There was good news last week for those registered as blind. The Government changed its mind and decided to legislate in favour of bigger mobility grants for people unfortunate enough to be in this category.
Unsurprisingly, everybody present in the House of Commons was happy to see this go through, and the measure was added to legislation without a vote.
Alas, the hard bit comes now. Both the Government and the Opposition were hesitant about this extension of grants despite the very good case for them, because nobody had come up with a suggestion of where we could find the money from. And there has still been no suggestion about this.
So the hunt will now be on to find the required cash by the time that the law comes into effect in 2011.
I have no doubt that this particular issue will be resolved – but we shouldn’t pretend that it is going to be easy to find money for anything in the next few years. The ghastly effects of the recession on public finances that were already severely overstretched will be with us for many years to come, I fear.
Regardless of who forms the next government, getting the books back into order is going to require a combination of a great deal of straight talking and great deal of strong leadership.
Governments are going to have to admit to people just how bad the situation is – that’s the straight talking bit.
And they are then going to have to find a way of bringing the whole population with them in their attempts to make the books balance. This, in turn, is going to mean persuading everybody that the actions that are taken are fair, and that people higher up the income scale are taking a proportionate share of the burden. That is where strong leadership will come in.
A lot of this is going to have to be done at local level, by people working together. That’s something we have always been good at in West Dorset – and I was delighted to see, last week, that West Dorset District Council has now teamed up with lots of other local bodies to provide more help for local people and local businesses that find themselves in difficulties as a result of the recession.
I hope that we are now also going to move towards the creation of job clubs locally.
For small traders in West Dorset, it often won’t make sense to spend lots of money advertising jobs – but if we can arrange for these jobs to pop up on an internet site, and if we can help those who are looking for jobs to have ready access to that site, I think we can, with a minimum of cost, help a lot of people into a lot of jobs a lot quicker than would otherwise be possible.
I am glad to say that the senior management of the Council have taken up this idea and I hope we can now put together the right kind of partnership, involving the Council, the Citizens Advice Bureaux, the right sort of internet software, and all the local business organisations.