15:00 - 24 January 2008

Last week, I found myself on the radio programme You And Yours.This is not the kind of radio programme that a politician normally expects to take part, but it was appropriate enough, because I was on about the failings of the Warmfront scheme.

This admirable scheme was set up to help elderly people get new central heating, better insulation and other things to make them warmer.

What a splendid idea, I hear you saying. Who could possibly object to such a scheme?

I certainly was not objecting to it, and nor was the BBC or anyone else appearing on the programme.

The problem, as so often, is not with the idea but the way it is being implemented.

I first became interested in this when I started getting letters from constituents, telling me the grants available under the scheme were being chewed up by big bills. Apparently, in some cases, the contractors installing the central heating were charging so much that the installation was costing as much with the grant as it normally would without.

When I started looking into this, I discovered that in order to get the grant, people have to apply to a company called EAGA, which is running the scheme on behalf of the Government. I also discovered people had to use EAGA's approved contractor to install the equipment.

I began a long sequence of letters to ministers, trying to persuade them to allow other contractors to compete for the work. No joy.

All I got was a series of letters, telling me that there were lots of good reasons why particular contractors should be used.

The months wore on and I started getting a new series of complaints from scheme users in West Dorset. This time, in addition to problems about installation costs, there were major delays.

What was worse, people were being asked to make their part of the payment for the central heating installations in the spring and then having to wait until mid-winter, without anyone installing the boiler in the meantime.

One lucky constituent who was in this position managed to find a noble contractor just before Christmas who, after publicity about her case, installed a boiler for free. But I know of two other constituents who were still waiting at Christmas, months after paying their money.

I finally saw red when I got a letter from EAGA telling me it is not an emergency service. Too true!

As a result of You And Yours, I have been receiving the most amazing e-mails from people with terrible experiences of the Warmfront scheme. One correspondent told me the contractor charged £200 per hour for the installation.

I am now trying to get a debate in the House of Commons to force the minister to explain what is going on.

ANY readers who have had experiences with Warmfront and are willing to tell me about them, please let me know right away.

15:00 - 17 January 2008

It was every MP's nightmare.I was sitting happily in the House of Commons, discussing various interesting questions of public policy, when I got a call telling me I needed to speak to the Secretary for the Environment because there was bird flu in West Dorset.

I rang Hilary Benn immediately, and he confirmed the bad news. After a further conversation with the chief vet at the department and the proprietor of Abbotsbury Swannery, where the disease had struck, I moved to the television and radio studios before setting off towards Dorset.

Mercifully, the TV and radio interviewers were calm and moderate, asking sensible questions without suggesting the end of the world was nigh.

One of the things that struck me most forcibly, as we went through the afternoon, was the extent to which we have now all become used to these animal health disasters.

Shortly after lunch, the National Farmers' Union had swung into action, the control and monitoring zones had been established by the department, and news of the outbreak had been disseminated without any of the lethargy or hysteria that I remember greeted earlier occurrences in other parts of the country.

I have also been vastly relieved to discover no-one has any crazy plans to cull all the wonderful swans.

For those readers of this column, and there must surely be a high proportion, who are acquainted with Abbotsbury, I am sure it will be uncontroversial to say this is one of the most beautiful and remarkable places on the south coast of England or, indeed, anywhere in western Europe.

These are swans with an immense historical heritage, creatures of astonishing beauty that link us directly to the medieval monastic life, set in the most spectacular scenery that even we, blessed as we are in West Dorset, have to offer.

It would have been a catastrophe if anyone had proposed the needless slaughter of the remaining healthy swans, but a quick word with the chief vet was enough to discover such absurdities were not on the agenda.

At the time of writing, I am wrestling with problems afflicting one of my constituents who faces a disaster for his business, and I do not know what further problems may follow. We can at least be sure that there is now, after the serial incompetence of the last few years, at last a working system that goes rapidly into action.

Reflecting the following day on the events, I recollected my family's walk to the ruined chapel high up at Abbotsbury on New Year's Eve. As we stood there in the wind and rain, gazing out at Chesil Beach, I had a sense of what it must have been like for the original monk inhabitants in the Middle Ages.

Little did I think how soon afterwards that lonely and awesome place would be connected with what have now become the all too familiar vicissitudes of modern rural life.

Walking to work from across the Thames this morning, I was met by a strong icy blast - for Gordon Brown, this must feel like a metaphor for the political problems which face him in the New Year.Mr Brown appeared on one of the Sunday morning political TV programmes to answer, or rather not answer, questions about political issues.

The bags under his eyes suggest he has had a lot to keep him awake in the past few weeks.

This is Mr Brown's first full year in the job which he has coveted for so long. But, as I watched his rather nervous performance on television, I was reminded of Oscar Wilde's observation that "there are two tragedies in life - one is not getting what you want and the other is getting what you want. The latter is the real tragedy."

Mr Brown was not a bad Chancellor of the Exchequer but he has not been a great Prime Minister so far, and the solid economy on which he built his reputation has been looking rather less secure of late.

In the next couple of months, we shall find out how serious the slowdown of the economy really is. If there is a significant economic slowdown then that will really cause problems - higher unemployment, bankruptcies and consumer debt problems, declining tax revenues and an even bigger hole in the Government's finances.

For much of Mr Brown's time as chancellor, the public finances were actually in a pretty good state - which gave him money to spend on public services and - usually in the years before General Elections - on a few carefully-chosen tax cuts.

An economic slowdown causes mayhem for Government finances, which are already stretched to breaking point. Slower growth has a "double whammy" effect on Government finances by pushing up spending - for example, on unemployment benefits - and simultaneously reducing tax revenues.

The Government has no real buffer against this outcome, which is why Mr Brown must be feeling so uncomfortable at this time.

Mr Brown's mind will also, no doubt, be on the electoral cycle - he would probably be planning to hold a General Election in spring 2009 but these plans would be likely to be scuppered by an economic recession this year.

There are many other political challenges facing the Prime Minister in 2008 and he will have every chance of proving the veracity of Groucho Marx's description of politics as "the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies".

I awoke this morning to hear on the radio that the Government is promising a "renewal" of the NHS, which seems a bit odd since it has been running it for the past 11 years. This sounds like more micro-management from Whitehall, when what it really needed is more devolution of powers within the NHS to those who use and run the service at a local level.

Over the next few months, the Government will be trying to implement its hugely unpopular plan to close 2,500 sub-post offices, which seems to be part of a strategy of centralising services. This is causing huge frustration for many people, who find themselves dealing with faceless and increasingly unresponsive Government agencies.

Spring will bring the next round of council tax rises, which will be inflated by one of the worst local government settlements for years. The Government's failure to grasp the nettle of council tax reform means that many people on modest incomes will be hit hard by council tax rises.

Meanwhile, pensioners will be kept waiting until sometime between 2012 and 2015 for the relinking of their pension rises to earnings growth.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, our armed forces still face extremely tough conditions, with inadequate equipment and (in Afghanistan) with too few troops to do the job which they have been given.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the Ministry of Defence's budget simply is not large enough to cope with all of the pressures on it - which have been exacerbated by fighting for years in what are essentially two wars.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this will be a challenging year both for the Government and for our country. It is also likely to be a year which shapes Britain's politics for some time to come.

EFFICIENCY PROMPTS A BIZARRE REACTION

15:00 - 10 January 2008

Just before Christmas, I went with a clutch of Dorset MPs to see the Minister about our fire service.The tale is all too familiar. We are blessed in Dorset with one of the lowest cost and most efficient fire services in England - as the graphs and charts proudly displayed by the chief fire officer amply demonstrated.

This efficiency and cost-effectiveness is no accident. It is brought about, in great part, by the intelligent use of retained firefighters. These are among the unsung heroes of rural life.

They work in other occupations most of the time. They and when they are not self-employed, their em- ployers, are sufficiently flexible to enable them to rush out at short notice, put out a fire, and rush back to work.

There are, of course, other people of a similar sort on whom we all rely and whom we take much too frequently for granted.

The people who man our lifeboats are a classic example. They brave dangerous seas, just as the firefighters face dangerous fires, and they rush out to do it at a moment's notice.

We all benefit hugely - not just from their brave endeavours, but from the fact that these vital emergency services are incredibly cheap.

So you would expect, would you not, that when we went to see the Minister it would be to witness the chief fire officer receiving some kind of accolade for running the fire service so well and so cheaply.

But, of course, that was not the purpose of the meeting at all. Instead, we were having to plead that Dorset did not deserve, what are in effect, cuts in its grant at a time when other areas, with far larger budgets and no more effective services, are receiving large increases.

If this were a unique case, one would assume that something had simply gone wrong with the formula for fire services. But, as we all know, it is far from a unique case. Our schools and social services have both been put under enormous pressure, over the years, because there is something about low-spending rural counties, such as Dorset, which seems to provoke a bizarre reaction in bureaucratic circles.

Instead of saying "oh, how marvellous; you are clever to do it all so cheaply; here's a pat on the back and a little thank you present from the taxpayer", the formulae all seem to say, in effect, "oh, how splendid, you do it all so cheaply; you must be capable of doing it even more cheaply; so let's have some money from you to give to someone who is a bit more extravagant".

The Minister involved is a nice man, who was obviously about to see a number of other such delegations and was not having, so far as I could tell, the happiest of Christmases. He seemed genuinely pained by what we had to say - though he was inevitably non-committal about whether anything could or would actually be done to remedy the situation.

As I walked away from the meeting, I reflected on all those retained firemen, with their very low wages and the considerable inconvenience and danger to which they put themselves in the public service. I wondered, ruefully, whether we would have been getting a much bigger settlement if we had to rely solely on full-time professionals at much greater cost and with much further to travel to the scene of the fire.