We are, of course, already in the phoney war that inevitably precedes a general election in the fifth year of a parliament.

When elections are called in the first, second, third or fourth [...]]]> This is, in all probability, the last “View from Westminster” that I will be able to provide before the general election is upon us.

We are, of course, already in the phoney war that inevitably precedes a general election in the fifth year of a parliament.

When elections are called in the first, second, third or fourth year of parliaments, they do not create this phoney war – because, in those years, no-one know which weeks are the weeks just before an election. But when a parliament stretches on towards the end of its final year of lawful existence, the date of the election becomes ever more determinate and the pre-electoral period becomes more and more obviously a pre-electoral period.

This takes us back to the interesting question of whether it would, in the long run, be preferable to have fixed term parliaments.

In a recent ‘View from Westminster’ column, I said “it remains a mystery why, when the Quinquennial Act was being introduced, our predecessors did not even discuss the possibility of a regular cycle”. And I added that, if our predecessors “had been forced to limp through the last few months, they might have come to a different conclusion.”

Interest in the proposition of fixed term parliaments has certainly risen during recent years – and I now receive a slow but steady stream of correspondence from people who are promoting the idea.

The arguments in favour are very clear. Everyone knows where they are. The Prime Minister of the day cannot play games with the date and hence with the electorate. The Civil Service can prepare in an orderly fashion for any likely transition. And the costs can be minimised by co-ordinating the parliamentary electoral cycle with local election cycles.

True, as the last few weeks have shown, a system of fixed term parliaments would have the disadvantage of creating a phoney war (and hence a prolongation of what is effectively the election period) at every single election. And I’ve no doubt that we will go on discussing this issue for some time to come before a national consensus emerges.

But I suspect that we may eventually get to the point at which fixed terms seem somehow more natural then the floating arrangements we have grown used to over many years.

These include reducing the UK’s dependence on imported hydrocarbons so we can increase energy security and reduce carbon output. We also have cross-party agreement on the need [...]]]> Over the past five years, many of us involved in national politics have worked together – across the political divides – to establish a consensus on fundamental ecological issues.

These include reducing the UK’s dependence on imported hydrocarbons so we can increase energy security and reduce carbon output. We also have cross-party agreement on the need to find much better ways of slowing down the water cycle so we do not waste so much of our increasingly precious water.

And the reduction and recycling of solid waste is the third shared national agenda.

These three agendas work together. By slowing down the water cycle and reducing waste or making much better use of waste products, we can also conserve energy.

So far, so good.

But how do we translate these admirable national ambitions into results on the ground?

Part of the answer, of course, has to lie in governments adopting particular policies that change rules and incentives to move us in the right direction. The creation of feed-in tariffs in the electricity system and the establishment of recycling incentives in the local government finance system are just two examples of the wide range of national measures that are needed.

But rules and incentives will carry us only some of the way. There have to be people at the other end who obey the rules and respond to the incentives. And we won’t really make the progress we need until the culture changes from the bottom up.

This is where local, voluntary effort has such a big part to play.

Bridport TLC is a splendid example of such bottom-up voluntary effort – and I am proud to have been a supporter of it for a long time now.
Of course, given our current economic and fiscal circumstances, it isn’t going to be easy for central government or local governments anywhere in Britain to do as much as we would all like to support such bottom-up effort – and of course local governments of all kinds have to be very careful to vet all their spending. But I hope that, over coming years, we shall see support for the recycling effort at all levels of government, despite the inevitable financial squeeze.

“Not another new-fangled initiative”? “Why do we want to fill children’s minds with rights – aren’t there enough people talking about their rights already”?

If this would be your natural, sceptical reaction, I would well understand – because this was exactly the sort [...]]]> If someone said the words “respecting children’s rights”, what would you say in return?

“Not another new-fangled initiative”? “Why do we want to fill children’s minds with rights – aren’t there enough people talking about their rights already”?

If this would be your natural, sceptical reaction, I would well understand – because this was exactly the sort of thought going through my mind when I went last week to Bridport Primary School to hear about the fact that it had won an award for being a “respecting rights” school.

What’s more, if you talk to some of the teachers who were at the school five years ago when this idea was first introduced there, you would find that they shared the same scepticism at that stage. They had little enthusiasm for the idea of turning their children into barrack-room lawyers.

But those same teachers today have become enthusiasts – and, now that I have seen the thing in action, I have, too. The key difference between what is going on in Bridport Primary School and what you might think would happen, is that the “respecting rights” idea has been translated into something that makes the children very conscious of the rights of other children – and hence of their own responsibilities.

I am told that the value of this approach really became clear when the caretaker noticed, after about two years of operating the scheme, that he had not had to make any repairs in the playground.

Pupils at the school also talk enthusiastically about the way in which some of the older ones have been trained up to act as mediators, solving disputes between the younger children. And it is positively touching to hear both pupils and teachers describing how what you might think would be useless paraphernalia – the charters in every classroom and the displays reminding people about rights and responsibilities – have actually helped to make the place feel safer and nicer.

What the school has managed to create is an extraordinary sense of good citizenship. It comes out in all sorts of ways – not least when one teacher told me that she had just seen a young pupil, who was rather aggressively pulling a toy tractor around, being asked very politely by another pupil to stop doing this because it was likely to damage their nice building. The neighbourly society in action – and at the age of 10!

What makes this so interesting is that the power of an idea has been used to alter the balance of power. The majority of pupils — sensible and nice children who want to learn in pleasant and safe surroundings — have been given a language in which to exert communal pressure on anybody who is, or is thinking of being, a trouble-maker.

So far from creating a generation of barrack-room lawyers, the school’s focus on rights and responsibilities has actually created a culture within which kindness and good sense triumph day-by-day over the untoward and the unruly. Society as a whole has a lot to learn from Bridport Primary School.

But there is a problem.

I think it is right to christen this problem “the gang-master syndrome”.

I choose this name because the law on gang-masters is the classic example that best illustrates the problem.

Some years back, there was the ghastly incident of cockle-pickers being drowned [...]]]> At first sight, dangerous dog insurance looks like a reasonable proposition.

But there is a problem.

I think it is right to christen this problem “the gang-master syndrome”.

I choose this name because the law on gang-masters is the classic example that best illustrates the problem.

Some years back, there was the ghastly incident of cockle-pickers being drowned when working for gang-masters: I am sure that some readers of this column will remember it. Following this ghastly incident, which shocked the whole nation, there was a knee-jerk reaction from the government which satisfied the calls for “action” from some quarters by creating a new law.

And what was the effect? Answer: the legitimate gang-masters who were already obeying the existing law now had to obey another law which didn’t really affect their behaviour, except that they had to fill out more forms and deal with more regulators. And the grisly, shady end of the trade, who exploit workers and were responsible for the appalling fate of the cockle-pickers, are all too likely to be unaffected — because there is a high chance that no-one actually enforces this new law against them any better than they enforced the old laws.

The latest proposals on dangerous dogs fall into exactly the same category. Mrs Charming – a frail, elderly person who happens to own a harmless example of a supposedly dangerous breed of dog – will now be subjected to considerable extra bureaucracy if the current proposals see the light of day. By contrast, Mr Thug – who terrorises his neighbours with the vicious brutes that he keeps around him – will pay no attention whatsoever to the new legislation.

And please tell me, how many readers of this column actually believe that the police are going to stop each and every owner of each and every relevant dog to find out whether the law is being enforced?

I will bet my bottom dollar that, if any checking at all goes on, it will affect the law-abiding rather than the lawless. Mr Thug will be left in peace and it will be Mrs Charming whose insurance papers are checked.

This is a question that I have repeatedly found myself asking over the years of writing this column.

It isn’t always an easy question to answer – because there are things that the experts know that the locals may not; and there are things [...]]]> Who knows best? The locals, or the experts?

This is a question that I have repeatedly found myself asking over the years of writing this column.

It isn’t always an easy question to answer – because there are things that the experts know that the locals may not; and there are things that the locals know that the experts may not. But most of the mistakes I have witnessed in the last 13 years in West Dorset have been caused by over-estimating the expertise of the experts and under-estimating the knowledge of the locals.

Last week, I saw at first hand a striking example of this phenomenon.

For some years, I have been campaigning for a second pedestrian crossing at the west end of Winterbourne Abbas – a village that lies on the A35.

The continuous flow of traffic through the village makes it very important that people – and, in particular, school children – can cross the road safely at a pedestrian crossing in order to get to bus stops, visit their friends, and so forth. With just one crossing at the east end of the village, and with much of the population living at the west end, there has been a considerable tendency for people – and, in particular, children – to take their lives in their hands by crossing the road without a pedestrian crossing.

The same problem arises in Chideock and in Morcombelake – and it was therefore with huge relief that I (and many others) greeted the recent announcement by the Highways Agency that it was going to press ahead with new crossings in all three villages.

Work on the crossing at Winterbourne Abbas has already begun – and this is a major step forward.

But there is a little problem.

The new crossing is being located exactly where the bus currently stops. So the experts – who know a thing or two about the interaction of crossings and bus stops – have (no doubt, very sensibly) determined that the bus stop must be moved.

Unfortunately, however, there is no footpath between the place located for the new bus stop on the south side of the road and the point where the new crossing reaches the south side of the road. Result: children getting onto or off the bus who wish to make their way down to the crossing will have to perform a high-wire act, balancing themselves on a one-foot wide strip of grass between the A35 and the stream that runs through the village. Alternatively, of course, they may forsake the new crossing and take their lives in their hands by rushing across the A35 at the point where the bus stops.

Either way, as any local can point out, the result will not be the additional safety that the scheme is meant to provide.

I am now attempting to draw on the further goodwill of the Highways Agency to solve this problem – perhaps by creating a wider path between the A35 and the stream. But the interesting question is: why was there so little opportunity for the locals to bring their knowledge to bear?

Here, as in so many cases, the best efforts of the bureaucracies can be negated by failing to take into account facts that any local can tell you.

540 words

This is as true in the case of rules [...]]]> It is often said that hard cases make bad law – and the thought behind this cliché is surely right. It isn’t possible to construct general rules that will work well for most people most of the time by thinking of the most difficult and exceptional cases.

This is as true in the case of rules about migration as it is in any other field. One has to start by asking what rules are likely to produce sensible results most of the time.

Once one poses the question this way, some of the answers become pretty clear. I suspect that the overwhelming majority of our fellow countrymen would agree with the view that our welfare system is not capable of withstanding the financial strain that would be involved in making benefit payments to anybody and everybody who might wish to migrate to the UK.

So it is perfectly sensible to have a general rule that, before people can be given entry to the UK from other countries outside the EU, they have to show that they can support themselves without recourse to public funds.

But there are, of course, other things that need to be taken into account when designing a set of rules about migration. And one of these is the general principle that British citizens ought to have the right to a family life with the partner of their choice. This is why the system also generally permits people to enter the country if they are (genuinely) married to UK citizens.

But what happens if these two principles come into conflict, or appear to come into conflict with one another?

This is where you hit the hard cases. Perfectly sensible general rules do not always look so sensible when a particular case comes to light.

What is the solution? Another set of rules for deciding how to solve conflicts between the rules? A new task force or quango? Surely not.

What is required when one hits a hard case is a bit of commonsense and human sympathy exhibited by the officials called upon to make decisions under the rules.

I am afraid my experience over the last 13 years has been that such commonsense and human sympathy is not always shown in resolving the hard cases. A surprisingly large part of the activity of a constituency MP consists of trying to help particular constituents obtain these two magic ingredients from the bureaucracy

It is all top-down. And it is basically the same system that was set up in the 1940s and 1950s.

But we are now entering a [...]]]> At present, almost all our electricity comes from big power stations that feed into the national grid. The electricity is then distributed downwards through a system of descending voltages.

It is all top-down. And it is basically the same system that was set up in the 1940s and 1950s.

But we are now entering a new age in which this top-down system is going to be transformed into something much more like an electricity internet. With “smart meters” in very house, a “smart grid” and plug-in hybrid electric cars with on board “smart technology”, we are going to have a much more interactive and responsive modern network.

Instead of just sending electricity down from on high to meet customer demand, the machinery in our homes and our cars will be programmed so that we can enable it to take electricity from the system at times of the day when electricity is plentiful and cheap – whether to recharge a car or keep the freezer frozen – but to switch off (or even in the case of cars, to deliver electricity into the system) when there is a sudden shortage and prices go high.

One component of this new electricity internet will be a huge increase in the number of households that make some of their own electricity – diminishing the need for big power stations and completing the picture of an interactive system that is no longer just pumping electricity down the wire to the home.

The advantages, if we can get all of this up and running during the next decade, are huge. As well as saving energy on a large scale and saving carbon emissions too, we can provide more energy security through a system that is more resilient and less exposed to global variations in the supply and price of oil and gas.

But – as Scandinavian countries and Germany have shown – to get over the hump and make this new electricity internet a reality, we need a clear system of “feed-in tariffs”, so that people who instal low carbon micro-generation (whether solar or ground source heat pumps or micro-combined heat and power or small wind turbine) can receive a pre-determined payment for each kilo watt hour of electricity they generate. Those of us who began agitating for a system like this some years ago are now delighted to see that this is a matter of political consensus – and, while there are lots of arguments raging about the details of the “feed-in tariffs” now being introduced, the big thing at this stage is to move forward, and get the new arrangements in place. We can then all see how effective they are in bringing forward micro-generation – and make adjustments as necessary over coming years.

But, for people further south, the normal destination is, of course, Dorset County Hospital in Dorchester. And Dorset County Hospital has been much on our minds recently.

As most readers of [...]]]> West Dorset residents in the Sherborne area naturally tend to use Yeovil Hospital for the acute services that the Yeatman in Sherborne itself cannot provide.

But, for people further south, the normal destination is, of course, Dorset County Hospital in Dorchester. And Dorset County Hospital has been much on our minds recently.

As most readers of this column will undoubtedly recall, the saga began when the chairman and chief executive of the hospital left their posts amidst reports that the hospital was facing grisly deficits.

It appears that large amounts of money were spent reinforcing staffing in particular specialisms – without any equal and opposite efforts to increase efficiency, reduce the scale of management and cut the cost of back offices.

Once the crisis broke, a new chairman and chief executive were put in place. With the help and approval of the regulator (the so-called “Monitor”), a rescue plan was quickly devised.

Importantly, the rescue plan did not involve cutting back on services – despite recurrent rumours to the contrary.

Instead of cutting back on services, the plan envisaged cutting back on management and other staff, and reorganising the way various things were done, as well as a severe dose of pay restraint.

We are now some weeks further on, and some rather strange things seem to have happened.

It has become clear that, while the re-engineering of various activities is going forward, the Department of Health is not currently intending to lend the money that the hospital needs to make the redundancy payments that would be involved in rapid staff reductions, and no strenuous pay restraint is in prospect.

Mercifully, it also seems clear that the hospital has found a way of making its cash flow work well enough to keep it running through coming months.

But, without the money to fund redundancies and without severe pay restraint, there seems little prospect of DCH being able to get its finances on to a basis that is sustainable in the long term.

The absence of the pay restraint is not altogether surprising. It is, at present, really very difficult for an individual hospital to change the pay of those employed in it, because of the way the national pay bargaining system works.

But the redundancies are different matter. It is certainly possible for a hospital like DCH to buy people out of their jobs by making the required redundancy payments.

So now we come to the really interesting question about these latest developments: why is the Department of Health not financing the redundancies?

Long experience in Westminster and Whitehall has not actually made me a cynic. My impression is that when things go wrong, it is more often because of cock-up rather than conspiracy – and, contrary to the current fashion, I don’t generally assume that ministers, even though they are my political opponents, are motivated mainly by low cunning.

But I have to say that, in this particular case, I do wonder whether the Secretary of State for Health, one Mr Andy Burnham, may have decided that he preferred not to see redundancies occurring this side of a purely arbitrary date like 6 May.

Could this really be the case?

And yet, I frequently find that, when there is a topic of real importance to people locally, the [...]]]> I don’t know how many times in the last few years I have heard people complaining about “apathy” – but this is certainly something one hears so often that it is in danger of becoming a cliché.

And yet, I frequently find that, when there is a topic of real importance to people locally, the locals turn out to be anything but apathetic.

I will never forget the huge congregation that gathered in the church at Bradpole when there was a threat to the local sub post office, or the meeting on the Sustainable Communities Bill that had to be moved from the Bridport Town Hall to the United Reform church down the road because the numbers exceeded health and safety limits, or the numbers of people who came to talk about the Three Cups Hotel in Lyme Regis, the biodigester in the Piddle Valley and the village shop in Thorncombe.

When people feel that their quality of life is really affected by something that they think they might be able to do something about, they turn up in large numbers and they display anything but apathy.

I had the same experience a few days ago when I chaired a public meeting about youth facilities in Lyme.

Any suggestion that the grown-ups in the west of West Dorset don’t care about providing more things for young people to do is, I can testify, completely false. The hall at the primary school was packed with adults who very clearly cared a lot about this problem. They had strong views, and they weren’t shy about expressing them. Any dispassionate observer would also have been bound to admit that the many people who spoke were articulate, polite, rational and well-informed. This was definitively not a screaming crowd: it was a group of mature people trying to solve a real issue.

What’s more, as the meeting progressed, it became clear that the solution which I had at first imagined might find favour was not going to achieve anything like a consensus – and a different solution gradually emerged. By the end, a show of many hands indicated that there was a way forward which was at least worth trying.

Of course, a public meeting of this kind is no substitute for the hard work that will now need to be done by professionals in the County’s youth services and others to put together a workable plan. And then there are all sorts of other hoops that will need to be gone through – consulting young people themselves, and working with Woodroffe School, Trustees of the Club for Young People, the Town Council, the Development Trust and others besides.

But there is all the difference in the world between a proposal which starts its life in a meeting of many locals whose views are based on genuine, personal understanding, and a scheme that merely descends from on high.

When local people are engaged in a process of collaborative democracy, there is at least a real chance of arriving at solutions that will stand the test of time. This surely has to be the shape of things to come.