Sporting Village Pre-Qualification Ends Successfully

We have just finished the pre-qualification stage in the procurement of the Sporting Village for Basildon District. This will provide our community with absolutely top-notch sporting facilities for sports from casual use all the way to elite sports of the highest standard. The Council is currently engaging in the process to select a development partner to build and operate the Sporting Village, a process which is dictated by EU regulations and which is rather long and tortuous. This is first stage where companies who want to be a part of the project have to more than just express an interest, they have to provide reams of information for evaluation. So, that cuts it down the field to those with a serious interest. While there will be an official Council communication later, I can say at this point that we are pleased with how things have gone. The project stays firmly on track, with a timescale that, if everything works out, will see Basildon with the facilities to support the London Olympics in 2012.

The Sporting Village will make Basildon the hub for sport in South Essex, and one of the key locations for sport in the East of England, if not England itself. This is good for our young people and good for our community, and a credit to our partners, including Essex County Council and the Department for Communities and Local Government as well as the officers of Basildon District Council, who have worked so hard get us to this stage.

John Baron MP: Welfare reform needed to tackle long-term poverty

MP backs plans to help people get back to work in Billericay and District

John Baron MP today added his support for calls to reduce long-term welfare dependency, tackle long-term poverty and re-create stable families. The policy ideas entitled “Work for Welfare” were launched by Conservative leader, David Cameron. They aim to help people find fulfilling jobs, while continuing to support those who genuinely cannot work. Currently across Billericay and District, there are 3,550 people on Incapacity Benefit and 970 on Jobseeker’s Allowance.

John said:

Labour’s old politics on welfare reform simply are not working. Despite the New Deal costing the taxpayer more than £3 billion, it is has become a revolving door back on to benefits with nearly 50% of young job seekers leaving the New Deal ending up back on benefits within a year. Someone on Incapacity Benefit for more than 2 years is more likely to die or retire than get a job.

People need better opportunities to take responsibility for their own success rather than being dependant on Whitehall handouts. The existing benefits system does not do enough to help people find work. Higher numbers of Incapacity Benefit claimants and high youth unemployment show that the policies of the last ten years have failed.

The Government boasts about the millions of new jobs it has ‘created’. But official statistics clearly show that 4 out of every 5 new jobs have gone to migrant workers in the past ten years despite having nearly 5 million people on out of work benefits.

Real welfare reform will help reverse the disastrous rise in family breakdown under Labour and tackle the persistent and often hidden poverty that shames our nation.

Under the new Conservative proposals:

Respect for those who cannot work: Recipients of Incapacity Benefit who really cannot work will receive continued support and will remain outside the return-to-work process.Employment for those who can.

Employment for those who can: Every out-of-work benefit claimant will be expected to work or prepare for work. There will be a comprehensive programme of support for job seekers including training, development and work experience. Welfare-to-work services will be provided by the private and voluntary sectors on a payment by results basis.

Assessments for those claiming benefits: There will be rapid assessments of all new and existing claimants for out-of-work benefits.

Limits to claiming out of work benefits: People who refuse to join a return-to-work programme will lose the right to claim out-of-work benefits until they do. People who refuse to accept reasonable job offers could lose the right to claim out-of-work benefits.

Community work: Those who claim for more than two years out of three will be required to help out on community work programmes.

End Tax Credit discrimination: The savings from these reforms will be used to end the discrimination against couples in the Tax Credits system.

Conservatives on Welfare Reform

Why do fit and able men and women choose to stay on the dole instead of going out to work? The short answer is because they can. Of course, unemployment and incapacity benefits exist for very good reasons. People do find themselves out of work through no fault of their own. People do get sick and a society that has any sense of solidarity looks after its members who fall on hard times, but that is not going on here. Every calculation, and plenty of direct evidence, suggests that there are large numbers of people for whom benefits have become a way of life, despite the fact that they are perfectly capable of providing for themselves. This is bad not only for public funds, but for wider society and the individuals themselves. Work brings order and stability to lives that can otherwise drift into the chaotic or criminal. It also, on average, brings a better standard of living over the medium and ling term. Put simply, if you live on benefits then you are likely to be poor, remain poor, bring up your children in poverty and have a much worse quality of life.

Tony Blair talked tough on this, but did more or less nothing about it. In fact the hidden unemployment of the benefit-dependent has grown sharply under Labour. Gordon Brown has belatedly started to talk about this issue, but it is the Conservatives that are making the running. Drawing on the US experience, where sharp curbs on welfare have reduced unemployment and all of the related social problems. The Conservatives have proposals to make Incapacity Benefit more rigorous, to stop the benefits of people who refuse to take a job that they are offered and to require that the long-term unemployed work in the community instead of sitting around at home. There are also proposals to contract private companies to find people work on the basis of no jobs, no fees. All in all this is first fresh thinking on this issue since Frank Field was sacked by Tony Blair for actually trying to reform the system. If I was Brown then I would be worried by all of this. A rule in politics is that you don’t hand the initiative to your opponents. Now, anything that he proposes will be measured against the Conservative proposals, and because they got in first he will seem like a copycat.

One good thing for the country though is that people are at least seriously thinking about benefits reform. A policy bidding war in this area is no bad thing.

Barack Obama wins first Democratic Primary

Barack Obama won handsomely in the Iowa Democratic Primary, beating John Edwards into second place and trouncing Hillary Clinton. Leaving Edwards aside, he has lurched sharply to the left in an effort to court Democrat activists and would find it hard to move back to the centre where elections are actually decided, it is already obvious that the Democratic candidate will be Obama or Clinton. Their sharp divide is less in policy terms, though Obama wants universal health care and Clinton is steering well clear of her great failure, and is more in terms of their political style. Barack Obama is an optimist, a one-nation politician, who wants to lead his whole country, not just the faction that voted for him. Clinton is a percentage politician, triangulating interest groups on an influence grid and running systematic attacks on her opponents. So, her people have been caught trying to push the notion that Obama was a drug dealer or is secretly a radical Muslim, never mind very public and personal attacks on his perceived lack of experience. This is the Alastair Campbell School of politics, and it leaves a bad taste even when it is effective. The good news here is that it doesn’t seem to be. Rumour-mongering hasn’t worked, in fact it has backfired with Clinton forced to personally apologise to Obama about some of the activities of her staff. The inexperience thing hasn’t resonated either, reminding people more of Hillary’s past ups and downs more than damaging her opponent. So, a positive, inclusive politician is leading over a divisive, negative one. That works for me.

As a Conservative, I map more to the Republicans than the Democrats and of their candidates I have time for Giuliani and McCain and no-one else. In particular people who overstate their religion in an effort to boost their appeal worry me greatly, which covers several of the Republican front-runners. The Huckabees and Romney’s of this world would be crushed by either Clinton or Obama in a general election. Put them up against someone like Giuliani and that would make for a contest.

New Business in Basildon

Basildon's economy carries on growing, with the Crane's Corridor industrial area now hosting a new kind of business. The old York International site is being redeveloped with a distribution centre and a backup Data Centre. A computer centre is a first for Basildon, and it is exactly the sort of high-technology industry that we want to compliment our established businesses, so I am very pleased at this development. Even better is the fact that businesses of this kind tend to cluster, because the reasons why one Data Centre gets built hold true for more Data Centres. So, good communications to London, a skilled workforce, local business services and support, and prime development sites could all lead to more of the same.

By the way, the that's Tony Ball, Deputy Leader of the Council, in the photo for the article on this in the Evening Echo. He's as pleased about this as I am. One thing though, the Echo article spins this as some sort of reaction to the 9/11 terror attacks and the continuing fear of terrorism. This might make for a splashy headline, but it is nonsense. Backup computer systems can be required for all sorts of reasons, most of the quite prosaic. Power cuts, fire, flood or even a serious system failure can take you to your backup site. This is why every serious company that I know of makes this sort of provision. It's not just about Osama Bin Laden.

Election prediction: Con 309 Lab 285, LibDem 22; Con short 17 of majority

A note from Electoral Calculus:

A new prediction has been posted on 1 January 2008 at www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/

Recent polls show a continuing but smaller Conservative lead over Labour. Ipsos-MORI has a lead of 7% (down from 9%); Populus (Times) has 8% (up from -1%); CommRes (Independent) has 11% (down from 13%); ICM (Guardian) has 5% (down from 11%); and YouGov (Sunday Times) also has 5% (up from 11%).

Overall the Conservatives are now 7% ahead of Labour (down from 9%), which is enough to be the largest party, but not to form a majority. As a rule of thumb, the parties are level if the Conservative lead is around 5%. The Conservatives need a lead of about 10% to have a majority, and Labour needs a lead of about zero. The current prediction is that the Conservatives will be short 17 seats of a majority, winning 309 seats (-20 seats since 6 December 2007).

Political Performance Survey from Iain Dale

Iain Dale is running a Political Performance Survey to assess how various politicians are doing. You can take it here.

House Prices falling

According to a variety of sources UK house prices are falling, with the Nationwide suggesting that they were 0.8% down in November and 0.5% down last month. This is a very sharp fall, and suggests that the housing bubble is deflating rapidly. Now, bubbles do burst, or rather sharp rises in asset values nearly always result in sharp falls as long term trends reassert themselves. There had been some argument that UK housing was different this time because of a shortage of supply over demand, but there are always arguments that sharp asset appreciation is 'different this time'. Remember the don-com bubble? Or the last time UK house prices went off the chart in 1989-90? That last experience is probably the best guide as to what happens next. For most people the answer is nothing as a rise or fall in the notional value of their property makes no difference because they were not planning to move and even if they did the relative values of the properties whey would sell and then buy have not changed. The problem comes with people who have been speculating on property and assuming that house prices would only ever go up. Investing in property in the hope of reselling quickly for a capital gain, or building up a property portfolio to let are now fraught with risk, and some people who have not been careful enough are likely to go to the wall. Then there are individuals who have been using their houses as a piggy bank by taking out secured loans against a notional value that may not be there any more. They only get into difficulty if they have to sell, as does anyone who bought at the peak of the market and now has to shift their suddenly over-valued property. Look for a number of personal disasters reported in the media over the coming months, but also for some quite severe commercial effects as the companies that support property-based loans feel the pinch. House-building is also going to slow down quite sharply against this market background, and large-scale projects with a large housing component might also face restructuring at the very least. Here in Basildon, where we have a considerable portfolio of regeneration projects then this is something that we will have to watch very carefully.

Politically, this is all bad for the government, especially as more housing is one of their key priorities. As things stand, the market is simply not going to deliver on the numbers stated by government ministers, and there is not much that they can do about it. Look for some imaginative excuses in 2008.

Happy New Year!

May I wish all that chance upon this message a Happy New Year. Let us hope that politics in 2008 does more to deliver on what the people of Basildon District and Britain actually want, and less on issues that are politically fashionable or are personal or party political hobby horses.

Blair a Catholic

Tony Blair has been admitted into the Catholic Church, this despite deliberately downplaying his Christianity during his premiership so as to not sound like a 'nutter'. I am not a Catholic, but I am a little surprised as the reaction of some prominent members for that Church who instead of treating a new convert as a matter for rejoicing are suggesting that past policy decisions should have disbarred him. Even if you accept that he did things in office against the teachings of the Church then the parable of the Prodigal Son pretty much covers that situation, so maybe a little more quiet reflection and Bible study is called for and a little less carping. As for the 'nutter' thing, he sort of has a point. Politicians in the UK don't tend to advertise their religion because it gives rise to the suspicion that their political decisions are filtered through the literal interpretation of some book or another. The Atheists in British public life do not help by trying to equate jam-making Anglicans with the Taliban in terms of fundamentalist irrationality. So, Blair probably made the right call. Of course there are lots of religious people in politics. There are even lots of religious people on Basildon Council. I am a Christian, as are several other Councillors, and there are probably other religions as well but no-one actually talks about it. Is that good? Well, if the alternative is the US model where Christ is a regular running-mate at election time then maybe we have got it right.