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Tag: Speeches

  • Iain Duncan Smith – 2003 Statement on the Hutton Inquiry

    Iain Duncan Smith – 2003 Statement on the Hutton Inquiry

    The statement made by Iain Duncan Smith, the then Leader of the Opposition, on 10 August 2003.

    All of us were deeply shocked by the tragic death of Dr Kelly. Last week our thoughts were with his widow, his family and friends, as we paid our respects to a man who served his country as a Nobel-nominated scientist and a leading expert on weapons of mass destruction.

    Now that Dr Kelly’s funeral has taken place, attention will inevitably focus on the Hutton inquiry. Lord Hutton has a reputation for independence and integrity. I have every confidence that he will establish the precise circumstances of Dr Kelly’s death and the role that the Ministry of Defence – or even Downing Street itself – played in releasing Dr Kelly’s name to the media.

    The British people yearn for honest and straightforward politics. They are sick of behind the scenes briefings, and inappropriate or insensitive statements from senior officials and Ministers. Should Lord Hutton’s inquiry be subject to any attempts at political interference, it will only reinforce the public perception that the conduct of this Government is both unacceptable and undesirable.

    Even while the Government was publicly trying to show remorse at the tragic death of Dr Kelly, this last week behind the scenes we witnessed yet more of this Government’s black arts at work. The attempt by Tom Kelly, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman, to cheapen the record of Dr Kelly off the record, even before his funeral had taken place, was appalling. We should not simply allow it to be dismissed as an unauthorised mistake. It is what 10 Downing Street has been doing for far too long. Malicious briefings are part of their culture and Tom Kelly was only presenting the agreed counter-attack briefing from Number 10. The fault line goes right to the top. It is surely Mr Blair who must apologise. After all Tom Kelly, Alistair Campbell, and all of their spin-doctors ultimately work for him.

    This latest episode of Downing Street’s unwarranted involvement in the Dr Kelly affair is why I have asked for Lord Hutton to be given a remit that allows him to examine all the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr Kelly.

    I have argued that the processes leading up to the September dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction are inseparable from the Dr Kelly’s death, and I have repeatedly made the case for as wide and open an inquiry as possible. I also still believe it would be a good thing for Lord Hutton’s inquiry to have the power to take evidence under oath. The public demand this. The Government’s credibility depends on it. I hope that Lord Hutton’s inquiry is able to deliver it.

  • Damian Green – 2003 Speech on Teacher Shortages

    Damian Green – 2003 Speech on Teacher Shortages

    The speech made by Damian Green, the then Shadow Secretary of State for Education, on 9 September 2003.

    I beg to move

    That this House notes that thousands of teaching posts have been lost in schools as a result of this year’s funding crisis; condemns the Government for failing to respond early enough to reports of these redundancies, instead seeking to lay the blame on local authorities; further condemns the Government for not using any of the Department for Education and Skills’ underspent money to alleviate this crisis; further notes that schools are having to ask parents for regular contributions to alleviate cash shortages; is concerned about the effect of these redundancies among teachers and support staff on the implementation of the Workload Agreement; and urges the Government to simplify the funding system for schools so that there will be no repeat of this year’s problems in the recruitment and retention of teachers.”

    I am sure that the House will understand, as I do, that the Secretary of State has a prior commitment at the TUC, which is why he is not with us today. I hope that he takes the opportunity to talk some of the teachers’ representatives who will no doubt be there. One reason for our calling this debate is to show that the Government are letting down not just those who rely on our public services but those who work in them. It is not only parents and children who have been hit by the Government’s school funding crisis but teachers, who are being made redundant in schools up and down the country. I am not surprised that teachers are angry—they have been betrayed by the Government’s false promises, and they will never trust them again.

    Ministers sometimes affect surprise that trust in the Government and especially the Prime Minister has disappeared. They seem puzzled that people no longer think that they are competent to run the public services. For an explanation they need look no further than the mess that they have created in our schools and their own performance in responding to this crisis since it became apparent earlier this year. This year, Ministers have provided the general public with a master-class in blunder and confusion. One moment we have protestations of innocence, while in the next breath the Government concoct a short-term and inadequate solution to the very problem that they just told the public did not exist at all.

    The history of the crisis is instructive. When questioned by the Select Committee on Education and Skills in July this year, David Normington, the permanent secretary at the Department for Education and Skills, told us when he began to feel that there were going to be problems with school funding in the year ahead. His answer to the Select Committee was that it was after the Secretary of State’s arrival

    “at the end of October and before Christmas, some time around then.”

    We now know that the Department knew before Christmas that the crisis was going to hit our schools. After Christmas, at the Secondary Heads Association conference, the Secretary of State said that there was no problem. Indeed, he had previously told the Association of Chief Education Officers that simply throwing more money at them would not solve their problems. Such a request, he said, showing less than his usual charm,

    “just floods straight over my head. I don’t listen to what you say quite frankly”.

    I am sure that the association responded in kind.

    I ought to have been apparent to the Secretary of State and other Ministers that not only was the local government settlement likely to cause difficulties but that many other matters under the direct control of the Government were going to cause problems, not least the Chancellor’s insistence on increasing employers’ national insurance contributions, which hit schools particularly hard—characteristically, 80 per cent. of a school’s budget is taken up with staff costs—and the decision to increase employers’ pension contributions, which came straight off the bottom line of school budgets. The bulk of the crisis has therefore been caused by decisions made inside government.

    I therefore agree with my hon. Friend that the Secretary of State’s apparent ignorance of the fact that the crisis was going to happen, let alone the reason why it was happening, is quite extraordinary. I can only assume that he was convinced by the announcement by the Minister for School Standards that every local education authority

    “will be getting at least 3.2 per cent. per pupil increase for next year, with further increases in the following two years. No LEA will lose out in real terms as this new system is introduced”.

    That was the Government’s formal position in the early months of this year.

    I am afraid that it is sadly characteristic of the Government that, when they are faced with a problem, their first instinct is to look not for a solution, but a scapegoat. In this case, the scapegoat was to be local education authorities. I suspect that the reason why the Government gave up on their fruitless quest for a scapegoat had nothing to do with the merits of the case, but related to the fact that many Labour-controlled authorities throughout the country were pointing out that their schools were suffering in the same way as those of Conservative-controlled authorities, which became politically unhelpful to them.

    In May, in response to many LEAs of all political colours, protests from schools and the rising number of complaints about the crisis, the Department finally announced that it would allow schools to set deficit budgets and that they would be allowed to use their capital budgets for paying teachers’ salaries. That was he first signal that the Department was beginning to accept the scale of the problem. However, I remind Ministers of what we said at the time. Allowing schools to dip into money intended for capital projects as well as their reserves risks storing up even greater problems for the future. The scale of the problems that the Government have stored up with that approach to the problem is now beginning to become clear.

    Many head teachers have said that when a school is engaged in a major capital project, it is extremely likely that it will be carried out during the summer holidays. Given the need to book builders, it is likely that arrangements will have been made for this year long before the Government gave permission for the money to be spent elsewhere. Their gesture was therefore moderately futile as well as ill timed.

    Labour Members will have a lot of explaining to do to head teachers who have been told to use their capital budgets for revenue spending.

    Let me quote Nick Christou at East Barnet school, just one of the many affected head teachers, who has had to divert £90,000 from capital projects. He said:

    “The money that I had was for repairing the roofs because they are leaking all over the place—in the maths office and textile technology room for a start. But we have to use it and run with our leaky roofs for one more year. We will just have to put buckets underneath them.”

    In Labour-controlled Ealing, schools are using between 70 and 100 per cent. of their reserves just to avoid another crisis this year. The Government’s first response merely stored up a worse crisis for years to come.

    Even once the Department and its Ministers had accepted that there was a problem, there was still an enormous gulf between the reality of life in our schools and the purported facts coming from the Government. Even in June, some in the Government were unwilling to accept the scale of the problems. On 11 June, my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition asked the Prime Minister

    “how many teachers are facing redundancy right now?”

    The Prime Minister replied:

    “According to the Department for Education and Skills, there are about 500 net redundancies.”

    We now know that that answer grossly underestimated the problems that schools have been facing. As my right hon. Friend said at the time

    “The reality is that the figures for redundancies are that, this year, three times as many will face the sack as last year.” —[Official Report, 11 June 2003; Vol. 406, c. 673–74.]

    Absolutely. All that I can say to my hon. Friend is that I hope that Ministers will apologise to the head, teachers, parents and governors at her school and at many others that face similar problems.

    By midsummer, even Ministers had stopped trying to bluster their way out of the crisis. Extraordinarily, one of their partial solutions was to scrap one of their own flagship policies—the school achievement award. That was truly bizarre. Only in May, the Minister for School Standards had said:

    “It is right to reward the staff whose work helps pupils to learn and today’s awards celebrate their achievements”.

    Two months later, the Secretary of State announced that too many teachers had been allowed to go to the top pay levels too quickly. In the next month, he announced that the Government would be scrapping the policy that was, according to them, intended to
    “celebrate the work of the entire school community”.

    Clearly, 2003 is not the year to be a teacher under this Labour Government. Last week, the Secretary of State finally came close to apologising to the thousands of children facing the new school year with fewer teachers. In a webcast to welcome the new academic year, he said:

    “The government make mistakes, certainly I do, my colleagues do, and the handling of the schools’ funding last year was a good example of that which I am determined to put right this year.”

    In these circumstances, with so many teachers experiencing redundancy or facing the threat of redundancy, I am amazed that the Government have the nerve to run expensive TV advertising campaigns for teacher recruitment. There is something surreal about watching a news programme that contains an item about teachers losing their jobs just before an advert urging people to become teachers. I congratulate Ministers on their latest advert, which features large numbers of headless people. As a piece of post-modern irony commenting on the Department’s performance this year, it cannot be beaten.

    If the Secretary of State had admitted culpability when these problems first arose, and had created a real solution instead of merely putting off the inevitable, perhaps we would not be in a situation in which one school in five are asking parents to make contributions to keep the school system going and in which a survey by the Secondary Heads Association and The Times Educational Supplement found that 2,700 teaching posts had not been filled and that 700 teachers have been made redundant. Only months ago, the Prime Minister was talking of losses in the order of 500 teachers.

    The articles head line was staff cuts running into thousands”, and it gives what it calls the “critical numbers”, stating that 2,729 teachers and 1,152 support staff have not been replaced because of lack of funding. The TES goes on to say that there have been 730 teacher and 301 support staff redundancies; that there are 1,881 unfilled teacher posts; and that, of teachers appointed, 4,246—16.6 per cent.—were judged unsatisfactory by heads.

    The Minister also knows that the increase in the school population means that approximately 1,000 teachers are needed to keep pupil-teacher ratios steady and that the Government have failed to do that. Perhaps he will turn to the inside pages of The Times Educational Supplement, which paint an even bleaker picture.

    The head of the Royal Grammar school in High Wycombe has pledged £15,000 of his salary to ease his school’s budget problems. The school caretaker is offering £5 a month. In East Anglia, one comprehensive school is considering charging for textbooks. One school in London—the London Oratory, which, I dare say, is familiar to senior members of the Government—is asking parents for an increase of £5 in the monthly £30 contribution that they already make. The school made it clear that the call for extra money is a direct result of the funding cuts for many schools in southern England that the Government announced early this year. The Oratory started term last week with fewer teachers.

    Ministers appear peculiarly reluctant to accept the facts that everyone else acknowledges to constitute an accurate description of life in our schools today. Their immediate reaction to the Secondary Heads Association survey was simply to rubbish it. It was followed by a survey of local education authorities in The Guardian that showed similar results. Ministers must stop pretending that the rest of the world is out of step.

    In 55 local authorities, more than 1,000 full-time teaching posts have been lost through redundancies and schools opting not to replace teachers who leave for other reasons. If that pattern were repeated in all local education authorities, approximately 2,500 teaching posts would be lost. We have a consistent set of numbers, which everyone, except the Government, recognises.

    In the Minister’s authority, 17 teaching posts have been lost. The LEA told The Guardian:

    “Schools have set budgets by using their high levels of carry-forward balances.”

    In the Secretary of State’s authority, 11 teaching posts have been lost and French and German classes are being cut in schools, which can simply no longer afford them. The Government tell us that they want to revive language teaching in schools, yet schools are having to cut such classes because of the Government’s funding policies.

    Not only teachers but support staff are suffering. According to The Times Educational Supplement, on top of the 301 support staff who have been made redundant, 1,152 support staff have not been replaced because of lack of funding. There are also problems with cuts in the capital budget that the Government have forced on schools. One can only spend one’s capital once.

    What do Ministers say to Roland Waller, the head of Morley High in Leeds, who said:

    “We have protected staffing by cutting repairs and maintenance to the bone this year. Upgrades to classroom furniture will be virtually zero and our rolling programme of redecoration and refurnishing has been curtailed.”

    Only yesterday, Anne Welsh, the new president of the Secondary Heads Association, said that this year’s cash crisis would have repercussions for many years. She said that problems were exacerbated because

    “It is increasingly difficult to persuade young teachers to take on the responsibility of middle management roles, which is very worrying given that most in leadership positions are within 10 years of retiring.”

    We are not therefore considering a one-year crisis; it will linger in schools for years.

  • Oliver Letwin – 2003 Speech at the Police Superintendents’ Conference in Newport

    Oliver Letwin – 2003 Speech at the Police Superintendents’ Conference in Newport

    The speech made by Oliver Letwin, the then Shadow Home Secretary, in Newport, Wales on 11 September 2003.

    This is an age in which the worst insult you can hurl at someone in my profession is “politicians are all the same.”

    I’d like to use this speech to argue against that. Politicians are not all the same. If only because they belong to different parties that each have a very different vision for Britain’s public services.

    Today, I want to tell you about my party’s vision for the police service. I can’t guarantee that you’ll like it, but I can guarantee this: At the next general election you will have a genuine choice. A choice between what you have now under this Government and what you could have under a Conservative Government.

    In a nutshell, our vision is this:

    The restoration of neighbourhood policing as a fully-respected, fully-resourced function of the modern police service – of equal importance, and equal status, to any other aspect of modern policing.

    Neighbourhood policing versus conventional policing

    In other speeches I have described the difference between neighbourhood policing and conventional policing. Neighbourhood policing is sometimes called beat policing, but it is not only that. The beat is at the heart of neighbourhood policing, but this is policing with brains too – as anyone who has seen it succeed in America can tell you. That is why you will not hear me use the term “intelligence-led policing” to refer to conventional policing alone. Each form of policing is as intelligent as the other. But they gather, and then use, intelligence in different ways.

    There are, of course, overlaps, but conventional and neighbourhood policing differ in emphasis: One deals with specific crimes, the other with general disorder; one targets major offences, the other minor offences; one is reactive and remedial, the other proactive and preventative.

    These two forms of policing are complementary; they could and should form two halves of a whole in today’s police service. But they do not. Over the years, neighbourhood policing has been systematically disrespected and under-resourced.

    As a result it has declined in importance and diminished in status. Debate over beat policing degenerates into talk of “bobbies on the beat”. And by that point, it is not long before predictable and patronising references to Dixon of Dock Green are trotted out. In this way the debate is lost, dismissed as mere nostalgia for an age long gone, if, indeed, it ever existed at all.

    Cargoes

    On the principle that I might as well hang for a sheep as a lamb, I’m going to indulge in a gratuitous act of nostalgia by looking back to my school days – the days when children were still taught to memorise poems by heart. I expect many of you will recall one particular poem by John Masefield, the one that begins like this:

    Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,

    Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,

    With a cargo of ivory,

    And apes and peacocks,

    Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

    The next verse describes a “stately Spanish galleon” and its equally exotic cargo of “diamonds / Emeralds and amethysts / Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores”.

    The final verse is in total contrast to the first two. It describes a “Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke-stack” and a deeply unglamorous cargo of “Tyne coal / Road-rails, pig-lead / Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.”

    This poem is itself about nostalgia. The gritty realities of modern life are set against the golden age of the Stately Spanish Galleon and the even more distant glamour of the Quinquireme of Nineveh.

    Gritty realities

    One could draw a parallel here with the police service. On the one hand there are the gritty realities of neighbourhood policing, while on the other there is the glamour of conventional policing – which normally goes by a more glamorous name like “intelligence-led policing” or “high-level policing”. Just as the “dirty British coaster” goes “butting through the Channel”, so neighbourhood policing concerns itself with ordinary life in ordinary places. Sure enough, the neighbourhood police officer sees past the polite façade of those lives and places, but what he sees is not the stuff of TV drama. There is no thrilling heart of darkness, just a dim reality of commonplace crimes and misdemeanours.

    The neighbourhood police officer is unlikely to encounter Mr Big on his beat. But he can stop Mr Insignificant from selling Mr Big’s heroin on street corners. Which might mean that Miss Hopeless makes something of her life. Which might mean that Old Mrs Frightened feels safe enough to venture outdoors. Which might mean that the neighbourhood regains some sense of community, the essential first step to regeneration and renewal. Not bad for a dirty British coaster.

    But Masefield’s poem isn’t just about nostalgia, it’s also about progress. The dirty British coaster was a workhorse of the industrial age, at the cutting edge of modernity. The quinquireme and the galleon were undeniably more glamorous, but it was the coaster that, quite literally, delivered the goods.

    And this is where my analogy might appear to break down. Because conventional policing is not only seen as more glamorous, but more modern too. Neighbourhood policing, on the other hand, is seen not only as dull and dirty, but out of date too – a relic from yesteryear to be patronised and disrespected.

    The attack on neighbourhood policing

    But this is a misperception, and there are two main reasons for the misperception.

    The first is technological. Pursuit vehicles, surveillance equipment, computerised databases, DNA analysis and many other applications of technology have transformed the possibilities of policing. While paying due regard to civil liberties, it is entirely right that these possibilities should be fully explored and exploited. And yet, however adept we become in the use of technology to target serious crime, there can be no substitute for human intelligence, in particular, intelligence derived from the wider community that provides the context for every crime, serious or otherwise.

    The second reason for the disdain of neighbourhood policing is ideological. To some, for whom crime is a response to a system of oppression, and for whom the police are agents of those who control the system, neighbourhood policing is seen as something to be expelled from the community. In previous decades, those who laboured under this delusion moved to weaken the police presence in our communities, in order to bring about a shift in the balance of power. As a result, the forces of law and order have lost ground in towns and cities throughout this land.

    These two tendencies of very different kinds – the enthusiasm for top-down, technology-led policing and the ideological disdain for traditional authority – have together led to a Britain in which neighbourhood policing has in general been allowed to decline. In my view, this is a calamity, because the real balance of power lies not between the police and people, but between crime and the community. The front line runs through our most disadvantaged neighbourhoods, a front line from which police have been systematically withdrawn, leaving the weakest, most vulnerable members of our society alone and defenceless against the real enemy.

    Parallel with the medical profession

    To understand the full scale of this calamity, imagine that something similar had taken place within our healthcare system. The medical profession has its equivalent of the neighbourhood police officer: a class of professionals who are based in the community, who are involved in the day-to-day lives of those in their care, who deal mainly with minor complaints, but are best placed to know when and where to call in extra resources and specialist help. These professionals are known as GPs. Most of the glamour and the fame may attach to other roles within the NHS, such as that of surgeon or consultant, but the respect in which the family doctor is held is second to none.

    Now the NHS has its problems, but imagine how much worse these would be if the role of GP healthcare had been subject to the denigration and neglect that has befallen neighbourhood policing. Imagine the fear and frustration of the public; the stress and despair of those GPs who remained in place; the deterioration of untreated minor ailments into major emergencies; the loss of local intelligence leading to massive misallocation of specialist resources; the inevitable decline in the nation’s health.

    It is not for nothing that the service provided by GP surgeries is known as primary healthcare. It is so fundamental to the functioning of the NHS as a whole that it is impossible to think about it in any other way. And indeed the primary importance of primary healthcare has never been in doubt. That is why, whatever the problems of the NHS, one thing we haven’t seen is a general decline in the nation’s health.

    However, what we certainly have seen is a general decline in law and order. And on that measure, the problems facing Britain’s police service are deeper than anything facing the National Health Service. Deep problems require deep solutions, the deepest of which would be the restoration of neighbourhood policing to its rightful place in today’s police service, in today’s Britain. We need to think about neighbourhood policing as primary policing, of primary importance to policing as a whole.

    Police numbers

    That is how my party thinks about neighbourhood policing. But what would the next Conservative Government actually do to make that vision real?

    First of all we will provide the necessary resources, by which I mean sufficient funding for an unprecedented increase in police numbers – that is an increase of 40,000 police officers.

    There’s no small print in that commitment. We will increase police numbers by 40,000 over and above the level we inherit from Labour at the next election. And to give credit were it’s due, by the next election this Government will have increased police numbers by about 5,000. It’s also true that, over the same period, they’ll have increased Home Office central staff numbers by 10,000. This may tell you something about this Government’s priorities. It may also tell you why you’ve got so much paperwork to deal with.

    So while this Government has increased police numbers by 5,000 over eight years, we will increase police numbers by 5,000 every year for eight years. That makes a total of 40,000 – an increase of almost a third. For every three police officers now, there will be four. My intention is that this significant shift in the level of resourcing should enable a quantum leap in the level of neighbourhood policing. If every one of the 40,000 extra police officers is devoted to neighbourhood policing, then that will, I believe, triple the number of police officers on the beat.

    The conveyor belt to crime

    Of course, this isn’t just a numbers game. In a moment I’m going to say something about what else is needed to restore neighbourhood policing to its rightful place. But first I need to make something else clear:

    Neighbourhood policing is essential, but it isn’t sufficient. We won’t give you the impossible job of winning the war against crime single-handed.

    This is what Sir Robert Peel said when he founded the modern police service all those years ago:

    “Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.”

    In other words, it is society as whole that needs to wage the war against crime – or, as another Shadow Home Secretary once said, we must be “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.”

    It’s a great line. But now we need some action. The next Conservative Government will start with the greatest single cause of crime – which is drug addiction. Heroin and crack cocaine addicts are responsible for one-third of all crimes in this country. And that can only get worse as the army of addicts swells by 10,000 every year. For the addict there are only two ways out: One is death, the other rehabilitation. Unbelievably, there are just 2,000 places on rehab programmes in the entire country. The system will prescribe methadone like mother’s milk, but if you want to get clean, this country won’t help you.

    That is why my Party is committed to a ten-fold increase in rehab capacity. That’s 20,000 places, enough for every hard drug addict between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four. Whether they like it or not. Because our policy will be backed up by compulsion.

    But our attack on the causes of crime goes well beyond addiction. We will implement policies at every stage to get offenders off the conveyor belt to crime. We will institute much longer but much more constructive, rehabilitative sentences for persistent young offenders, with a period of serious rehabilitation in open custody and a long period of supervision based on the C-Far model.

    We will focus more effort on helping the parents of very young, troubled children before those children have a chance to go off the rails. And Damian Green and I will shortly be making announcements on helping those excluded from school to return to the rails.

    Conclusion

    It is fashionable these days to talk about partnership. But this really is about partnership. Government must do its part by providing the resources for neighbourhood policing and for policies to get young people of the conveyor belt to crime. And the police must do their part, which in particular depends on the people in this room.

    If fully-funded, fully-respected neighbourhood policing is going to work, it’s got to work at the level of the BCU. It will be the captain of the Dirty British Coaster that delivers the goods. Not the Chief Constable on his Stately Spanish Galleon. And certainly not the landlubbing politician, running up and down the beach, trying to direct the fleet.

    You can’t steer a ship from the shore. And you can’t police a neighbourhood from Whitehall. The Home Office has got to let go. Because, sooner or later, the obsessive, centralising tendencies of the current regime will end in disaster.

    The next Conservative Government will reverse the direction of policing policy. We will push power down from the politicians and bureaucrats, through the police force hierarchies and to the police officers on the front line against crime and disorder. Each of you will be accountable, not to me, but to the neighbourhoods in your care.

    At next month’s Conservative Party conference in Blackpool, I plan to make a major announcement on how the next Conservative Government will change the relationship between the Home Office, each police force and the general public. And, as with our plans for police numbers, that change will be dramatic.

    We are determined to create the basis for a serious revival of neighbourhood policing in this country. We are determined to let the stimulus for such policing come from local populations rather than from above. And we are determined to let you get on with the job, rather than telling you how to do it.

  • Andy Burnham – 2022 Comments on Manchester Buses Coming Under Public Control

    Andy Burnham – 2022 Comments on Manchester Buses Coming Under Public Control

    The comments made by Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Manchester, on 17 August 2022.

    The introduction of lower, simpler fares across our bus network signifies the biggest shake-up of our bus system in close to 40 years and comes at a critical time.

    Hundreds of thousands of households across Greater Manchester are deeply worried about money, with fears of even higher bills just around the corner.

    As the most used form of public transport, with around 2.5million trips every week across the city-region, introducing lower fares for bus passengers is the best way we can help the most people with the cost of travel right now.

    Coupled with the extension of Our Pass, which provides free travel for 16 – 18-year-olds, we are taking steps to make an immediate and tangible difference to people’s lives by putting money back into their pockets.

    While this is the right thing to do, we cannot at this point guarantee that this new fare structure will be permanent. It will be reviewed annually. But the more that people use the buses, the more likely it is that we will be able to sustain it.

  • Iain Duncan Smith – 2003 Speech to the Compassionate Conservatism Conference

    Iain Duncan Smith – 2003 Speech to the Compassionate Conservatism Conference

    The speech made by Iain Duncan Smith, the then Leader of the Opposition, to the Compassionate Conservatism Conference held on 15 September 2003.

    Thank you all for coming to this ground-breaking conference.

    I’d particularly like to welcome people from some of the voluntary and charitable organisations that I – and members of the shadow cabinet – have been meeting over recent times. Thanks for being here today and for helping us to understand the nature of poverty in Britain and around the world.

    This is one of the most important conferences I’ve addressed since I became Conservative leader. One hundred and fifty Conservatives in their teens, twenties and thirties at a two-day conference on social justice. A third of the shadow cabinet – including most of its senior members – here to talk about the Conservative Party’s commitment to build one nation.

    I made that commitment after my first visit to Glasgow’s Easterhouse estate in February last year. Some dismissed my commitment as a publicity stunt. Some will dismiss this conference as a two-day publicity stunt. And in this in this age of spin, perhaps that’s understandable. But the people of Easterhouse and Gallowgate, of Hackney and Handsworth, of the many other hard-pressed communities all over this country have had a profound impact upon me.

    They have led me to refocus the Conservative Party on the challenges that most face these communities but which worry and threaten everyone. Britain’s left-behind communities are often thought of as Labour’s strongholds. Their heartlands. But there’s little heart in the way Labour neglects and forgets these communities.

    Communities suffering under the weight of drugs, crime, community breakdown and the other social challenges that the wealth and technology of our times have not defeated.

    The burdens of want and fear are blighting the lives of more and more people in this country. Casting a shadow over the lives of the many and dominating the lives of the few. In recent months Conservatives have announced policies on schools, policing, drug rehab and social entrepreneurship that will help people who find life a daily struggle.

    People whose struggle is greater because of this Labour government. Greater because of the humiliating complexity of Labour’s benefits system. Because of the taxes Labour have loaded onto the backs of the poorest workers. Because of Labour’s appeasement in the war on crime and drugs. Because of Labour’s pursuit of total politics rather than practical delivery.

    We won’t identify all of the answers to today’s social challenges over the next two days or even over the next few years. Problems that have grown over a generation will need the idealism, imagination and unfailing commitment of a new generation.

    Your generation.

    Today’s social challenges – the challenge of poverty in the twenty-first century – needs you.

    In your youth…

    In your idealism…

    In your creativity…

    You, in your solidarity with people for whom life is a struggle…

    You are the future of this Party.

    These challenges are your challenges.

    They’re the challenges of the many, not the few.

    The battle to overcome these challenges – in all their enormity – is the future of this Party.”That is why I have brought the issues and you together, in this conference, as a foundational act. We live in a world where poverty challenges our moral conscience and our security. It is a staggering thought that over the next twelve months, over ten million children around the world will die as a result of malnutrition.
    War, disease, terrorism and many forms of hardship and danger will feed on each other – claiming the lives of still more millions. And of those who do not die, the majority live in conditions that would be intolerable to anyone in this country.

    Against that background, there are those who say that poverty in Britain simply does not exist. But it does. Many people do not enjoy the opportunities and freedoms that most of us take for granted. I think of children growing up in homes where it’s still hard to make ends meet. I think of pensioners in communities ruled by criminal gangs. Poverty is real today for those children and pensioners. When I left Easterhouse, I committed the Conservative Party to a new mission with these words:

    A nation that leaves its vulnerable behind, diminishes its own future.

    Britain will never be all that it should be until opportunity and security mean something to people in Easterhouse.

    To make this country theirs as much as it is ours. That is a mission fit for the new century.”

    That is why there are two inseparable parts to our Fair Deal. No one held back and no one left behind. Opportunity and security. Aspiration and compassion.

    Talk is one thing, action is another. But, of course, action is the privilege of government, and so I want to spend some time on what this Government has done about poverty. To give credit where it’s due, Labour has not been inactive. They talk big on poverty and they spend big too. I‘m sure Labour politicians care about poverty but, sadly, something has gone terribly wrong with their policies. And we need to understand why if we are to avoid making the same mistakes. If we are to build an effective and distinctive Conservative programme of social justice.

    How you tackle poverty depends on how you define it. Currently the following definition is in use, ‘You’re poor if you live in a household with less than 60% of the median household income’. Now there are all sorts of problems with that definition. Above all the definition is exclusively financial and says nothing about the non-financial needs of every human being. It’s also interesting to note that Labour – the party of equality – has presided over growing inequality. According to the Government’s own statistics, Britain is more unequal under Tony Blair than at any time under Margaret Thatcher or John Major. Even under their own figures – Labour have failed.

    Ministers would say that they have focused on households with children – and that, according to their definition of poverty – and their figures – they have made real progress in this area. But they have missed their targets on child poverty and show little prospect of ever achieving them. The Labour MP Frank Field – as well as David Willetts – have shown that what progress has been made has been achieved by “picking off the easy ones.”

    In other words, the main effect of Labour’s policy is to shift some families from just below the poverty line to just above it. Now this helps ministers meet their targets, but it doesn’t do much to help those in the deepest need.

    Earlier this month a Save the Children report confirmed Frank Field’s analysis. The report’s authors were concerned with children in severe and persistent poverty – equivalent to household incomes of less than 40% of the average. Over one million children live in such households. The researchers were surprised to find that many, if not most, of these households are not on permanent benefits.

    An earlier report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies came to much the same conclusions: One in ten children, the report concluded, live in households on very low incomes – but almost half did not receive any of the main means-tested benefits. So it’s clear: Labour’s child poverty targets are being missed – and the limited progress that has been made has been achieved by focusing on the easiest cases. Those children deepest in poverty are those least likely to be helped.

    But we shouldn’t be surprised. The targets culture always encourages government to focus on the easy cases in order to fake success. The complexity of Labour’s benefits system may delight Gordon Brown but it is a nightmare for vulnerable families. They cannot cope with the humiliating bureaucracy that Labour has manufactured. The stigma of means-testing means that many families and pensioners who need help do not ask for it. The perversity of the whole system means that people who try to do the right thing are often punished.

    Save money and you’ll lose it. Seek work and, if you can’t master the complexity of the benefits system, you’ll find yourself out of pocket. The system is fundamentally flawed. Even the Government knows that something has gone terribly wrong with its policies. Let me read you this from a Cabinet Office report. It sounds as though it was written by Yes Minister’s Sir Humphrey Appleby, but it’s real:

    It is possible the efficacy limits of some key policy instruments are being reached.

    For example, the take-up of some means tested fiscal measures remain low and further means-tested support of in-work incomes could undermine the incentives of households to enhance their own earnings.

    Now, let me translate the gibberish into English:

    Our policy isn’t working.

    People aren’t getting the help they were promised.

    And if we carry on like this we’re going to trap even more people in poverty.

    Let’s not forget that we have reached these “efficacy limits” under the most favourable economic conditions. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have enjoyed a golden legacy of record tax receipts. Which they have spent wasted. This compares to the record of Conservatives in Kent. Kent Conservatives have invested the good economic times of recent years to help families build free and independent lives through a range of innovative support programmes.

    Labour’s policies have left the poor even more dependent on the state for their incomes and the kind of public services they receive. Worse still – Gordon Brown has spread dependency up the income scale. And when times get harder, as they always do, that dependency will remain. But it will be harder for a weaker economy to afford. And that, in the end, will be Labour’s legacy to the poor. Dependence not independence.

    We can’t blame this Government for inventing the flaws in the system. They have pumped more money into these flaws than any government in history, but there is nothing new about the dependency culture. Or about means testing. Nothing new about the poverty trap.

    Since the war, unimaginable sums of money have been funnelled through the benefits system. Undreamt of wealth has opened up healthcare, education, transport and culture to all sections of society. And yet social mobility is less today than it was in the 1950s. After five decades of state-led welfare a child born at the bottom of the pile is more, not less, likely to stay there.

    This is what Patricia Hewitt, a serving member of Tony Blair’s Cabinet, said to the Fabian Society back in June:

    “Today [historians] would still be horrified by the gulf in health, education and life chances between the child growing up in an impoverished council estate – with a secondary school where only 10 or 15 kids in a class of 100 can expect to get five GCSEs – and the child of the leafy suburbs heading confidently for university and a professional career.”

    What she is describing is the final failure of socialism. The final failure of the know-all, centralised state. The state that Mr Blair runs from Downing Street.

    A failure all the more dramatic if one looks beyond purely financial measures of poverty.

    This is not a tactic for avoiding the issue of benefit levels. Families with young children, pensioners, people with serious disabilities, the sick, those looking for work – Conservatives will always ensure a fair income for these deserving causes. But we also know that there is no conceivable increase in benefits that would change some of the fundamental facts of poverty. A few extra pounds can make a big difference to a tight budget. But it won’t buy you security when you’re too frightened to let your kids play outside. Or peace, when your home is a noise-polluted tower block. Or friends, when vital support networks have been smashed by the breakdown of family and community. Or self-respect, when you’re trapped in dependency. Or ambition, when your child’s school descends into chaos.

    Surely, if the fight against poverty is to mean anything, then it has to be as much about peace, community and self-respect as it is about money.

    And it also has to be about turning round the public services on which we all depend, but on which the poor depend most of all.

    I have devoted the greater part of this speech to the problems dogging the fight against poverty. Governments have a role to play in fighting poverty and the next Conservative government will take its responsibilities seriously. But government cannot solve the problem of poverty on its own. Securing a fair deal for everyone is a shared task. A task for government, businesses, families and communities. Conservatives have, therefore, a project.

    A mission to replace the welfare state with a welfare society. It was William Beveridge who said –
    The making of a good society depends not on the state but on the citizens, acting individually or in free association with one another…

    The happiness or unhappiness of the society in which we live depends upon ourselves as citizens, not on the instrument of political power which we call the state.”

    Beveridge was never in favour of a monolithic welfare state and issued a prophetic warning against any policy which, in his words, caused “the whole field of security against misfortune, once the domain of voluntary Mutual Aid, [to be] divided between the State and private business conducted for gain.”

    The post-war Labour Government ignored that warning.

    That was a mistake of historic proportions – the consequences of which we still live with today. We must not live with it tomorrow. We can begin to build a welfare society.

    Let me give you a practical example of what I mean. In July, I visited Tabernacle, an inner-city school, mainly serving the African and Caribbean Community. Because the parents were fed up with the way the state system had failed their children they got together and started their own school. A school under the inspired leadership of Paulette and Derrick Wilson. Standards of discipline and academic achievement are high. The teachers love teaching there.

    The pupils love learning there. And the parents, many of modest means, make the necessary sacrifices. And yet this school is under threat.

    The Government is set to impose a crippling regime of inspection fees that would force the school to close.

    Conservatives oppose this disgraceful attack on high quality inner-city education. Our policy is not only to systematically reduce the regulatory burden on schools like Tabernacle, but to actively support their foundation and expansion. Our State Scholarships policy will give every parent the right to send their child to a school that’s right for them and consistent with the family’s values. It will support schools like the Tabernacle and create more of them. We are determined that no child should be left behind in a failing school.

    Tabernacle School is just one example of what voluntary action can achieve for our nation. Indeed, there isn’t a single social challenge to which someone, somewhere hasn’t found an answer. Social entrepreneurs are at work in every area of public policy. And we’ll be hearing from some of these trailblazing projects over the next two days. Projects which have inspired our green paper, Sixty Million Citizens, which contains sixteen proposals aimed at unlocking the full potential of Britain’s civil society.

    In a moment, Greg Clark, our Director of Policy, will explain how Conservatives would open up our public services to this spirit of social renewal. But I believe that the same principle – of Government enabling people to find their own solutions – can apply to the social security system too.

    David Willetts, the Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, will be here tomorrow to talk about his latest thinking in this area. Thinking informed by the One Nation Hearings he and other members of the shadow cabinet have held in disadvantaged parts of Britain.

    Also speaking will be Sir Sandy Bruce Lockhart, the Leader of Kent County Council, and Simon Milton, the leader of Westminster City Council – both of whom are proving that Conservatives can take on the dependency culture and win for the most vulnerable people in their communities. I thank both of them for their work.

    No serious discussion of social justice can ignore the injustice faced by communities plagued by crime. We often hear about poverty as a cause of crime. It’s time we heard more about crime as a cause of poverty. People in social housing are twice as likely to be burgled as homeowners. Residents of flats are twice as likely to have a vehicle stolen than those in detached homes. The unemployed are twice as likely to suffer violent crime as those in work. There can be no end to poverty without a start to security.

    That is why the next Conservative Government will recruit 40,000 extra police officers to take back the streets for law-abiding people who, today, are afraid to walk them. Our plan for a ten-fold increase in the number of drug rehabilitation places – to 20,000 – will give young people the chance to escape from a life of addiction and crime. I’m delighted that the Shadow Home Secretary, Oliver Letwin, will be here this evening to tell you more about our law and order policies.

    Crime is not the only cause of poverty. Drugs and family instability can also damage a child’s chances in life. Labour is too embarrassed to face up to these issues. They hide behind a screen of political correctness. Conservatives must not be afraid to talk about these and other causes of poverty. We must be intolerant of discrimination. We will have the opportunity to talk about the face of poverty within Britain throughout this conference. And the fact that deeper exists beyond the shores of our country. If there is a pressing need for a new approach to poverty at home, then there is a desperate need for a new approach to third world poverty. Statist, and superstatist, solutions have not worked.

    But as we’ll hear from Caroline Spelman, the Shadow Secretary of State for International Development, Conservative solutions do have a chance. Through our emphasis on free trader for third world producers. On fighting corruption and promoting good governance. On trusting local agencies and local people as the only people capable of delivering sustainable development. In particular, Conservatives will put greater trust in the extraordinary work of Britain’s aid agencies and fair-trade enterprises – including CaféDirect and Traidcraft – both of which are kindly with us today.

    On my first visit to Easterhouse, someone shouted out:

    “What are you doing here? This is a Labour area.”

    “Yes,” I said, “and look around you.”

    There will be others that say:

    “Why are you talking about poverty? That’s a Labour issue.”

    And to them I’ll say “yes, and look around you.”

    Labour think they have a monopoly on compassion. And this monopoly – like all monopolies – has hurt the people it dominates. Poverty is too important an issue to leave to Labour. It’s too important to leave to any one political party.

    Labour is failing because it thinks poverty is only about money. Yet, as I’ve shown, even on its own measure, Labour is failing. Defeating poverty is about more than spending money. It’s about living in a secure neighbourhood. But today – under Labour – violent crime is rising. It’s about fighting the drug menace that blights our children’s lives. Yet, today, families desperate to get their children off drugs find that there aren’t enough rehabilitation places available.

    It’s about order and structure in schools. Yet Labour have taken disciplinary powers away from headteachers. Most of all it’s about giving people control over their own lives. But over recent years Labour’s massive centralised state has increased dependency and left far too many people and communities unable to take key decisions about how they lead their lives.

    That’s why a future Conservative government will be different. We’ll protect the incomes of vulnerable people but we’ll do much more. 40,000 extra police officers will reclaim the streets from criminals and drug pushers. 20,000 drug rehabilitation places will give young people a second chance in life. Our State Scholarships scheme will give parents in the inner cities the means to send their children to better schools. Our proposals on the voluntary sector will greatly increase the opportunities available to community-based social entrepreneurs. These and other policies will make a real difference to the hard-pressed communities that I’ve visited throughout my time as Conservative leader.

    I don’t expect to storm the Labour heartlands at the next election. But unless Conservatives can show that we will govern for the whole nation, we will neither win nor deserve to. That is why our fair deal is for everyone. No one held back. No one left behind.

  • Oliver Letwin – 2003 Speech to the British Sikh Federation

    Oliver Letwin – 2003 Speech to the British Sikh Federation

    The speech made by Oliver Letwin to the British Sikh Federation on 15 September 2003.

    Some months ago, I was visited by a senior delegation of British Sikhs, many of whom are here this afternoon.

    I was astonished to learn that as far as the Commission for Racial Equality was concerned, the Sikhs almost do not exist.

    Why? Because the CRE code of practice advising Public Authorities on the monitoring of ethnic groups does not monitor Sikhs as a separate ethnic group.

    Not only does this lack of recognition not give dignity to the Sikh population in the UK that it deserves, but it also means that the Code is meant to ensure equal treatment and enables Sikhs to be properly assessed and mentored by health, police authorities and other agencies.

    The Sikhs’ omission from the Code is astonishing given that there are 600,000 Sikhs in Britain today, probably the largest ethnic group in the country.

    The CRE oppose ethnic monitoring of the Sikhs because the code reflects the 2001 census, which included Sikhs as a religious grouping not an ethnic grouping. Yet the CRE code strenuously monitors other smaller ethnic groups.

    As you have pointed out, given that none of the existing categories fit Sikhs, the exclusion of Sikhs would mean that a distinct ethnic group – that constitutes 1.5% of the British population – would be rendered `invisible’ from a statistical standpoint. But if statistics ignore real people, what is the point of them?

    Whatever the Government or the CRE think, I don’t think that the 10,000 people here today are invisible or the other 590,000 Sikhs in the country are either.

    Last year we helped organise a Sikh lobby to Parliament on this issue and sent a petition to Tony Blair. We are determined to pursue this issue and it will be top of my agenda when I meet Trevor Phillips, the new Director of the CRE, next month. I and Dominic Grieve, the Conservative Shadow Community Cohesion Minister, look forward to working with you to continue the campaign at Westminster for proper recognition of Sikhs when Parliament returns after the Party Conference.

    But you too will need to continue to campaign vigorously and as a united force.

    That is why it is excellent news that the Convention today has announced the creation of a new national Sikh organisation, the Sikh Federation. It is good that you have decided to work with the mainstream parties. As a cohesive organisation you will have a better chance of achieving not just proper recognition of Sikhs, but a host of other objectives.

    Sikhs and Conservatives

    Ladies and Gentlemen, I am delighted to be here today for a number of reasons.

    Not just because it offers me the chance to see and experience 10,000 strong members of the Sikh community engaged and active.

    Not just because I want to learn from the Co-ordinating Committee of the National Sikh Convention as to how to get so many people to turn up to a public meeting.

    We could use some of your skills at the Conservative Conference next month in Blackpool!

    But because I believe that there is much common ground that Sikhism and Conservatism share. Sikh values of family, community, service to others and self reliance resonate with much Conservative thought.

    Service to others

    In a recent speech in Brixton, London, I suggested that my task as Shadow Home Secretary was to try and build a set of foundations on which the neighbourly society can build. I said then that four building blocks were essential:

    · Firstly, a neighbourly society. This requires providing young people with exit routes from the conveyer belt to crime. We have to provide help for parents with young children facing difficulties. We have to offer serious rehabilitation for persistent offenders. We need to provide young drug addicts with serious abstinence based treatment;

    · Secondly, Neighbourhood Policing. We need real active and sustained neighbourhood policing so that the police can recapture the streets for the honest citizen. That is why we have pledged to increase police numbers by 40,000.

    · Thirdly, Active Citizens. We have to encourage a society which fosters the networks of support between individuals, families, neighbourhoods and community organisations. This kind of society depends on active citizens and flourishes from voluntary activity.

    · Lastly, A Tolerant Society. We need to establish a framework which recognises that neighbours of differing creeds and colours, backgrounds and aspirations, can agree to live together in harmony.

    The first two of these foundations – getting young people off the conveyer belt to crime and getting more police in our neighbourhoods will need commitment from Government.

    But the last two cannot be just done by politicians.

    Whatever social policies emanate from the politicians at Whitehall, whatever comes from local government, without the active participation of our active citizens in our neighbourhoods and communities very little will be achieved.

    Encouraging active citizens in our communities and ensuring harmonious race relations can in the end only be done by all of us working together.

    And this is where I see that the Sikh community has – and must have – a central role.

    I am told that central to Sikhism is what is termed as Sewa – service to others. Service to religion, family, community, voluntarism and charity are regarded as the requirement and duty of every Sikh. I understand that the Guru Nanak once wrote:

    “The essence of wisdom lies in the service of humanity.”

    I agree.

    I know that Sikhs run a host of community organisations dedicated to helping the needy, in the UK. In India, the Sikhs have a deserved reputation for running orphanages, widow’s homes, institutes for the destitute and the handicapped and a Blind School.

    But the work that you do in Britain, is not just important to Sikhs, it is essential for the well-being of every Briton in our country.

    I salute the way you are making miracles happen in our inner cities. I pay tribute to the determination of the Sikh community to transform the lives for many of our disadvantaged people.

    We strongly support your efforts to have Sikh faith schools. What better example could there be of community endeavour? What is more important than the education of our children?

    I am glad to be able to tell you today that Conservatives feel that every community – parents, teachers and faith communities should be able to establish excellent new schools in their neighbourhoods. If Sikh schools are able to attract parents and children – as they no doubt will – then they will be guaranteed the required funding.

    We believe that every school should have its own ethos and strongly support the creation of faith-based schools.

    Race

    But the Sikh community also have a role in the second of these foundations – helping to build a more tolerant and harmonious society.

    I mentioned earlier that the announcement of the establishment of the Sikh Federation is good news for Sikhs and good news for Britain.

    Similarly your other two announcements today concerning the establishment of the National Council of Gurdwaras and the new Sikh Advisory Group are both positive developments.

    You are showing a determination to act as a cohesive force. You are bringing the Sikh community together to ensure that you are best placed to work with the grain of political and social institutions in this country.

    The work that you do has never been more important.

    And I want to tell you why. Last week the British National Party won their 18th Council seat in the United Kingdom. They are now represented right across England.

    Make no mistake; the hate and extremism of the British National Party do not just threaten ethnic communities. They threaten us all.

    They threaten the democratic values all of us cherish.

    They threaten Britain’s proud status as a tolerant and liberal nation.

    I understand that since the atrocity of September 11 2001, many Sikhs have had to deal with racial abuse – and some have been victims of racial violence.

    My Party is determined to play its part in doing something about this and to try and curtail the BNP electoral success. We will be making an important announcement about this at our Party Conference next month.

    Conclusion

    Part of the reason for the success of the British National Party is because so many people feel let down by mainstream politics and politicians. So many promises made, so much promise unfulfilled.

    In a country in which a crime is committed every five seconds, where criminals have just a 3% chance of being convicted, where our asylum system is in chaos, it is no wonder that extremists are successfully exploiting popular discontent.

    There is a saying which states “nature abhors a vacuum”. We are living at a time when there is such a vacuum. There is a deep absence of trust and malaise in our political life. At best this leads to apathy and at worst the support for extremist and fringe groups that I talked about a moment ago.

    That is why this Sikh Convention today is so important. By organising this event today and coming here in such vast numbers. You are showing your commitment to public life and a determination to lead by example.

    I am told that the Guru Nanak said that:

    “Truth is higher than everything, but higher still is truthful living”.

    As I think of the loss of integrity in our public life, I can think of no better message to take back to Westminster:

    Waheguru Ji Ka Khalsa, Waheguru Ji Ki Fateh

  • Theresa May – 2003 Speech on One Nation Conservatism

    Theresa May – 2003 Speech on One Nation Conservatism

    The speech made by Theresa May, the then Conservative Party chair, to the Compassionate Conservatism Conference on 16 September 2003.

    I am sure many people in Britain would be surprised to know that the Conservative Party has hosted such a successful conference on Compassionate Conservatism.

    All too often, we have allowed ourselves to be portrayed as a party which cares nothing about compassion. As Iain Duncan Smith said earlier this year, we have let our opponents place us in a box marked self-interest. We all know that this is not the case.

    We know that many Conservative Party members up and down the country are at the heart of community groups and voluntary organisations that work with some of the most vulnerable people in our country. We know that Conservative councils deliver the best services for the least well off, for the lowest tax.

    Since becoming Chairman I have seen countless examples of how Conservative councils make life better for people. How they improve schools, how they make town centres safer, how they tackle graffiti and anti-social behaviour.

    Today I want to give a clear message.

    There is nothing inconsistent about being Compassionate and a Conservative. Indeed, compassion has always been at the heart of what we have been about. There has always been a rich vein of compassion running through the Conservative Party. We never stopped being the party of one nation, the party of the poor, or the party of the vulnerable. Conservatives have always been about providing the ladder of opportunity, and the safety net for those in need.

    Labour often think history began in 1997, so let me establish a few facts about Compassionate Conservatism.

    · We were the party that granted home ownership to a million and a half council tenants when we were last in office. In 1997 there were four million more home-owners than there were in 1979.

    · We were the party that helped hundreds of thousands of people gain access to university. By the time we left office, one in three young people went to higher education – up from one in eight in 1979.

    · We were the party that helped countless people set up their own business. There were a million more small businesses in Britain by the time we left office than there were in 1979.

    · The last Conservative Government offered more help to families on low incomes, to lone parents, to pensioners and helped expand opportunity so that social mobility became a reality for many.

    Labour would like us to believe that they have a monopoly on compassion.

    – Tell that to people trapped in crime-ridden estates.

    – Tell that to the mothers who see their children high on drugs, without any help or rehabilitation.

    – Tell that to the children trapped in failing schools.

    – Tell that to elderly people who use up all their life savings to pay for a vital operation that the NHS won’t provide for months.

    – What is compassionate about a Government that imposes so many regulations on care homes that they have to close, leaving thousands of elderly people with an uncertain future?

    There is nothing compassionate about New Labour.

    This is a Government that have shut the door on the policy of right to buy – denying home ownership – the fastest vehicle of social mobility to hundreds of thousands of people.

    This is a Government that has already slapped thousands of pounds in tuition fees on university students, and now plans to burden them even more with top-up fees – a policy which could end up deterring thousands of academically able people from disadvantaged backgrounds from entering university. Where is the compassion in that? It is a policy I am proud to say the Conservative Party has opposed, and which we are committed to reverse.

    Under Labour, the gap between the rich and the poor is wider now that it has been for over a decade. For all its talk about social justice, this is a Government in which allows a quarter of all pensioners to live below the poverty line.

    In today’s Britain a crime is committed every five seconds; record numbers of young people are caught up in a culture of crime and drug abuse; and people fear to walk out alone at night.

    That is just a snapshot of ‘compassion’ in New Labour’s New Britain. It is no wonder people are looking for an alternative.

    When I speak to people across Britain, they tell me that they simply want things to be better.

    They want better schools, better hospitals, better public transport, less crime.

    They can’t understand why they pay more tax, and the public services are getting worse.

    They are sick of the Government’s obsession with spin. They are tired of hearing about the Government’s latest target or initiative. What matters to them is whether the things on which they depend – the public services – are getting better or worse.

    To put it simply – they want a fair deal.

    This presents us with a challenge and an opportunity.

    But it is not enough for us to point out Labour’s failures.

    Nor can we simply point to our achievements when we were in office.

    Neither of these alone provide people with a fair deal.

    We have to persuade people that we can offer a genuine alternative to Labour.

    We need to persuade people that we can deliver the changes in the public services they need.

    For the last two years, that is what the Conservative Party, under Iain Duncan Smith, has been doing just that.

    This is how we are changing.

    As Iain said last week, we are now in our strongest position for ten years. We’re talking about the issues that matter to people. We’re offering solutions to the problems that concern people.

    And instead of Labour’s phoney compassion, we’re offering genuine solutions.

    Surely that is what opposition is about.

    And that’s what ‘Compassionate Conservatism’ is about too.

    Showing that we don’t have to settle for second best in the public services.

    That Government isn’t only about managing decline in the health service – but revitalising them.

    Showing that our goal shouldn’t be simply to curb crime, but to create a neighbourly society.

    Persuading people that inner city children shouldn’t be condemned to failing schools, but provided with a stepping-stone to success.

    That opportunity should be open to the many, not the few.

    Under Iain Duncan Smith, Renewing One Nation has had a central place within the Conservative Party. For that is surely our mission. To renew Britain. To breath new life into failing public services. To show that we can offer genuine alternatives.

    But why should people believe us? Labour promised the earth, and failed to deliver. People feel let down. People’s faith in New Labour has been betrayed.

    How are we going to convince people we are different? We have to show we understand their problems. And we are changing here too.

    The culture of politics is changing.

    People are tired of politicians who argue by throwing statistics at each other.

    They are sick of politicians who think the answer to a problem is to come up with a good slogan.

    People want to know what we stand for, not simply what we are against.

    On Sunday I attended the 30th anniversary of the foundation of the Cookham and Maidenhead branch of Amnesty International – based in my constituency. There was a time when the idea of a conservative attending an Amnesty International event was anathema to many Conservatives. Because we had difficulties with some things they did and said, we appeared to be completely against them. Now, we are grown up enough to say ‘we admire your commitment and recognise your dedication to fighting against injustice and although we don’t always agree with you, we are happy to work with you when we do, such as when Caroline Spelman met representatives of the Indian Government pressing the case for Ian Stillman.

    I believe that is the sort of constructive political engagement that Britain needs to reinvigorate British politics, because too many people have been put off political debate because of the way it is conducted.

    Too many people have lost faith in politicians because of the culture of British politics.

    That is not only bad for politics. It is bad for Britain.

    People want to know that we understand what they want – not simply what makes a good headline.

    We have to show people what a Conservative Government will do for them.

    How a Conservative Government will make their streets safer, how it will make our schools better, how it will improve health services.

    We have already made great progress doing this.

    Last year’s party conference was, I believe, our most successful for a decade. We unveiled 25 new policies that will begin to reverse the decline in our public services, and we have followed this with more announcements.

    Oliver Letwin has set out our commitment to recruit an extra 40,000 police – the largest increase in police numbers for a generation – and our pledge to provide intensive drug rehabilitation for every young hard drug addict.

    David Davis has set out our policy to allow thousands of more people to own their own homes.

    Damian Green has set out how we would give children stuck in failing schools the chance to go to better schools.

    Since then, we have unveiled new policies on health, crime and education.

    We have launched our policy to scrap tuition fees and oppose top-up fees.

    We have set out proposals to improve public health.

    We have begun our consultation on improving Britain’s transport.

    We have produced our own Green Paper on revitalising the voluntary sector. Up and down the country, each and every day, people from all walks of life take part in voluntary activities that knit together civil society. This is the front-line of compassionate Britain. A Government which neglects this well-spring of compassion will never tackle the problems facing Britain today. We will empower civil society in Britain to be an engine of social renewal.

    Labour think the answer to social problems is ever more state control. We disagree.

    Last week, Iain Duncan Smith and David Davis released a major critique of Labour’s culture of command and control, and promised that the next Conservative Government would cut through suffocating Whitehall bureaucracy and empower people on the front-line.

    Since the last party conference Iain has toured the length and breadth of Britain, telling people what a Conservative Government would do for them.

    We have been to some of our most deprived communities – the areas which have most reason to feel let down by Tony Blair.

    We’re not just going to these areas and telling them what we would do. Through organisations like Renewing One Nation, we are listening to them, to their problems, listening to the voice of people – people not obsessed with Westminster politics – to see what they want.

    And I think the fact that this conference is taking place is testimony to how much the Conservative Party is changing.

    Yesterday Iain Duncan Smith set out the Conservative Party’s approach to fighting poverty. Greg Clark has set out the policies that underpin the Fair Deal. Caroline Spelman has spoken of our approach to the developing world. Peter Franklin has spoken about drug rehabilitation. Jill Kirby has spoken about the role of the family. Oliver Letwin has spoken about helping young people off the conveyor belt to crime, and our mission to create genuine neighbourhood policing.

    Later we will hear from leading Conservative figures in local Government about how they are already tackling poverty and empowering communities where they live. We will hear about how Conservative principles, put into practice, can make a genuine difference.

    This afternoon we will hear from David Lidington about how Conservatives will resolve tensions between different communities in Britain – something we need now more than ever before. David Willetts will speak about a Conservative approach to welfare and poverty, and how we will free people from a culture of dependency.

    In a few weeks, we will meet for our annual conference, when even more policies will be set out about how we will take power out of the hands of politicians and bureaucrats, and give it back to the people.

    We won’t deal in slogans. We will set out our policies. People will know what we stand for. And then they will decide.

    This year’s local elections showed that people are already making that decision. Across Britain, people are deciding to come back to the Conservatives.

    On May 1st, we gained over 500 council seats and we are now the largest party in local government in Great Britain.

    People have realised that Labour have failed to make life better. Labour’s voters are abandoning them – not simply because Labour are addicted to spin, not simply because of the war on Iraq, but because they have broken their promise to make Britain better. As Iain said yesterday, there is no heart in Labour’s heartlands. Under Labour, people pay higher taxes, but live in a country of rising crime and declining public services. That is why people are turning to us to deliver a fair deal.

    As this conference has reminded us – there are conservative solutions to the problems Britain faces today.

    Conservative solutions that ensure no one is held back, and no one is left behind.

    But we cannot be complacent. Britain does face huge problems. Too many children leave our schools unable to read or write. Too many communities and town centres have been lost to drug dealers, vandals, and criminals. Too many people wait too long for vital hospital treatment.

    I believe compassionate conservatism offers the answer to these problems. Our party under the leadership of Iain Duncan Smith is providing these answers.

    We have to be disciplined. We have to stick to the course we have set.

    Our goal – as a party and as a country – must be to turn around the decline in our public services, and restore life to our communities.

    This is why we are Conservatives.

    We are Conservatives because we believe in One Nation. We believe that by Conservative principles we can address Labour’s failure.

    Renewing One Nation will be at the heart of our campaign.

    Our mission is simple. It is to make Britain better.

  • Oliver Letwin – 2003 Speech at the National Volunteering Convention

    Oliver Letwin – 2003 Speech at the National Volunteering Convention

    The speech made by Oliver Letwin to the National Volunteering Convention at the Britannia Hotel, Canary Wharf, London on 16 September 2003.

    In a speech given at Toynbee Hall last year, Iain Duncan Smith described Britain’s intractable social problems as “five giants” – an echo of William Beveridge’s famous words. Since Beveridge’s time the giants have changed, but they are still with us. After almost sixty years, our society still faces enormous challenges. The main difference is that public confidence in the ability of state to meet those challenges has evaporated. Which is not to deny an equal degree of scepticism in the universal applicability of market solutions.

    Failing schools, substandard healthcare, rising crime, child poverty and insecurity in old age: the persistence of the same old problems demands a new kind of politics. A politics distinct from that of the 1940s and from that of the 1980s. A politics that looks beyond the state and the market for new solutions. A politics that looks to the voluntary and community sector.

    Don’t we already have this new kind of politics? Hasn’t the voluntary and community sector been getting more attention than it has done for decades? Yes, but only up to a point. And that brings the voluntary and community sector to a potentially dangerous place.

    The threat is that the sector will be seen as a source of replacement parts for the worn-out components of an essentially unchanged public service framework. A framework governed by the same old politics. What is sold to the voluntary and community sector as partnership may turn out to be subservience. After decades of being locked out of the public services, the voluntary organisations may find themselves being locked in, co-opted as unofficial and under-resourced agencies of the state.

    And yet the opportunities of true partnership are enormous – both for the public services and for the voluntary and community sector. That much is obvious. What is not so obvious is how you can have the opportunity without the threat.

    The voluntary and community sector cannot complain that it is been ignored by Government and Opposition. Politicians on all sides are touting their solutions to the dilemmas facing the sector.

    Government initiatives include the Compact on relations between the public and voluntary and community sectors; the Treasury cross-cutting review; and the possibility of a Charity Law Bill in the next Queen’s speech. Incidentally, I will continue to press my opposite number to make room for such a Bill in the legislative timetable.

    On the Conservative side, in 2001 we were the first party to issue a civil society election manifesto; in 2002 our annual business breakfast was replaced with a charities breakfast at party conference; and this year we published Sixty Million Citizens a consultation paper containing sixteen proposals aimed at unlocking the full potential of Britain’s voluntary and community sector, whilst safeguarding its independence.

    In short, there is some pretty healthy competition for your hearts and minds. Of course, it would be far from healthy if the voluntary and community sector were turned into some kind of political football. Indeed, there is a great deal of cross-party consensus on these issues and we have welcomed a lot of what the present Government has done for the sector. Nevertheless, there are differences in each party’s approach to relationship between civil society and the state. You need to be aware of those differences, because I believe they will have a profound influence on the sector as it stands on the brink of enormous opportunity and real danger.

    These differences are rooted in each party’s fundamental values, which determine what each party values most about volunteering and the voluntary sector. Our Conservative values are set out in Sixty Million Citizens, where they are stated as five principles, which together can be remembered by the acronym VALID:

    The first principle is volunteerism: The uncompelled gift of time or money by volunteers and donors is virtually unique to the non-statutory, non-commercial third sector. Professionalism and professional staff are also important to the sector, as is income from contractual arrangements with other sectors. But we hope that these will always be used in a way complementary to volunteerism, not as a substitute for volunteering.

    The second principle is altruism: Though the unselfish desire to better the lot of others is by no means absent from either the public or private sectors, it is most apparent and important in the voluntary and community sector. Altruism and voluntarism are deeply interdependent. Altruism motivates volunteers and donors, who in turn influence voluntary organisations to serve the common good, rather than the enrichment or aggrandisement of those in control.

    The third principle is localism: If the private sector is fuelled by money and the public sector by power, then the life blood of the third sector is compassion. And while money and power can be centralised, compassion cannot be. Whether large or small, the best voluntary organisations retain a strong local character, rooted in the communities from which they draw support and to which they render service.

    The fourth principle is independence: A sector which is genuinely voluntary, altruistic and local is almost by definition independent. However these internal drivers of independence could be overwhelmed by external pressures from the much larger public and private sectors. As, for the very best of reasons, voluntary organisations deepen their involvement with the state and the marketplace, independence cannot not be assumed. Independence must become a cardinal value in its own right to be defended at all costs.

    The fifth principle is diversity: Proof of the independence of the sector is its ability to represent every need and cause, to encompass organisations of all sizes, and to include every shade of religious and secular motivating ethos. This clearly distinguishes the voluntary and community sector from its public and private counterparts, and also explains why it is able to find solutions to intractable social problems where neither the state nor the market can.

    Each of these principles describe what we think is good about volunteering and voluntary organisations – not what they are good for. Of course, the voluntary and community sector is good for all sorts of things. Not least the pivotal role it could play in the reform of the public services. Conservatives believe that we should empower the sector to play a much bigger role in fighting poverty, rebuilding community and improving delivery. But it must be stressed that, as far as we are concerned, this is an invitation not a command. Unlike Don Corleone, we are making you an offer you can refuse.

    In fact, it goes further than that. While we want to increase opportunities for partnership with the public sector and, like everyone else, ensure that such partnerships do not disadvantage those volunteers and voluntary organisations that choose to get involved; we also want to ensure that there should be no disadvantage to those volunteers and voluntary organisations that choose not to get involved.

    In short, we do not regard civil society as a means to an end, but as an end in itself. A healthy voluntary and community sector is one which flourishes both in partnership with the public sector and by itself.

    So far I have spoken of the voluntary and community sector generally. Now I’d like to turn to the specific issue of volunteering – which, of course, includes Britain’s longstanding and much valued tradition of volunteering within our public services, as well as volunteering within voluntary organisations.

    Conservatives strongly believe in the inherent value of all volunteering as a leading dimension of full citizenship. It should, therefore, be encouraged for its intrinsic value – as well as for its instrumental usefulness to both the public and voluntary sectors. We do not want to devalue the importance of an increasingly professional voluntary sector; nor the need for its employees to be properly paid and to enjoy full pension provision. Nevertheless, increased rates of volunteering are essential if we are to build a culture of active citizenship and if we are to expand the sector’s capacity to reach vulnerable people. Many people struggling with addiction, loneliness or low self-esteem desperately need the reliable care of another human being and that cannot be provided by overloaded caseworkers. Conservatives want to encourage the voluntary and public sectors to greater consideration of what volunteers might bring to their work.

    That’s our vision for volunteering, but is it achievable? In particular, can we really hope to see an expansion in the number of volunteers at a time when many voluntary organisations, especially those involved in partnerships with the public sector, are taking on more paid staff?

    The experience of other nations is instructive. According to research carried out by the Comparative Non-Profit Sector Project, the world’s volunteering superstars are the Swedes. And yet in terms of paid employment, Sweden has one of the least developed voluntary sectors in the western world. It is also the case that Swedish state dominates public service provision, with next to no role for the voluntary sector. From the Swedish experience we might conclude that a professional voluntary sector and partnership with the public sector is incompatible with a flourishing culture of volunteering. However, if one then looks at Holland, which comes second only to Sweden in volunteering levels, one would have to come to exactly the opposite conclusions. Not only does Holland have the highest level of paid non-statutory, non-commercial employment in the world, it also has public services in which voluntary organisations play an extensive role.

    Britain is more like Holland in that it has high levels of both paid and unpaid third sector employment, though not quite as high. And it is more like Sweden, in that the voluntary sector has a limited role in the public sector, though not quite as limited. If Britain were to move to Dutch levels of voluntary sector participation in the public services, paid voluntary sector employment would be sure to be boosted accordingly – but what would happen to volunteering?

    As I said earlier, the work of volunteers is one of the good reasons why the voluntary sector should play a bigger role in the provision of public services. However, it also provides a very bad reason. Volunteers are unpaid and therefore the danger is that partnership with the voluntary sector could be seen as a way of providing public services on the cheap. I don’t have to tell you how damaging this would be to all concerned. Indeed, nothing could be more guaranteed to kill the culture of volunteering in this country than its exploitation by an unscrupulous government.

    However, there is an equal danger that partnership between the two sectors will proceed without significant involvement from volunteers. This is just what has happened in the former East Germany following reunification with the west, where public service reforms boosted levels of paid voluntary sector employment, but left volunteering not much stronger than it was in the Communist era.

    Not only would this deprive our public services of the contribution that volunteering can make. It would also compromise the whole approach to the third sector. Volunteers keep voluntary organisations focused on their grassroots, an invaluable anchor in all circumstances, but especially in situations of partnership with the state – where the temptation can be to fix on centres of political and bureaucratic power. This temptation is understandable when projects depend on the continuing good will of the powers that be, but a voluntary sector that loses touch with its grassroots is well on the way to losing its independence too.

    I would like to offer two solutions. One general and one specific.

    Our general solution is the decentralisation of the public services. By returning power to the frontline providers and users of our public services, we will radically reduce the power of politicians and bureaucrats to pull the strings – whether from the town hall or from Whitehall. This isn’t so much a single policy, but an entire platform on which we will base our appeal to the nation at the next election. Indeed, it is more than a platform, it is our purpose as a Party.

    Obviously, our decentralisation platform is not aimed at the voluntary sector alone, but it would be of enormous benefit to the voluntary organisations. By giving users a greater choice of service providers, and making sure that funding followed those choices, we would multiply the opportunities for voluntary sector involvement. And by making service providers primarily accountable to local users, rather than to political and bureaucratic hierarchies, we would enable voluntary organisations to maintain their independence.

    Our specific solution is to make sure that some of these bottom-up funding streams are devoted to the expansion and development of volunteering. Our green paper, Sixty Million Citizens, includes an outline proposal for the creation of what we call a “volunteer bounty”. That is, a simple and straightforward per capita payment for each volunteer signed up to an accredited training programme. We would very much welcome your continued feedback on this proposal, but we believe that it would be a much better way of distributing public funds than the current top-down bureaucracy – whose flaws have been amply demonstrated by the Experience Corps debacle.

    In the words of Iain Duncan Smith: “The alternative to a bigger state is not… a lonely individualism. The centralised state and Darwinian individualism are, in fact, natural accomplices in the undermining of society. Both cut people loose from the institutions that provide identity and personal security. The real alternative to a bigger state is a stronger society. Chris Patten once talked of a smaller state and bigger citizens. Government should be focused on strengthening the natural institutions of society – and not replacing or undermining them.”

    Likewise, Government should be focused on strengthening volunteering – and not replacing or undermining volunteers.

  • David Lidington – 2003 Speech on a Fair Deal for the Dairy Industry

    David Lidington – 2003 Speech on a Fair Deal for the Dairy Industry

    The speech made by David Lidington, the then Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, on 17 September 2003.

    The Dairy Industry is going through a period of drastic and painful change.

    The rules of the market place are changing in three significant ways. First, we are seeing the gradual opening up of world trade and the dismantling of production subsidies.

    Despite the failure of the WTO talks in Cancun, the world looks almost certain to continue moving, albeit hesitantly and erratically, towards the further liberalisation of international markets.

    The enlargement of the European Union from 15 to 25 members will lead to an increase of about one fifth in total EU milk production and more vigorous competition for British producers in some of our traditional export markets.

    Together, enlargement and the push towards global free trade are bringing change to the Common Agricultural Policy. The need to limit the overall CAP budget and the growing political pressure from churches and charities to help developing countries will, in my view, lead to export subsidies being reduced or phased out all together.

    Second, the structure of the food industry is changing. Retailing is already dominated by a handful of big players and I hope that the sale of Safeway does not lead to a further reduction in the number of national supermarket chains. Meanwhile, both catering and food processing are following the pattern already set by the retail industry. Both sectors are consolidating, giving us a market with fewer big players and fewer food factories.

    Third, customers’ demands and shopping habits are changing. I welcome the rise of farmers’ markets and internet sales of food but the figure that leaps out of the Curry Report is that more than 95 per cent of us do our main shopping at a supermarket. Customers value the convenience, price and variety that the big retailers offer and I see little prospect of that changing.

    More people live on their own, in most couples both partners work. Fewer people are willing to make time to prepare fresh food. The demand for ready-to-eat meals is rising.

    If we look at dairying, figures from the Institute of Grocery Distribution show that demand for traditional dairy products – full fat milk and cheddar cheese – is static or declining. The growth in demand is for value added products, for skimmed milk, yoghurt and fromage frais.

    There is a market for speciality products – I want to be the first in the queue for cheese like Llanboidy or Stinking Bishop. And there is a demand for novelty foods. When I read about the prospect of Tandoori flavoured cheddar, I want to run a mile. But it does actually offer the possibility of a new market for British dairy producers.

    What should politicians do to help dairy farmers to meet these various challenges?

    I want to see British farmers make profits. The job of government should be to help make it possible for them to do so.

    That doesn’t mean that politicians should be taking business decisions. Governments have a dire record of picking winners in business. Not even the brightest and best in Whitehall or Brussels is likely to be able to tell you which cheese or ice cream is about to become the customers favourite. Farmers, not civil servants, let alone politicians, have the enterprise and ingenuity to produce the food that customers will want to buy. That is why I believe that the future lies in a world where farmers are free to respond to the signals from their customers rather than those from government. The duty of government is to help create the economic conditions in which farm businesses can prosper.

    I believe that government should be fighting to get a fair deal for British agriculture in the EU and the WTO, that we should make changes to the home market to give domestic producers a better chance and that we should be helping farmers to cut their costs by a different approach to regulation and determined action against disease.

    We are meeting just a couple of days after the collapse of the Cancun negotiations and before the Trade Secretary has made any statement to Parliament about the reasons for that failure. So it is difficult to speak with any certainty about what is likely to happen next, though I can truthfully claim to have expressed doubts ever since the Luxembourg Agreement that the partial and incomplete decoupling regime agreed then by the EU would be sufficient to secure progress at the WTO.

    There are two things in particular that I regard as important in further WTO talks. The first is that the burden of making concessions to help the poorest countries in the world should be shared fairly amongst all the developed nations. For once, American rhetoric about free trade needs to be matched by American practice. Second, we have to find a way in which to write animal welfare into the rules governing international trade so that our producers do not suffer on account of the welfare standards that we as a society impose upon them.

    When it comes to the Mid Term Review, I support the principle that the link between farm support and production should be broken. But I am worried that the concessions made to France and others in terms of both the timing and the scale of decoupling may lead to market distortions and the fact that “degressivity” has now been renamed “financial discipline” cannot conceal the fact that British farmers are going to be expected to pay a disproportionately large share of the costs of CAP reform.

    However, the priority now must be for the Government to announce clear decisions on how it plans to implement what was agreed at Luxembourg. Whatever its flaws, that is the deal to which the Government has signed up and it is vital that farmers are told how they will stand under the new support arrangements.

    If decoupling is to come in as early as 2005, farmers need to take decisions by the end of this year in order to plan their businesses. Uncertainty over the precise implications of the Mid Term Review is causing turbulence in the quota market (already in some turmoil following the Thomsen case) and in the market for land. People need to know what the new rules mean for them.

    The Government also needs to come clean about cost compliance. One of the big attractions of decoupling is that it will sweep away a lot of form filling and red tape. That will be of little account if we simply substitute a host of new rules in the name of the environment. Nor is it clear how the standards required of farmers under cross compliance will relate to those that will have to be met to get into the “broad and shallow” environmental payments scheme.

    One further point about Europe – with the end of OTMS, it is vital that DEFRA makes it a priority to campaign for the lifting of the date based export scheme to ease the pressure on the home market. I was dismayed to read that Health Ministers are stalling over whether to implement the recommendation from the Food Standards Agency that to allow Over 30 Month beef back into the food chain. That kind of hesitation will only give ammunition to those on the Continent who want to maintain export restrictions.

    When it comes to the domestic market, I know that the chief concern amongst dairy farmers is that the farm gate price of milk often does not even cover the cost of production, let alone give you a decent return.

    Those worries have undoubtedly been made worse by the collapse of United Milk. I think that it is in everyone’s interest that the receivers are able to sell United Milk as a going concern and I hope that the business remains in the hands of farmers themselves. A takeover by one of the other cooperatives would of course raise issues of market share and it is vital that the OFT recognises the need of the industry and does not block a merger on competition grounds. The last thing that we need is a “Son of Milk Marque” judgement.

    We will need to look at the implications of last week’s ruling from the ECJ but I am already persuaded that we need to overhaul the competition rules as they affect farmers’ cooperatives. If British farmers want to follow the path of the profitable cooperatives that we see in New Zealand or on the continent, they should be free to do so. If politicians tell farmers that we expect you to compete in a European and global market place, then our competition rules should be framed to take account of that fact rather than looking solely at domestic market share.

    We also need stricter rules on labelling. A British shopper should be able to tell instantly whether the food she is buying came from British producers or not. I acknowledge that there are practical issues to be worked out over processed foods that contain ingredients from a number of different countries. But the current situation, where food can be grown abroad, processed here and still labelled as “UK” is unfair to our farmers and amounts to fraud on consumers.

    At a time when dairying is going through a traumatic recession, government should be making every conceivable effort to reduce the costs that it imposes on farmers. Too often that is not the case. Regulations are agreed and imposed without adequate thought being given to the practical, including the financial, implications. We all know the examples: nitrate vulnerable zones, fallen stock, not to mention the sheer incompetence of the Rural Payments Agency. Even after the Government had conceded the principle of a ban on the burial of fallen stock, it could have used exemptions and derogations to allow time for an alternative system of disposal to be put in place. Ministers agreed to delay the implementation of the Animal By-products Regulation for waste food from retailers. It should have done the same. Other countries were more ingenious. The Spaniards even secured a derogation to allow carcasses to be left on the hills as a conservation measure to preserve vultures!

    We could all draw up our list of regulations that we would like to see repealed or amended. But more important still I believe is to bring about a change in the whole culture of regulation in this country. We need much earlier consultation with industry, much more effective scrutiny by Parliament (especially of secondary legislation), an end to the gold plating of Brussels’ Directives. We need sunset clauses embodied in new rules so that they lapse automatically after a given period unless renewed. That way, we give everyone the chance to assess how the rules have worked out in practice and to make changes.

    We need to end the duplication of forms and inspections that waste hours of time that would be better used running your business and winning customers. Government should adopt a risk-based approach to regulation. It is not necessary to monitor and inspect every enterprise every single year. Different agencies should make use of the same body of information and not insist on sending out their own special list of questions and tick boxes. A single set of data for each farm business, filed on line, could surely be interrogated by the different regulatory bodies and remove the need for much of the paperwork.

    The other issue raised with me at every meeting I have had with dairy farmers has been Bovine Tuberculosis. This is now developing into as great a threat as Foot and Mouth Disease. The latest figures show that 4,200 herds were under restriction during the first half of this year. More than 15,000 beasts have been slaughtered. In 2002 the cost of TB to taxpayers was between 80 and 90 million pounds and while that figure included compensation payments it did not cover the costs borne by farmers through the disruption of their businesses. This year, those costs will be much higher.

    There are still more than 3,000 herd tests overdue. It must be a top priority to eliminate that backlog altogether and to ensure that reactors are quickly removed from the farm.

    Restocking after Foot and Mouth was almost certainly responsible for bringing Bovine TB into Cumbria. I think we will need firm rules on testing both before and after movement to avoid such a thing happening again.

    We have to revisit the issue of culling. Yes, the way in which disease is transmitted between wildlife and cattle is complex and still not wholly understood. But the Irish evidence is clear. Culling, in combination with other disease control measures, can bring about a big reduction in the incidence of TB. There are now disturbing reports that TB is found, not just in the badger population, but amongst deer on Exmoor and in the New Forest.

    On both economic and animal welfare grounds, this situation should not be allowed to continue. Where there is clear scientific evidence that local wildlife has become infected with TB, the government should be prepared to authorise culling of the diseased populations.

    The long term answer has to come through developing effective vaccines. This needs to move to the top of DEFRA’s research agenda and when the Irish Government is carrying out field trials on a BCG vaccine for wildlife we should be saying to Dublin that we would like to take part in that experiment.

    The Dairy Industry is going through a time of great difficulty and challenge. No politician could come to this event and say truthfully that he, or for that matter any government of any political colour, had all the answers. But I believe there are initiatives that Ministers could and should take to show dairy farmers that their government is on their side and will fight to get them a fair deal in a rapidly changing world.

  • Iain Duncan Smith – 2003 Speech at the Chartered Insurers Institute Conference

    Iain Duncan Smith – 2003 Speech at the Chartered Insurers Institute Conference

    The speech made by Iain Duncan Smith, the then Leader of the Opposition, on 18 September 2003.

    The new political year has just begun.

    And I can almost hear you groan!

    Well, the outlook from 10 Downing Street is certainly bleak.

    The Labour Party is divided from top to bottom:

    …on Iraq and relations with the United States…

    …on the euro and relations with the European Union…

    …on foundation hospitals, tuition fees, and the whole direction of public service reform.

    Throughout Whitehall, political will has been replaced by political infighting.

    Ministers’ commitment to their country has been replaced by concern for their jobs.

    And that concern is valid.

    The Hutton Inquiry has exposed to the public’s view the inner workings of this Government.

    And the public have had enough of it.

    However, I do not intend to make a speech about the immediate difficulties of the Government.

    Beyond all the serious charges in the Hutton Inquiry…

    … – Hoon versus Gilligan, Blair and the mistreatment of Dr Kelly – …

    …there are the serious failures of this Government that affect the everyday lives of the British people.

    Labour’s mismanagement of the economy is one of its least reported failures.

    It is under-reported because the growing weaknesses of the UK economy, are growing beneath the surface.

    Like an iceberg we can only see the tip of the uncompetitiveness and supply side rigidities that Labour is creating.

    Last year, business investment fell at its fastest rate for nearly 40 years.

    Manufacturing is losing 10,000 jobs a month, without gaining in competitiveness:

    …we have had a trade deficit in each and every month since August 1997.

    The UK stock market has fallen – and fallen further and faster than in other advanced countries.

    Since May 1997, the FTSE 100 has been outperformed by the Dow Jones by over 40 per cent…

    …and by the French stock market by over 30 per cent.

    GDP growth has slowed…

    …and Gordon Brown’s forecasts may well prove over-optimistic for a third time in a row.

    Next March, with falling tax receipts squeezing his spending programmes, the Chancellor will face a dilemma:

    He can choose more tax and borrowing, or – for the first time – he can choose real reform to the public services.

    I have an idea which he will go for.

    The most striking feature of our economy since 1997, of course, is the increase in the burden of tax.

    There have been sixty tax rises since Labour came to power.

    Since 1997…

    …the overall tax take has increased by 50%…

    …and as I reminded the Prime Minister in Parliament yesterday, that includes a 70% rise in Council Tax…

    …the savings ratio has fallen by 50%…

    …and the amount of the average personal pension has also fallen by 50%.

    It is not plausible to claim – as Gordon Brown does – that these facts are unrelated.

    High taxation damages the economy and erodes the incentive to save.

    Households now put aside less than 5% of their income for the future.

    This is hardly surprising.

    Gordon Brown has imposed a five billion pounds a year tax on pensions.

    The withdrawal of the dividend tax credit has imposed a downward pressure on equities…

    …further eroding the value of pensions invested in the stock market.

    And the unstoppable advance of the means-test, higher and higher up the income scale…

    …has seen the incentive to save grow smaller and smaller.

    According to the New Economics Foundation, British citizens on average owe 120% of their disposable incomes – at a time when real take-home pay is actually falling.

    In seeking to boost saving, it is important that savings and investment products are properly explained and marketed.

    I am glad that the Financial Services Authority is turning its attention to financial promotions…

    …though I hope that statutory regulation will not be necessary.

    We have had enough of that already.

    Membership organisations like the Chartered Insurance Institute…

    …which has been setting professional standards for financial services for over a hundred years…

    …are often better placed to monitor best practice than Government is.

    And I strongly commend the work you are doing alongside the FSA to improve professional practice.

    The central plank of our election platform is that Conservatives offer a fair deal for everyone.

    You will hear a lot about that fair deal in the coming months – and I would like briefly to outline what we mean by it.

    Earlier this week I addressed an important Conservative conference on poverty.

    I pointed out that economic inequality has widened since Labour took office.

    And that over the last five decades – the life of the welfare state – upward social mobility has become harder, not easier.

    Labour has failed to tackle poverty.

    Conservatives have a different way.

    We want a society in which no-one is left behind – where no-one has to put up with second-rate housing or education or healthcare.

    And we want a society in which no-one is held back from realising their potential.

    That includes entrepreneurs – the people who create the wealth which Governments tax and redistribute.

    You are the agents of social justice in this country.

    You are the people this country depends on for a better and fairer future.

    But Labour has hurt wealth creation.

    The sad fact is that productivity growth has halved since 1997.

    The combined cost of Labour’s tax and red tape has been estimated by the CBI at £15 billion a year.

    And as Digby Jones of the CBI commented recently, business people feel, and I quote:

    “that the most dominant feature of running a business [today]… is no longer creating wealth – it is dealing with regulations.”

    So when Conservatives talk about a fair deal they mean a fair deal for everyone:

    …for the poor, trapped in poverty…

    …for the taxpayer, denied value for money…

    …and for business people, taxed and regulated to despair.

    These are not contradictory messages.

    They are a single message.

    A fair deal for everyone.

    How will we go about delivering the fair deal?

    As far as your industry is concerned, we urgently need to revive the culture of long-term responsibility – the culture of saving.

    That is why we propose what we have called the Lifetime Savings Account.

    This would allow people to save in an escrow account with the benefit of a matching Government contribution.

    They could withdraw the money if they needed it, and re-invest at a later date without sacrificing the Government contribution.

    But this country also needs sounder economic foundations.

    I should emphasise that we cannot, at this stage, anticipate the economic situation in two or three years’ time.

    But Conservatives will always be a lower tax party than Labour.

    In order to achieve this, the first thing we must do is tackle the problem of high taxation at its root –

    …the culture of profligacy and waste which is found in our unreformed public services.

    The Chancellor likes to boast of his ‘investment’ in our schools and hospitals.

    But as we know all too well, most of the Government’s public expenditure is not ‘investment’ at all.

    It is spending to stand still.

    Inputs rise, but outputs remain the same.

    Figures from the Office of National Statistics show Government’s current spending has increased by 50% since 1997…

    …but that the value of Government outputs has increased by only 15%.

    Since Labour came to power, public service productivity has actually declined by 5%.

    This is most evident in the NHS.

    Since 1999 we have seen a 22 per cent increase in health spending, but a meagre 1.6 per cent increase in the number of patients treated…

    …and an actual fall – of half a per cent – in the number of hospital admissions.

    These figures pre-date this year’s National Insurance rise, which has fallen especially hard on large employers like the NHS.

    Labour are taxing… spending… wasting… and failing.

    We must reverse this trend, and improve the efficiency of our public services.

    And by reforming them, Conservatives will provide proper value for taxpayers’ money, and make savings which can be returned to the people.

    I want to end with a word on the euro.

    On Sunday Sweden rejected the single currency.

    Not a single country has yet endorsed the euro in a referendum.

    I believe that after the Swedish vote the prospects for a referendum in this Parliament are remote.

    Of course, if we win the next election, the prospects for a referendum in the next Parliament will be non-existent.

    And that is why I urge the business community to support us in that election.

    Many of you will have a different view from me on the single currency.

    But I hope you agree that what the British economy needs most is certainty.

    Mr Blair is incapable of providing it.

    He has promised his colleagues in Europe that he will call a referendum.

    But he knows that he would lose it if he did so.

    So there is only one alternative route for him – the route he always chooses.

    The route of the third way: ambivalence.

    Ambiguity.

    Calculated indecision.

    One Cabinet minister authorised to say one thing, another instructed to say the opposite.

    Well, that might be the way the Labour Party operates.

    But after six years of mixed messages and confusion, the British people, and British businesses in particular, are entitled to a little certainty.

    They will get it with the Conservative Party.