The case for HS2 before the pandemic hit was made on the basis of the need to expand capacity. I always argued that there was a quicker and cheaper solution for capacity, and that was to digitalise signalling, introduce more short sections of bypass track and improve engineering around the main stations. By those means, we could have got a 25% or so increase in capacity much more quickly at a fraction of the cost, leaving over money to improve local services and the use of the existing railway, and for other purposes.

Now that we have had the pandemic, as we move to the recovery phase, which we hope will be quite soon, we have to accept, as the right hon. Member for Warley

(John Spellar) and others have mentioned, that the nature of work and the use of the office will change. We may well find that the intense pressure during the Monday-to-Friday morning and evening peak, as a result of people tending to start work at 9 and tending to leave for home at 5 or half-past 5, will diminish. We may well find that people will want much more flexible use of their railway—that they will not travel every day, and will not necessarily be going at peak hours. One of the big problems that the railways face—capacity on journeys to main towns and cities at peak—will be changed or relieved by that.

We are due, from the Government and the industry representatives that advise them, their interim thoughts on what the shape of the railway and railway demand might look like in two or three years’ time, assuming that all has gone well with vaccination, and that there is a pretty good, robust recovery. We should not assume that it will be recovery to the same work and railway travel patterns that we had before.

I hope that we will make more intelligent use of the railway for freight, because there is still plenty of scope for that if we can get better at single-wagon marshalling, and can make better use of the railway for the relatively longer distances that freight often has to travel to get from ports to all parts of the United Kingdom. That would be a possible use of the capacity that we already have. I dare say that there will also be plenty of promotional schemes for leisure and tourist travel. The fact remains, however, that the use of the railway for work will change very dramatically. I do think this whole project needs appraising in the light of that, and that we are owed a proper plan with the latest forecasts, which must be very different from the forecasts that the Government were using when they first put this proposal to the country and to the House.

Question:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps he is taking to protect marine conservation areas from illegal fishing by large trawlers. (136424)

Tabled on: 12 January 2021

Answer:
Victoria Prentis:

As an independent coastal state, the UK has full responsibility over how it manages all of our fisheries. All vessels fishing in our waters have to be licensed by a UK Fisheries Administration, and abide by the licence conditions and relevant legislation. We are also committed to ensuring an effective and robust enforcement system. To ensure appropriate arrangements to enforce fisheries regulations are in place to protect our waters, including marine protected areas, the Government has put in place a significant increase in the number of personnel and surveillance assets dedicated to fisheries protection, which includes offshore patrol vessels supported by aerial and radar surveillance. This strong presence will deter against any fisheries infringements.

The answer was submitted on 20 Jan 2021 at 16:39.

Question:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what Government (a) grant and (b) loan assistance is available to people wishing to expand capacity of vegetable and fruit growing under suitable cover to extend the growing season and protect from weather damage. (136427)

Tabled on: 12 January 2021

Answer:
Victoria Prentis:

The Government has provided some limited grant support for indoor horticultural growers through the Rural Development Programme for England (RDPE) for the purchase of innovative lighting, heating and irrigation technology. Funding continues to be available to producer organisations who implement operational programmes in the Fruit and Vegetable Aid Scheme.

From autumn 2021 my department will launch the new Farming Investment Fund, providing grants to farmers, foresters and growers to enable them to invest in the equipment, technology and infrastructure that will help their businesses to prosper, while improving their productivity and enhancing the environment. My officials are working with stakeholders and others on the detailed design of the scheme.

The answer was submitted on 20

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has provided the following answer to your written parliamentary question (136425):

Question:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, if he will ban supertrawlers from fishing in UK waters to help protect fish stocks and the marine environment. (136425)

Tabled on: 12 January 2021

Answer:
Victoria Prentis:

We are reviewing our policies for these vessels operating in UK waters including marine conservation areas. Any action needs to be evidence-based and in line with the UK/EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement.

The answer was submitted on 20 Jan 2021 at 16:41.

 

Jan 2021 at 16:45.

 

      

As the government battles the virus we need more wins and optimism elsewhere. We need to get on with the great Brexit wins now we are free to set our own laws and taxes.

This is now crucial for our fishing industry who feel let down. There is   scope for major  growth in investment and  jobs. The immediate task is to protect our fish stocks from plunder by  aggressive foreign  industrial trawlers, and to help the UK build capacity to fish the grounds in a sustainable way landing much more fish here in the UK. This requires

1. A ban on super large industrial trawlers. The Agriculture Department says there is no definition of a supertrawler . There can be. You could ban all boats of over 100 metres in length, or all boats of over 5000 deadweight tonnes. This would remove the huge Russian and Dutch vessels which dominate and leave more fish for our smaller boats. This would be very popular, and supported by Green groups.
2. Cheap loan and grant schemes to build new under 100m boats for our expanded fishery in UK yards, and a scheme to allow purchase of second hand vessels from abroad which can also increase capacity. With interest rates so low for the government it would be easy to offer soft loans with long repayment dates to get new fishing people involved.
3. Use available regional and development grant regimes to encourage harbour expansion around our coasts at suitable fishing locations.
4. Speed up Freeports and Enterprise Zones, allotting enough to fishing areas and use them to attract new and additional fish and food processing.
5. Help the UK fishing industry establish new markets for UK fish by adding value, using the fish in ready meals and frozen products, sending much more to fish hungry Asia.
6. For shipping generally, reverse the Factortame ECJ judgement, restoring a minimum UK ownership requirement for UK flagged vessels.
7. Draw up with our shipping industry improvements to requirements for the UK shipping Register to encourage expansion without diluting labour or safety standards.

Yesterday I accepted the Prime Minister’s advice and abstained on the Opposition day motion. I was in two minds about it and gave the government the benefit of the doubt.

On the one hand it is a perfectly fair tactic for the Opposition to table a motion to smoke out a government view on a contentious issue. I prefer it when the government has a view and then defends it with arguments and votes. It would be popular with many if the government just agreed to continue the new higher rate of benefit. On the other hand, I could see that the government wishes to make up its mind on  whether to continue the extra £1000 a year Universal Credit to all recipients nearer the budget when it should have new forecasts of how likely it is people can get jobs to boost their incomes, and how the spending figures generally are placed.

The central idea of Universal credit is to ensure people are always better off working. Higher minimum wages, control of low wage migration, taking lower pay out of income tax are all part of a suite of policies to make it true that it is better to work, whilst ensuring all can afford to live from benefit payments  if they are out of work. I was a strong supporter of the increase in UC when the pandemic hit with policies to control it that drove many lower paid out of work altogether, and slashed the overtime and performance related pay of others.

I fear we will need further support for families and small businesses before the pandemic is over and more normal life resumes. I will press for suitable measures in the run up to the budget. I am against the ideas I see in some parts of the media that from March the government needs to rein in spending and borrowing and push up taxes. That would be quite the wrong response when the economy is still limping along way below its levels of income and work of 2019.

I read that the Chancellor has been charged with chairing a Committee to take advantage of the freedoms we gain from leaving the EU. I wish him well, as there are many obvious easy wins which the government should have ready after four and half years delay in our exit. Why are we still waiting for them?

The Chancellor in particular should get on with a Brexit bonus budget. He should set out the large savings on our contributions to the EU and how they are being used. He should explain how the sums we will still be paying to farmers in lieu of the CAP payments will be better directed. I want to see more of that money promoting domestic food production. The EU often paid us grants to stop us producing things.

He should explain how he will police any residual bills from the EU under the Withdrawal Agreement and what action he will take to get our money back from the EIB and other joint assets we held with them.

I want him to overhaul VAT, an EU tax. He could begin by removing it from all green products, and from domestic fuel. That would promote higher standards of insulation, fuel efficiency and more modern controls, and reduce fuel poverty.

He should examine tax levels and grants for small business with a view to producing a better package. He needs to promote small business and self employment as we need them to power the recovery from the deep anti CV 19 recession we have been living through.

This is not the time time to be increasing tax on the self employed through IR35, nor to be putting VAT onto foreign visitors who used to come here for duty free shopping amongst other reasons. We need a UK open for business and welcoming to visitors with money to spend.

On Monday night the web expert who runs the technical side of this site will make improvements to the layout. The work will be done after 9pm. I have asked him to make it clearer that people can ask to receive a free email of each day’s blog posting, to improve the layout of the text so people can read it more easily on small mobile devices and update the appearance. I have sketched some changes.

I intend to continue with a daily main story which I write. I will continue to turn down the various offers of guest writers, adverts and sponsorship, as I wish it to be independent, and will continue to pay for the service myself. It will continue to be the John Redwood site. It will include items relevant to my job as MP for Wokingham, with a separate local pages section on Wokingham and West Berkshire issues. It is not an MP website site paid for by taxpayers. None of its content is cleared with Conservative Central Office.

Moderating the site is taking up too much of my time owing to the refusal of a limited number of people to accept my guidance. I will repeat

Please limit the number of proposed postings each day

Avoid long postings – unless you have something novel and well researched to say, in which case I might publish them

Avoid links to other sources, unless they are helpful links to easily identified government/Central Bank/global quango free public websites supplying useful data and backup

If you want to highlight something good you have read elsewhere then mention the source and give a small summary of what excites you about it in your submission.

Avoid allegations against individuals or companies as I do not have time to check them out for libel. I afford the same protection from allegations to Opposition MPs as to Conservative ones.

I will from now on be deleting many more incoming comments from a few individuals who are repetitious , who constantly ignore this guidance and whose opinions are now well known to regular readers. They need to find something new to say and to say it better if they want to be posted.

This site does not seek to censor people who disagree with me or the government or the Conservative party, and is willing to explore alternative explanations and policy options in a sensible way.

The official figures for death rates in the UK show that the death rate in 2020 was considerably higher than in recent years. They also show, contrary to some media reports, that the death rate stayed below the higher levels it reached in the years 1999-2004. The overall rate is around 1% per annum, with most of those dying being the elderly. As people are living longer, so the typical age of death has trended upwards over the last half century.

There was a surge of deaths in the spring of 2020 brought on by CV 19 which boosted overall annual numbers. Since then progress with finding a range of treatments and nursing procedures that can cut the death rate from the virus have helped to bring down the numbers dying from the pandemic.

Today there is concern that other causes of death including cancer and heart problems may be boosted by people not seeking the treatment they need with these conditions, or by delays in access to hospital care resulting from the need to create extra capacity in some hospitals to handle covid 19 patents. There is also the double hit to overall NHS capacity that has come from the measures to tackle the virus. There is more social distancing in hospitals to wrestle with infection control, and absences of more staff who either catch the virus or need to self isolate for periods after contact with it.

The NHS management and their Ministerial supporters are concentrating on rolling out the vaccine, with the hope that this will solve the problem of lockdown. It may require more development of vaccines and further vaccination moves should the virus transmute. This important work should not detract from the need to advance in other ways as well. So let us look at other ways we can learn to live with this virus.

1. More medical guidance on ways the rest of us can fend off the virus, using everything from diet to exercise. What is the official view of zinc, Vitamin C, weight loss and other measures in addition to Vitamin D which now has some official support?
2. Are there treatments like Regeneron and chloroquine that can offer some protection?
3. More treatments that can cut the death rate and reduce the severity of viral attacks. The work that has discovered dexamethasone and the anti rheumatoid drugs is welcome. Where are we on Ivermectin and others?
4. More guidance and support for people to convert air flow and heating systems and introduce air cleansing systems within their air systems, to reduce exposure to disease laden air in enclosed rooms and spaces
5. More use of isolation hospitals to cut the spread of disease in health settings and to reduce the numbers of NHS staff at risk

Now the vaccines are being rolled out at some speed surely we are owed a proposed timetable to remove restrictions? The experts have always wanted long lock downs and have always seemed to rely on mass vaccination as their answer. It has been hard work getting them to take adaptation and safety measures seriously as a way of re opening more businesses, and even difficult to get results from tests and trials of various treatments to cut the death rate and the severity of the bad cases.

This week has been about securing sufficient deliveries of vaccine and sorting out arrangements to get the inoculations done. There have been debates about the relative role of GPs, pharmacies, hospitals and large temporary centres. The system seems to favour large facilities capable of carrying out many procedures, and favours NHS leadership. Let’s hope it goes well.

Meanwhile damage is being done to many small businesses and the economy has declined again. the Chancellor resists all requests to give more temporary help to businesses .

I am pressing for more measures to support the economy and a clearer path back to work.

A contributor asked for an update on government debt.

The UK had a difficult borrowing problem in the IMF crash of the mid 1970s when the country ran out of foreign currency to borrow and had to make emergency cuts. The IMF supervised a programme of lower public spending in return for loans.

It had a bit of a domestic borrowing problem in the 1980s as a Conservative government tackled the large inherited borrowings. Interest rates rose to high levels to persuade people to take state debt as investments. As spending came under better control so rates came down, helping economic recovery.

It had a worse borrowing problem during and after the banking crash of 2008. State debt was high going into the crash alongside very high levels of private sector borrowing. Both sectors reined in in the last months of the Labour government. The incoming Coalition, contrary to media reports, raised the levels of state borrowing over their tenure.

On each of these occasions debt interest was over 3% of GDP or 6-7% of total public spending. It was considerably higher immediately after the war when state debt was 250% of GDP reflecting the need to spend and borrow to win the war. Patient work brought the debt under better control in the 1950s.

People ask me if we can afford the sharp build up in gross debt brought on by the policies chosen to deal with the pandemic. I am pleased to report that we can afford it, because interest rates have tumbled so much and because the Bank of England is buying in substantial quantities of the debt. The latest official predictions show net debt interest as a percentage of GDP falling to a tiny 0.8% of GDP next year as debts are rolled over at low rates and as the Bank completes its buying programme. This means debt interest will be at its lowest for the post 1945 period. There is no need to count the interest paid on the debt owned by the Bank of England, as taxpayers and government get that receipt.

The Uk government today can borrow money for 10 years at 0.29%. The stated debt is a large 105% of GDP, but the state itself will own £875bn of that so the true figure for the actual net debt owed by the state is around two thirds of GDP.

These are unusual times when the US, UK, leading EU countries and Japan can all borrow at around zero very large sums of money. It is still not a good idea to go on borrowing at scale for too long, and never a good idea to waste money borrowed. The immediate need for high borrowing is necessary to subsidise people and companies that are prevented from working by lock downs. The sooner we can unlock, the sooner we can get our finances under better control.

The good news is there is no need to worry yet. Markets are allowing all the major countries to borrow plenty at ultra low rates of interest, underpinned by Central Banks buying up a lot of the debt. This only has to change were inflation to pick up, which so far it has not. Japan has been doing this now for several decades with no inflation, with gross state debt at 250% of GDP but net state debt around half that and the interest burden very low.