they could then win the vote? They are undermining the apparent wish of the PM to be decisive and strong, as set out in his article. Is it a long-term ambition of Labour to make us live on edge in a society where the authorities have much stronger powers to arrest and detain than in all civilised democracies, as if we were living in some tin-pot dictatorship? I don’t remember that coming out in the speeches and writing of great Labour luminaries in the past. Or is it the principle of remaining a slave to Blair’s most famous sound bite, “tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime”? In which case, how will he balance it with something that is tough on the causes of terrorism and what does he think those causes are?

The truth is that this is a dreadful way to start the fightback. Labour advice to the PM revolves around two principal camps. The modernisers and pragmatists say he has done so much damage to the ambitions and aspirations of middle England that he needs to ameliorate the position. He needs to offer some tax breaks, some improvements in public service based on decentralising and offering more choice, and back off from his strident agenda of regulating and terrorising the law-abiding. They do not think he can win an Election doing this, but he would be in damage limitation mode and it should save some marginal seats compared with the wipe-out predicted by current opinion polls. The left agree he has lost the Election, but say he should go down fighting, putting in as many socialist measures as possible over the next couple of years to strengthen the core vote and to leave Mr Cameron a difficult legacy. They think this should also save some seats, as more traditional Labour voters would turn out, even though it guarantees losing more votes or failing to restore lost votes in the marginals.

I think there is a third way. I have some sympathy with the modernisers. The Prime Minister does not have a prayer of a good result in the Election if he continues to trample on most of us with his hobnailed higher tax sized boots, grabbing us at the same time in his regulatory clunking fist. He needs to abate the tax pressures on family budgets as I have frequently argued in these columns. I also have sympathy with the left. I do think the PM should try to do something to further his aims. Let us take him at face value, as a man who wishes to do something about child poverty. In a typical muddled Labour way there are grains of importance on this beach of mistakes.

As a radical Conservative I want change, just as left wing Labour people want change. Like them I want to see an end to the scourge of poor housing, low incomes and no incomes. I want every child to go to a good school, and to have a chance to advance by education. I want every adult to live in a society where they can be entrepreneurial, can realistically aspire to own their own home, and shares in the company they work for. When I advised a former PM, I urged her to strengthen the policies for home ownership and to develop policies for enterprise, small business ownership and wider share ownership, as I wanted to see an ownership society.

The left disagree with me more about methods than aims. I, like them, want to see more people do well and have a chance of a good life. I, unlike them, know you cannot make the poor rich by making the rich poor, and cannot give opportunity to many by taking it away from some who already have it. To be more specific, closing the grammar schools or pricing more people out of public school by removing tax advantages will not create a single new place at a good school for someone currently struggling in a bad one. Taxing people who have already done well does not incentivise the work-shy or workless to get a job, but may drive potential employers offshore or deter foreign investors from coming.

So what should the PM do? He should triangulate as a good Blairite. He should tell the left they are right to want a crusade against poverty, but he should tell the modernisers their methods can be harnessed to the task. Instead Brown is likely to throw more regulations and excess public spending as a bone to the left, which makes his task more difficult with middle England, and then throw the odd tax break to middle England to confirm his reputation as the highest spending and borrowing PM by far. All of which will mean the economy will not function well, and middle England will remain under the cosh of an expensive and inefficient state.

What the UK needs is someone who will be radical to help get people out of poverty. It does not need more public subsidy and further distortions in how the cash is spent around the country in favour of the poorer areas. It requires choice of school, making every school independent, and tougher love in the benefit system to encourage people to work or back to work. Controlling immigration would also help.

The government’s visceral hatred of co-payment for health is as absurd as it is dangerous. Practically everyone who uses the NHS practises co-payment. The very system Labour set up more than half a century ago soon required co-payment in the form of prescription charges. It always allowed private sector pharmacies to offer over the counter drugs to people for self treatment, or for treatment under the advice of the pharmacist. NHS Doctors have been known to tell people to buy an over the counter drug rather than a prescription one where this could be cheaper or better for them.

The discovery that the Health Secretary now thinks that if someone buys some drugs that are not available on the NHS from a private Doctor they should be banned from all NHS treatment for that condition is bad and mad. Logically on this Labour view if I try to treat myself for an ailment at home using over the counter medicines, and then have to go the GP because it is not working, he should say I have no right to free treatment for that as I have been spending my own money directly on the condition. Co-payment and alternative systems are fundamental to meeting the real pressures on health care in this country. The NHS could not manage without a flourishing pharmacy sector alongside it to handle many of the day to day and smaller items. Ending prescription charges and charges for eyes and teeth would leave a big hole in the accounts.

This looks like more evidence that this government is reverting to class war as its main reason for being. The so called humour of the Crewe by-election clearly has a greater significance. If even more consumer friendly and sometimes rational politicians like Alan Johnson are now declaring war on those who have earned or saved so they can supplement the medicines available on the NHS we are in for more of a hard pounding. The bad news is we may have two more years of this. The good news is that the assault on Middle England is now so severe that it just means even more Labour MPs will lose their seats when the day of reckoning can be stalled no longer.

This measure is mean minded. It is also politically incompetent. Don’t they even read the polls I thought they believed in? Most people see nothing wrong with people being able to supplement NHS care from their own funds. Most people understand that if you tried to ban co payment comprehensively it would just drive private medicine offshore, limiting it more to the rich.

I have commented before on the lamentable failure of parts of our public services to keep pace with demand, to recognise the big improvements in customer service elsewhere, and to tackle the high error rates they currently experience. I have been visiting some factories recently and seeing just how far the private sector is getting with high quality and reliability. Manufacturing is well advanced with total quality systems, as it has to be to stay in business. Firms use the Kanban techniques (cards or other devices triggering action when needed) first developed by Toyota in the 1950s to control inventory and work flows through the factory. They use Poka Yoke techniques, also pioneered by Toyota to prevent mistakes, by “idiot proofing” processes. Many now use a variant of Motorola’s 6 Sigma system pioneered in the 1980s for total quality management, training leaders to collect data, and manage continuous improvement. The only acceptable level of defective products leaving a factory is zero. Keen inspection and checking regimes aim to remove any failures or wrongly made parts. In order to cut waste and improve efficiency, the private sector is aiming for well under 1000 defective parts per million in what it does, and seeking to eliminate almost any that are not properly made first time. It is aiming to find them all and understand why they failed before any reach the customer.

Meanwhile the public sector stumbles on as if none of this had happened elsewhere. We accept large numbers of people contracting serious diseases in NHS hospitals, we put up with very high error rates in tax calculation and benefit assessments and allow poor performance in a whole variety of areas. Error rates can easily exceed 10,000 per million and in some cases like secondary infections in hospitals might reach much higher levels! In a well run supermarket queues are monitored and more tills opened up if the time you are waiting gets too long. If you hit Immigration and Customs at the wrong time of day you end up in a huge long queue which no one in government seems to care about. If you ring a private sector phone line there should be rapid response, with call monitoring, to make sure your call is captured and answered promptly. It is true that some of the less competitive large companies have poor phone in arrangements for some of their services, but a competitive business has to have a phone system which works well and is monitored to ensure speedy response. Compare that with the problems my constituents and others experience trying to get through to Benefit offices or the GP booking line, where delays can be huge and redialling on a regular basis a necessity if you to have any chance of getting through.

The defence of the public sector is that they are doing more difficult things than the private sector, so the same standards and techniques cannot apply. I do not accept that defence. The quality systems developed in the first instance for smart manufacturing could apply similarly to the public sector. Keeping the place clean is one of the first principles of good factory management – so it should be of a good hospital management. Modern factories in some industries have to be run to clean room standard, where tiny particles of dust and fluid have to be kept out of contact with the products. Ensuring a proper workflow, so that everything is done to the time required by the client and customer should apply to public sector customers as well. After billions of spending on IT the NHS still does not have a reliable and comprehensive system for ensuring smooth work flow to all hospitals in a way which guarantees speedy treatment to all patients.

There is nothing intrinsically more difficult about planning a benefit system than running an insurance company, nothing inherently more difficult about running a public hospital than running a private one, and nothing that more difficult in running an Immigration system than running an employment agency. The public sector needs to wake up, and wake up quickly, to how much better the best of the private sector has become., They need to understand the whole approach. Concentration on good work planning, managing quality and good housekeeping, are complemented by believing in the people in the business, giving them scope to be responsible for their own work and decisions about how it is done, and allowing people opportunity to develop with career progression and offers of suitable training. The best of the private sector is not afraid to admit mistakes and seek to remedy them. The best know they are not good enough and are striving to be better. The complacent will fail. We are in urgent need of some of the magic of total quality and full involvement of all staff in continuous improvement in public service. We need the leaders in public service who can do this hands on day by day crucial work, instead of writing more memos, demanding more resources and employing more management consultants.

The figures this week show just how the squeeze on people’s incomes is intensifying. As readers of this blog will know. wages remain under strict control. Real wages (Wage increases after allowing for the increase in the Retail price Index) are now falling by 1% a year – they usually go up by around 2.5% a year. The RPI itself underestimates the cost increases of many family budgets. Food prices are now rising by 1.5% a year more than the RPI, and energy prices, taxes, government charges and petrol prices are soaring.

The squeeze will get worse in the months ahead. The government is determined not to absorb any of the pressure, so it all falls on the private sector. Companies are being more successful at pushing through price increases, so the squeeze within the private sector falls mainly on working people trying to live from their wages and salaries.

The squeeze partly stems from the government overdoing the costs and spending of the public sector. We are now reaching the days of reckoning, so taxes go up and consumers suffer. It partly stems from the ability of overseas suppliers to charge more for everything from oil to manufactured goods. The Chinese now expect better prices for what they make, as they have plenty of demand at home as well. Opec and the Russians are able to sell their oil for more, because Asia has demanded more oil. Governments worldwide – including the UK one – have see higher taxes on oil and oil products as an easy way out of their own overspending. That has made the position worse.

The continuing squeeze means two things. It means the inflation will not get out of control. It means the political outlook remains poor for Mr Brown, the main architect of the UK squeeze thanks to his tax and waste policy.

All this week, Parliament is once again in recess. It may suit the Prime Minister. It gives him a fire-break from all those frantic conversations between MPs about his suitability to remain as Prime Minister, and all those plots about how to get the PM to change his agenda and to understand the mood of the nation. It may suit individual MPs, who can use the time to travel or catch up with other matters. It does not suit the nation, and sends a bad signal about how much value we get for all those salaries and expenses. At a time when the public is learning how much it costs to keep so many politicians, it is especially ill-judged that, once again, we should be locked out of the main job.

There is so much Parliament should be doing. It should be going through the public accounts line by line, looking for ways of cutting the waste and needless expenditure. It needs to come to a conclusion about how much MPs should be paid and how much they can claim to help do the job, and then explain it to the nation. It needs to cross-examine the government more strictly over many of its plans, from ID cards to the new curriculum for the under-5s, with a view to getting improvements in them.

Parliament should be so much more than an occasional meeting used by the government to rubber-stamp its legislation. The old idea was that MPs sought redress for their constituents’ grievances – better government – before they voted the government more taxes. This side of the job has been squeezed by this government’s regular holidays and shorter hours. They may find that more convenient for Ministers, but it makes for worse government. If they had been prepared to take a bit more scrutiny and criticism in the spendthrift years, they might not have landed us in such an over-borrowed mess today.

Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling met the oil industry yesterday to see what they could do to boost production of oil. They reasoned that if they could help the industry pump more, the price would fall and alleviate some of the pressure. I have no objection to such discussions, but wonder why they have left them so late, and wonder what they made of all the industry representations before recent budgets. These sent a consistent and simple message. The North Sea now offers only expensive and marginal new prospects compared with opportunities elsewhere in the world. The way to encourage oil companies to do more here is to lower taxation on new exploration, development and production. In recent budgets, the government decided to ignore that advice.

Part of the reason for the meeting seemed to be the wish to divert attention from the government’s tax take at the petrol pump and highlight the part played by higher crude oil prices. Unfortunately for the government, this technique will no longer work. Their greed at the pumps has made most people aware that the majority of what they now pay for their petrol is tax on fuel levied by the UK government. Their wish to raise it another 2p a litre after such a big rise just underlines how high the tax already is.

It also illustrates just how much time the government has wasted in consulting and dithering on energy strategy. Eleven years have gone by without a government lead on whether to replace nuclear stations with more nuclear or not. Eleven years have passed without a proper lead on the role of renewables, eleven years without a strong programme of energy reduction measures throughout the public sector, and eleven years without major new power projects in the UK. An island of coal, sitting in a sea of oil and gas, has been left strangely vulnerable to the fact that the main oil and gas reserves are heavily concentrated in the world, and supply is far from perfect. It is better to do something late than never, but the government really has left this one extraordinarily late. It puts in context all those fine words about how this government works for the long term and is prepared to make the tough decisions. There was no sign of that in the energy field. As a result we are now short of energy, and caught with ageing power stations that are not up to modern standards of fuel efficiency in some cases. This is not a problem that can be solved by a tweak on North Sea oil output. This requires some immediate decisions, granting planning permission and other permits to all those who want to build the next generation of energy-producing plants, and energy-supply facilities.

Yesterday government Ministers queued up to appear on TV and radio programmes to tell us they are “listening”. We were told to await the Autumn Statement patiently to see if their listening extended to understanding why people are against the big hike in Vehicle Excise Duty which they defended in the Commons recently when the Opposition told them to drop it. I guess the conjunction of Labour MPs in a queue to rebel on this issue – somewhat late, considering the amount of parliamentary time it has already enjoyed- with an orderly queue of lorries protesting on the A40 in London was sufficient to give us the benefit of hints in interviews that there could be change in the air.

This leaves us with two problems. The first is that we have learnt, from long experience of this media savvy government, that what counts is not what they say but what they do. A straightforward government that deserved more respect would have come out yesterday and said “Yes, the new higher oil prices change things. We will cut fuel duty and cancel the VED increases as a result.” Instead, we have backtracking from No 10 saying these Ministers went too far! The second, is, how will they pay for any concession they are finally forced to make?

If the government had control of its spending it would be easy to offer something off fuel duty, as they will be collecting so much more tax from VAT on fuel anyway. They could offer us the amount of the extra tax back to show their “sharing of our pain” had produced some response. They could also offer to cancel the worst of the VED increases, by using the substantial windfall revenue they will be getting from North Sea oil.

Unfortunately the government does not have control of its spending, and it is finding it expensive to remedy the obvious economic and political errors of the error-strewn last budget of Mr Brown, and the first budget of Mr Darling. There is the £2.7billion of cost of alleviating the 10p income tax band abolition. There is the £24 billion offered to support Northern Rock, and all the contingent liabilities which may well produce losses for the taxpayer to fund. It has been an expensive few months.

What the government needs to do immediately is to take action to get better control over its own costs. It should not be sacking teachers and nurses, and should not be mean to the police in denying them their Independent Pay review increase. They should be getting very tough on civil service and quango staff numbers with a full recruitment freeze, they should be market testing more of the administrative functions of government, and as they are so concerned about how much energy the rest of us use they should go on a drive to cut energy use in the public sector to combat the surge in bills.

We need to cut the tax bill on people. To do so we need to curb spending. Curbing spending is now very easy, because administrative staff numbers are so high, quangoland is so bloated, and the core public sector is profligate. Instead we have a government which is still spending on itself like there’s no tomorrow, whilst losing its authority to raise the money to pay for it all.

There was a good response to my item asking what you thought MPs should be paid, and how many things they should be able to claim in expenses. The range of views was much wider than I expected, and not everyone thought MPs were overpaid.

Today there are rumours that the Committee charged with coming up with proposals for reform of these matters is thinking about a substantial increase in basic pay, or about a system of claims for living expenses that would avoid having to file detailed receipts for the items which give the press so many stories.

My hunch is that as the Credit Crunch tightens, and as people find it more and more difficult to afford the basics, the climate will become more hostile to the idea that MPs should have a pay rise or any relaxation of the controls over expenses.

Having seen what some MPs claim – quite legally under the present system – I would like to see similar figures and details for other senior people in the public sector. How do all those so-called chief executives in local government fare? What about all those chairmen and chief executives of quangos? Can we see how much foreign travel, staying away from home and the like they all get up to? One of my Parliamentary colleagues is asking under Freedom of Information for details of judges’ expenses along with their private addresses, as he feels so strongly MPs should not have to divulge their private address. I am all in favour of proper controls over public sector expenses, but would like the system to be tightened up for everyone while we are about it.

The haulage industry is suffering badly from this government’s crippling taxes on motor vehicles and fuel. It does not drive lorries off the roads. Instead it gives a huge competitive advantage to foreign lorries to come over the Channel and grab the business.

This government has done practically nothing to increase rail capacity, offsetting the completion of the Channel tunnel rail link with measures which have reduced the use trains can make of existing tracks – the railways cut services again over the bank holiday for engineering works. You cannot deliver to most shops and factories by train – the goods have to go by truck to reach the goods entrances. If the government wishes to see the people fed, and jobs provided in British factories, it has to accept lorry traffic to move the products around. Treating lorries and vans as villains in some environmental horror movie raises the prices of food and essentials, hurting those on low incomes most, and transfers jobs from the UK to abroad.

A foreign truck business can fill their vehicles with cheaper fuel at Calais or some other French or Belgian port, and ply their trade in the UK. They can pay a foreign rate of tax on the vehicle, considerably lower than that of the UK. They can pay their drivers the overseas rate, which, in the case of the Eastern Europeans, can be a lot lower than UK pay levels. Foreign trucks drive round Labour’s nasty attack upon British hauliers, and take the business the UK industry needs to be able to have a chance of paying the government’s rip-off at the pumps. The Conservative party has long argued for a Brit disc or some other tax device to get the foreign lorries to pay their fair share of motoring taxes when using UK roads. This revenue could be applied to cutting the tax requirements on the UK vehicles. We set out ways of alleviating the tax burden on UK lorries and levelling the playing field with foreign lorries in the Economic Competitiveness review (Freeing Britain to Compete, p. 27). We pointed out that, as of last year, 75% of all lorries leaving the UK for the continent are now foreign-owned. With the vicious taxation of diesel now at the pumps this proportion will rise still further. It is high time the government at least came up with a system to balance the tax burden on transport more fairly between UK and foreign trucks, if they insist on this very high overall level.

Some Labour MPs now seem to realise that they are fast approaching high noon for their lop-sided green strategy. Over the last decade Labour has pursued a dogged and unpleasant campaign attacking the motor vehicle in all its guises. The car has been castigated as if it were the main generator of carbon dioxide, attacked for being unsafe, and singled out to be the one part of the economy which must not grow. In their ever more frantic desire to stop people getting around – and now to stop goods as well – they have lighted upon their ability to take ever larger sums of tax off motor vehicle owners and users. The robbery at the pumps is now so extreme that the public are saying very clearly to the government they have overdone it. News that next year will see a big increase in Vehicle Excise Duty for most people as well is just insufferable.

Labour’s green policy is about to fall because it is lop-sided and mean-minded. Tax and regulation were used in a draconian manner to try to stop people driving, while the government offices belted out the heating and the air conditioning, Ministers swept by in government cars paid for by the taxpayer or took to the skies to fly around the world at the taxpayers’ expense. Street lights are left on all night, even in places where no-one ventures out after midnight, some public buildings are floodlit at night, and few government offices have proper heating and lighting controls that switch off the systems when not needed. Labour has not yet dared target our homes with the same intrusive taxes and regulations on domestic power use as they inflict on us in the car. If they were thinking of doing so, the huge unpopularity of their attacks on motoring must now be driving home to the most insensitive Minister that they cannot go further down this route.

This week with the fuel protests from hauliers and the awakening of Labour MPs to the Vehicle Excise Duty increases – the Poll Tax of Wheels – it is likely the government will come to understand, finally, that it has driven the motorist into sullen hostility to all this government does and stands for. The attack on motorists has been unfair and unacceptable. They forgot that most people use cars, and we all rely on the work done by lorries and vans for our food and other supplies. They will have to think again, unless they want to go down to a very large electoral defeat.