I was not surprised to see my Conservative MP for Shipley, Philip Davies, trigger another raft of press and social media controversy yesterday. This time, he is in the stocks for derailing an attempt by Labour backbencher Julie Cooper to exempt carers from car parking fees at NHS hospital. Philip spoke for over 90 minutes to help ensure that Ms Cooper's private member's bill ran out of time and stands no chance of becoming law. This is tragic, as it means that these charges will continue to have a detrimental impact on the lives of tens of thousands of patients, carers and relatives.
The focus of public outrage should, however, be the fact that Tory ministers refused to support Ms Cooper's bill in the first place. If the government had backed this cause, to stop these immoral charges, there would have been little that Philip or his colleagues Christopher Chope and David Nuttall could do to resist (not to mention Jacob Rees-Mogg, whom I spotted lounging lugubriously across the green benches at the far end of the chamber, chipping in occasionally to help extinguish precious parliamentary time).
We have a government that is busy privatising our NHS, opening up our public health care to profiteering private sector providers and, in the process, ripping apart the social fabric and public sector ethos for which the old NHS was world-renowned. Allowing hospitals to levy parking charges on ordinary people visiting their sick relatives is simply another manifestation of the privatising mania that was unleashed on the NHS by the Tories in the early 1990s and expanded in an extreme way with the calamitous passage of the Health and Social Care Act in 2012 (supported, of course, by the Liberal Democrats).
The bottom line is that charging patients to use hospital car parks should be banned. I accept that this would require extra taxpayer funding as the sums raised are quite substantial. The money raised by these charges varies, but can run into millions of pounds of additional revenue per trust. Overall, it is estimated that the total revenue raised each year is around £100 million. But this income stream is a tiny proportion of the overall NHS budget for England of £116.4 billion this year. It is also dwarfed by the £20 billion in 'savings' that Tory ministers expect the NHS to find by 2020, not to mention the huge £3 billion cost of implementing the 'top-down' re-organisation of the NHS overseen by David Cameron since 2012 (a far cry from the Tory leader's promise in 2006 that there would be "no more pointless and disruptive reorganisations").
So, it is entirely reasonable to argue that a government ban on hospital car parking charges would be swift and straightforward to implement AND that the resulting revenue shortfalls could be dealt with affordably. The money can be found - just as George Osborne is apparently going to find a few billion quid in his autumn budget statement for the working poor to offset his planned tax credit cuts. Hospital car parking charges should not be a subject for Friday afternoon debates between a handful of MPs in the Commons, but are a pressing social issue that our government needs to deal with once and for all.
Saturday 31 October 2015
Friday 30 October 2015
Thoughts on that Tory Tax Credit Car Crash
It is hard to know where to begin with George Osborne's tax credit car crash as it is such a target-rich environment.
Let's start with the low-grade way in which the tax credit policy was concocted, symptomatic of the dismal quality of much government policy-making (so much for the Tories being the 'natural party of government'). One complaint aired by MPs and peers is their frustration about the lack of detailed justification for the tax credit cuts or reliable information about their impact on Britain's poorest working families. Even the Treasury Select Committee has struggled to get its hands on the data it wants. It should not be left to the IFS to demonstrate that so many people will be so badly hit, or to identify the blatant inaccuracy of Tory assurances that working families will be compensated by other policy changes such as the phased introduction of a (so-called) 'living wage' by 2020. This information should have been on the table months ago, as soon as George Osborne set off down this road in July.
It is also difficult to square the parade of Tories complaining vociferously about the impact of these particular cuts with the fact that many of them have supported shocking reductions on welfare support for so long. Where have they been for the past five years? Many voted for the successive Osborne budgets in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014 that worsened poverty and widened inequality across the UK; and those who won their seats for the first time in May stood as Tory candidates squarely behind a manifesto commitment to carve another £12 billion off the welfare bill. It's true that senior Tories were coy about the precise nature of the welfare cuts, but where on earth did these Tories think the axe was going to fall given that pensions are protected? It is also true, as Cameron has pointed out, that these multi-billion pound cuts have attracted majority support in the Commons on several occasions in recent weeks, yet barely any Tory MPs - including those now queuing up so eagerly and publicly to berate the Chancellor - were prepared to stand up and be counted by voting NO. Had they done so sooner, these proposals would have been slung back into the Treasury boiler room long before they ended up in 'The Other Place'.
It is saying something that, as a citizen of one of the world's oldest democracies, my main line of defence against these tax credit cuts has been the House of Lords. I am happy to toast the way these peers wedged their crowbar in the government gearbox. But they remain a group of unelected, unaccountable legislators who have been handed well-paid jobs for life in an absurdly over-populated parliamentary chamber (the second largest in the world). We need a reformed parliament in which power is shared across two chambers and is not concentrated in the hands of a few key individuals who use their single-party majority to dominate the Commons and drive through bad policy. In short, we need this kind of sustained parliamentary scrutiny of government decisions to be the norm rather than the exception and the only way to legitimately achieve that is to elect the upper house.
Excitable press reports that Cameron is threatening to create 100+ new Tory peers to regain Tory control over the Lords are probably exaggerated. Apart from anything, it is hard to imagine that the Queen would be thrilled to play a starring role in such a politicised drama. Moreover, the creation of another batch of 'Cameron Cronies' would shine an unflattering light back on a prime minister who won support from just 38% of voters in May 2015 on a miserly turnout of 66%. In other words, Cameron and Osborne and their cocksure Tory ministerial colleagues - part of a pack of 330 Tory MPs in the Commons - enjoy the backing of barely a quarter of the electorate and are therefore hardly brimming over with democratic legitimacy themselves. If this policy-making disaster has demonstrated one thing about our democracy, it is that a reformed House of Commons is as essential and long-overdue as a reformed House of Lords.
Let's start with the low-grade way in which the tax credit policy was concocted, symptomatic of the dismal quality of much government policy-making (so much for the Tories being the 'natural party of government'). One complaint aired by MPs and peers is their frustration about the lack of detailed justification for the tax credit cuts or reliable information about their impact on Britain's poorest working families. Even the Treasury Select Committee has struggled to get its hands on the data it wants. It should not be left to the IFS to demonstrate that so many people will be so badly hit, or to identify the blatant inaccuracy of Tory assurances that working families will be compensated by other policy changes such as the phased introduction of a (so-called) 'living wage' by 2020. This information should have been on the table months ago, as soon as George Osborne set off down this road in July.
It is also difficult to square the parade of Tories complaining vociferously about the impact of these particular cuts with the fact that many of them have supported shocking reductions on welfare support for so long. Where have they been for the past five years? Many voted for the successive Osborne budgets in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014 that worsened poverty and widened inequality across the UK; and those who won their seats for the first time in May stood as Tory candidates squarely behind a manifesto commitment to carve another £12 billion off the welfare bill. It's true that senior Tories were coy about the precise nature of the welfare cuts, but where on earth did these Tories think the axe was going to fall given that pensions are protected? It is also true, as Cameron has pointed out, that these multi-billion pound cuts have attracted majority support in the Commons on several occasions in recent weeks, yet barely any Tory MPs - including those now queuing up so eagerly and publicly to berate the Chancellor - were prepared to stand up and be counted by voting NO. Had they done so sooner, these proposals would have been slung back into the Treasury boiler room long before they ended up in 'The Other Place'.
It is saying something that, as a citizen of one of the world's oldest democracies, my main line of defence against these tax credit cuts has been the House of Lords. I am happy to toast the way these peers wedged their crowbar in the government gearbox. But they remain a group of unelected, unaccountable legislators who have been handed well-paid jobs for life in an absurdly over-populated parliamentary chamber (the second largest in the world). We need a reformed parliament in which power is shared across two chambers and is not concentrated in the hands of a few key individuals who use their single-party majority to dominate the Commons and drive through bad policy. In short, we need this kind of sustained parliamentary scrutiny of government decisions to be the norm rather than the exception and the only way to legitimately achieve that is to elect the upper house.
Excitable press reports that Cameron is threatening to create 100+ new Tory peers to regain Tory control over the Lords are probably exaggerated. Apart from anything, it is hard to imagine that the Queen would be thrilled to play a starring role in such a politicised drama. Moreover, the creation of another batch of 'Cameron Cronies' would shine an unflattering light back on a prime minister who won support from just 38% of voters in May 2015 on a miserly turnout of 66%. In other words, Cameron and Osborne and their cocksure Tory ministerial colleagues - part of a pack of 330 Tory MPs in the Commons - enjoy the backing of barely a quarter of the electorate and are therefore hardly brimming over with democratic legitimacy themselves. If this policy-making disaster has demonstrated one thing about our democracy, it is that a reformed House of Commons is as essential and long-overdue as a reformed House of Lords.
Saturday 3 October 2015
Further thoughts of Sainsbury's...
I have just emailed in some additional objections, which read as follows.
"Further to my previous objection, I would like to express several additional concerns that I have about this application (partly as well to amplify some points in my first objection).
First, the new lay-by for deliveries only catersfor trucks coming from one direction and leaving in the opposite direction. This will create difficulties (on an already-congested stretch of highway) when the deliverytruck arrives at the site from the Bingley direction or wants to head towards Bradford after completing its delivery.
Second, these deliveries will have to be made across the footpath and therefore will block pedestrian access. Other shops in the area (for example, the Co-Op) have rear access for deliveries.
Third, the proposed delivery-only layby is unlikely to be adequately policed and will almost certainly be used as well bycustomers 'nipping in' for a pint of milk or to use the ATM. This will create problems when deliveries arrive.
Fourth, the application does not adequately resolve the conflict between (a) cars from the Bingley direction seeking to turn right into Sainsburys and (b) cars from the Bradford direction seeking to turn right into Victoria Road (the latter manouvre has become more common since the right turn at the old 'Tramshed' roundabout was outlawed by the new junction there). Linked to this are the tricky manouvres of cars leaving the Sainsbury's car park and turning right towards Bradford. And, remember, all of these vehicle movements will be taking place along a stretch of road that is regularly filled with cars queuing in the Bingley direction (the supermarket will be busiest at these peak commuter times).
Fifth, vehicles entering the car park when it is full will not have enough room to turn round easily and will sometimes seek toreverse out into busy traffic and across a busy footpath. Indeed, the entire parking area is very constrained and leaves very little room for manoeuvring - hardly ideal and potentially dangerous for anyone parking to go into the store with small children.
Sixth, vehicles travelling towards Bingley andwaiting to turn left into the Sainsbury's car park will cause blockage for those wishing to exit Grosvenor Rd.
Seventh, the entrance/exit of Sainsbury's will be directly opposite a busy bus stop which has at least eleven services per hour in daytime (not including school services) and wheretraffic already has to squeeze past parked buses. These drivers already have tonegotiate the right-turners into Grosvenor Rd and Victoria Rd who occupy the centre of the road.
Finally, I would like to add a request that, in the (hopefully unlikely) event that the planning panel has a fit of the vapours and decides to award approval, that two firm conditions are added: (1) that a clearly-marked and signed pedestrian crossing is provided across the entrance to the car park so as to facilitate pedestrian movements and try to minimise the number of cars parked across this busy pedestrian route as they seek access and egress from the site, and (2) that the boundary between the delivery bay and the pavement is bollarded sufficiently to prevent lorries using any part of the footway for their manouvres."
So, if everyone else can pile in too, that would be great!
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