Thumbs up for Basildon Sporting Village

Basildon's Conservative administration is faced with a crumbling sporting infrastructure that was designed for the assumptions of the 80s municipal socialism, which more or less held that competitive sport was a bad thing. So, we have small sports centres that are intentionally inadequate for the development of sporting skills to a high level, one swimming pool was actually designed to be just short of 25m to prevent competitive use. Labour Council administrations also failed to spend to maintain the fabric of Basildon's sports centres, pretty much limiting funding to what was required to keep the rain out. Our answer to all of this is to fold a number of small sports centres into one large, world-class facility characterised as a Sporting Village. Let us be clear, the idea is to provide a facility for everything from leisure use all the way up to elite sports and at a price ordinary people can afford. The trouble is that our local Labour party have suggested that we are going to aim it at the David Lloyd crowd and they are really exercised at the option of a third-party running it under contract. So, having created the problem in administration, they vote against the solution in opposition. The good news is that the Labour government doesn't agree with them and they have pledged £5 million to the project, which brings the total available funding up to £25m. So, the Sporting Village will move forward and we will be out to tender shortly, hopefully now with local cross-party support. Basildon is geographically close enough to the site of the London Olympic Stadium for our Sporting Village to be a supporting facility for the games. The challenge now is now to be ready for the run up to 2012.

Labour wants to close A&E units, because longer ambulance journeys are better

You have to be careful with statistics. A few years a factoid was doing the rounds that went something like this 'a policeman will only walk in on two crimes in their entire career, so it is more efficient to have them in central police stations waiting for the public to report crimes'. This was based on a study that was apparently performed by people with no actual knowledge of police work. For example it ignored the deterrence effect of police on the beat, or the fact that obtaining community knowledge and intelligence is pretty difficult sitting on your backside in an office. However, that throw away summary of a piece of flawed research actually framed policing policy for a number of years, until people noticed that the crime rate was going up despite the supposed 'efficiency' of the new system. Now community policing and walking the beat is back in fashion and anything else is considered absurd.

Something similar appears to have been happening with health policy; the idea here being that a smaller number of specialist units would be better that local services. Now, there is some merit in this if you are treating a long-term chronic condition like cancer, unfortunately I know a bit about that subject. The point here is convenience is quickly outweighed by quality of medical treatment when it comes to that sort of disease. However, this is not always the case and the Telegraph summed up the result of some new work thus:

A study has found that the further patients travel in an ambulance to reach hospital the more likely they are to die.

Rain is also wet by the way, but sometimes the bleeding obvious has to be said because otherwise you can get into the situation where people argue that more police on the streets is not a good idea.

Iain Dale breaks a story: Mirror tried to infiltrate CCHQ

Iain Dale has a story that the Daily Mirror tried to put a mole into CCHQ in the form of an undercover journalist. This is pretty reprehensible; a newspaper could make a case for undercover reporting if there was some sort of public interest, but what is the public interest here? Worse than that, how do we know that anything politically useful to the Labour party from the journalists efforts wouldn't have ended up passed to them, regardless of its news value? So, now we have a national newspaper in bed with the government. Do these people think that they have any credibility left? They might as well just change their masthead to Vote Labour.

Conservative Policy on the Green Belt

This was a very welcome statement from Eric Pickles, Shadow Communities Secretary:

"The Green Belt has served England well for the last half century – protecting against urban sprawl and unsustainable development.

“Yet I fear the Green Belt now faces a sustained assault from Labour's army of bulldozers and concrete mixers – with local communities powerless to resist Whitehall’s Soviet-style targets."

We need to build more homes and regenerate rundown communities – yet Green Belt protection must remain. The Green Belt defines and protects urban communities from sprawl.”

Politics at the grass roots, Noak Bridge Parish Council does the business

There is a planning application in Noak Bridge for 20 houses and flats. Noak Bridge is a village between Basildon and Billericay with a Parish Council and they have been doing just what the lowest local authority tier should do for their community; leafleting the immediately affected area and holding a meeting to explain the planning process and determine people's views as evidence for the District Council Planning Committee. It was efficient, responsive and very relevant. It was also based very much on the concept of voluntary public service, as Parish Councillors do not get paid. If you tried to duplicate that service as part of, say, some sort of quango I wonder how much it would cost? Oh, and this sort of democratic representation is one of the things some people think should be done away with. Apparently, it hinders the planning process and matters should be left in the hands of 'experts', who will, no doubt, charge by the hour.

Report on British education from Reform

That the education system is not delivering as it should is a bit of an open secret. A high percentage of children are not taught to read and write by age 11, which effectively sabotages the rest of the their education. We have falling exam standards, not just in grades for which you could actually make a justification if you want to push up the number of university entrants, but in absolute terms, for which there is no excuse. I have had three fast-track graduate trainees at work at one time or another and for two out of the three I have had to add remedial written grammar to their development schedule, and these are supposed to represent the apex of our education system.

There have been various attempts to fix matters from a government that on one hand rubbishes criticism as some sort of attack on hard-working students and on the other hand produces a secession of initiatives to fix what apparently isn't a problem. Now there is a new think-tank report on the subject that shows the sort of clarity of thought that has hitherto eluded ministers. I especially like this:

The centralisation and privatisation of the examination industry, has had detrimental effects on exam standards. The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Government. In effect this means that a branch of government decides the qualifications and the curriculum available to the very great majority of young people in England. The second problem relates to competition between the exam boards, of which England has six in comparison to two in the United States. They are competing for business, introducing an undesirable commercial element into the examinations industry. No one examination board can afford for their examination in any given subject to be seen to be significantly harder than that of another board, leading to an overall decline in standards.

There is such a thing as market failure.

Conservatives want to cut tax, Labour wants to change the subject

The Conservative Economic Competitiveness Policy Group is not just proposing reductions in red tape that are effective tax cuts; it is proposing some actual tax cuts as well. Their analysis reveals how Britain has slipped down the business taxation league and how other countries, Ireland for example, have cut corporation tax and more than made up the revenue in the resulting increase in growth. So it is suggested that UK corporation tax should fall to 25p in the pound from its current 30p level, and to 20p in the pound for small businesses. It is also suggested that capital gains tax should go on any asset held for longer than 10 years and that, crucially, inheritance tax should simply be abolished. This last is especially welcome. A tax should raise realistic amounts of revenue and it should also be collectible. Inheritance tax meets these tests, but it fails a third in that it is simply not fair. What is the logic that allows the government to tax assets on which tax has already been paid just because the previous owner isn’t around to complain, or vote for that matter? The current threshold is £300000, supposedly rising to £350000 by 2010. That means the estate of anyone with a relatively modest house anywhere in the south, and in many places elsewhere in the UK would be hit with the 40% charge. These people are not rich, they are usually just hardworking, and their families should not be penalised for it and maybe forced to sell family homes just to meet death duties.

Taken together, these are sensible proposals and they are more than likely to pay for themselves in their beneficial effect on the economy. Of course they are a way from being policy, but the mood music from George Osborne among others has been favourable, as has been the press coverage. Labour has tried to characterise it as a ‘lurch to the right’. That they can’t even debate tax cuts on their own terms without trying to make it a political process story shows how little they really have to say.

An Alcohol-free zone worked in Billericay

Following the tragic death of a family man at the hands of what appear to be alcohol-fuelled yobs, there have been calls for all sorts of action on underage drinking. There are already quite a few things that can be done, however, for example we had a bit of problem with people drinking on the street in Billericay High Street, so we made it an alcohol-free zone. That means that people can drink in pubs or restaurants, but they can't wander around clutching booze without the police having the power to confiscate it. The thing is that it has worked. Most people heed the signs and the police do take people's drinks from them when they encounter those that don't. It has made a difference and disturbance on the High Street is well down. The Council as the licensing authority and the local police are also pretty hot on those selling alcohol to underage teens, with test purchases and action taken against retailers who put profit before the law, or their community for that matter. This is the point, there are already laws and before we do the usual hysterical legislative reaction can we at least use the ones that we have already?

Money Market woes, Brown says not a lot

Something very odd happened over the last few days: the international money markets stopped working. These are where institutions, banks in particular, lend to each other in order to raise capital or to lay off the risk of lending. The markets are dependent on the accurate pricing of risk, the risk that you may not get your money back, but for some days there has been so much uncertainty stemming from the sub-prime mortgage collapse in the US that risk could not be priced and hence trades were not made. So, the Central Banks stepped in as lenders of last resort and business was able to continue. That is not likely to be the end of it though. Many institutions have admitted to losses in the sub-prime meltdown, and many more are likely to. There will certainly be an effect on the so-called real economy as well, which will probably take the shape of a reduction in the availability of credit to both companies and individuals. If your economy has been fuelled by credit, and Britain’s has, then a lower level of economic activity is likely to result. That means jobs and wages to you and me.

This story hasn’t really gone beyond the business sections, and the government hasn’t said much either. Neither state of affairs is likely to persist.

Wickford North Green Action Group meeting

I went to the public meeting organised by the Wickford North Green Action Group meeting last night to oppose the proposed development on the Barn Hall site. It was an excellent event, with Councillors from Basildon and Chelmsford as well as the very capable organisers of the Action Group all speaking and fielding questions from the audience. The hall was packed and the local opinion was very clear, with the exception of a few chaps from the so-called Wickford Action Group who oppose development in Wickford Town Centre but seem a bit ambiguous when it comes to the Green Belt, I know it sounds like the People's Front of Judea vs. the Judean People's Front but bear with me here. Our view, that is the Conservative administration's view is that to meet the government's housing targets we can either concrete the Green Belt or build on brownfield, and we choose the latter. There are very legitimate concerns about roads, schools and healthcare provision, but that does not change that central policy, so I am very pleased that local people have organised to fight the Barn Hall development.

The highlight for me was when an elderly member of the audience told us how he and his neighbours had organised to fight, and win, against an earlier attempt to encroach on the Green Belt in Wickford, opposing then Chairman of Planning on Basildon Council ex-Councillor David Harrison, who is now a leading light of the Wickford Action Group. It was actually very moving and the Chairman of the current campaign spoke of the torch being handed to a new generation of community activists.

So, the planning application will be heard in October and any appeal against a possible refusal would be heard in public in the New Year, but as the Wickford North people said, one battle at a time. If you oppose the development then make sure you write to Basildon Council and tell them so. Local opinion matters, and if people decide to stand up for their community then they can make a difference.