When I was first elected Parliament sat on most Fridays, on some there was Government business and others were given over to Private members bills. Constituency duties were therefore, largely confined to weekends.

 Things have changed, we now only sit on 13 Fridays per year and they are all taken up with private members bills.

 Constituency Fridays have become a habit. Weekends are no less busy, but there are things you can do on a Friday that you just can’t do at the weekend, such as visiting schools, most business premises, or most public services and officials. Consequently, MPs have become quite jealous about protecting their productive Fridays in their constituencies.

 How does this square with private members bills?

First, to be successful in piloting a bill through Parliament you need to be lucky because the order is determined by ballot. Second, you need to choose a bill that is of very limited scope and almost wholly uncontroversial. This is because your enemy is the limited time available to you. Very rarely will your opponents need to vote against your bill, they just have to take up the available time.

Unlike the US Senate however, we do not tolerate a filibuster. Scrutiny of your bill must be proper and pertinent. Mr Speaker will order members to resume their seats if they are tedious, repetitious, stray from the point, or read speeches verbatim. If however, your bill has wide implications and is controversial you are multiplying the opportunities for your opponents to legitimately opine at length without difficulty.

There have been demands for reform and to make more time available, but the current system has suited Governments of all persuasions. Back-bencher’s bills have bees in their bonnets and happy thoughts that usually come with a large price tag or any number of complicated implications. It is convenient for ministers to rely on a small number of Friday devotees to ‘talk them out’.

Campaigners write to their MP to demand their attendance on a particular Friday to support a bill listed for that day. It is a ‘big ask’ because several bills are listed each sitting Friday and unless the bill is first in the order there is little chance of it being reached, so your time will have been wasted.

 Even if you support a bill passionately, its enemy is the time available, so you would be foolish indeed if you went along and took up any of that precious time yourself. Actually, the best way to support a bill is to shut up, or to stay away.

 Of course, a very few controversial private members bills have succeeded, but that is only when they have been backed by the Government.
 There’s the lesson: complicated, controversial, or expensive legislation needs to take place in government time when it will have lengthy and thorough treatment by both Government and Opposition, not just an interested few on a Friday.

Sometimes however, something will turn out to be surprisingly uncontroversial: last Friday the Organ Donation (Deemed Consent) Bill passed its second reading in good time and unopposed

I’ve had several emails demanding nothing short of the discontinuation of UK Aid as a consequence of the revelations about Oxfam in Haiti and the subsequent furore.

I don’t think that this sordid and tawdry affair alters the fundamentals of the case for UK Aid.
Our international development effort rests on two pillars: First, that as the fifth richest country on the planet, we have a duty to help those poorest countries struggling to catch up. This duty is currently discharged in the commitment we make to spend 0.7% of our income on aid to the poorest countries, leaving us all of 99.7% of our income for ourselves.

The second pillar is our own national self-interest: The objective of our aid budget is the same as that of our Defence budget and our Foreign Office budget, namely to project our power and influence internationally, in order to deliver stability and security in which we will prosper.

I am always keen to argue about how this budget could be spent more effectively to achieve this end, but I do not question that it continues to be in our interest to spend it. Indeed, at this point in our history, when we are leaving the EU and seeking to re-establish our place in the international order, I think it would be folly to reduce the ‘soft power’ that our UK Aid represents and the influence internationally that it affords us.

‘Sex-gate’ has raced through Hollywood, Parliament, the media, and sport. Now it has reached international humanitarian and development aid. It raises questions about the way we go about doing things but it does not fundamentally undermine the purpose of doing them.

Nevertheless it does underline the importance of taking control of your supply chain if you are to avoid severe reputational damage. If our Department of International Development subcontracts a project to Oxfam to deliver, then it has to be exacting in the standards that it demands.

This is by no means straightforward. for example, let’s say we decide to fund a reputable international organisation like The World Bank, to build a hospital in a very poor country like Nepal.
The World Bank, then sub-contracts to civil engineering companies and builders to carry out the work. One of the builders orders locally made bricks –which is a good thing because it helps the local economy and creates jobs.
Then investigative journalists discover that the brick-maker is employing child labour in frightful conditions. The reputational damage will go right back up the chain to the World Bank and our own Government for not investigating carefully enough exactly what they were paying for.

The same discipline applies to entirely commercial undertakings: when Rana Plaza collapsed in Bangladesh in 2013, killing over a thousand garment workers, the reputational damage rebounded on our own high street chains for not taking more care over the conditions in which their imported stock was being manufactured.

We all have a duty to ask searching questions about what we buy and about charities that we support.
If things turn  look too good to be true, usually it’s because they just aren’t true

 

Occasionally constituents will come and give me a piece of their mind about how the country should be run, but that is rare.

 

During a typical ‘surgery’ constituents will, more often than not, come to see if I can help resolve their problems.

 

The problem in question might be to do with housing. It might be a family in bed and breakfast accommodation; or a house that is too small for their needs; or damp, or next door to unsuitable neighbours.
They might come and see me because they are in debt.
Or it might be that there is a problem with schooling, being unable to manage the journey to the allocated school place, or problems with behaviour or attainment at school.
Or it might be problems with social security benefits leaving them unable to make ends meet and having to rely on food banks.
Or it might arise from problems with payments from a former partner for maintenance of their children, or perhaps access to the children being improperly denied by one of the partners.

 

However the problem presents, scratch the surface, and nine times out of ten the root cause is family breakdown. It is the swiftest way to poverty and it is of epidemic proportions, costing us billions of pounds in dealing with the social consequences.
For children under 12 we are judged to have the most volatile family circumstances in the developed world. More than half our sixteen-year-olds no longer have a father living in the home.

 

Marriage is not perfect, no human institution can be given our fallen nature. Yet it is the most stable of social arrangements that we possess: For children whose parents marry, those parents are more likely to remain together throughout their childhood by a factor of two thirds, as compared to those children whose parents choose not to marry.

 

Arguably any number of government policies impact to the disadvantage of marriage.
Currently the Department of Education is consulting on how marriage should be treated in our education system, to which end I met the new Secretary of State last week. Notwithstanding the huge social problems that we face it would appear that ministers are reluctant to robustly defend marriage for fear of appearing ‘judgemental’.  It seems to me, given the magnitude of the social problem, that there is a proper judgement to be made.

In his response to a debate a fortnight ago, the Minister for the Cabinet Office told us that ‘families come in many shapes and sizes’. I asked him just exactly how many, and if a family was just any collection of people who happen to share a fridge?

A colleague and friend who served with me on the standing committee which scrutinised the Equal Marriage Act 2013 has introduced a private members bill to enable all couples to enter into a civil partnership.

Now, I recall being challenged in the committee proceedings on the ground that my support for the Bill, which extended marriage to same-sex couples, would fundamentally undermine marriage. Well, it seems to have survived pretty well.

Civil Partnerships were introduced in 2004 to enable same-sex couples to enter a legally recognised and protected relationship because they were unable to get married. Now that they are able to marry it should logically follow that civil partnerships should be abolished.

My colleague however, wants to extend them to all couples. I cannot think of anything more calculated to undermine marriage than the availability of some sort of ‘marriage-lite’ option for those who can’t face the full-fat obligation.

I’ve had half a dozen emails or so from constituents prompted by the Fair Fuel Campaign demanding an end to hospital car parking charges, which –although fewer than half NHS facilities levy them- raised £174 million last year.

It seems fair to me to exempt the disabled and people with chronic conditions, such as patients requiring kidney dialysis for hours on several days per week, but I would be very reluctant to see a ban on all such parking charges.
Some hospitals need the money, and some that are close to town centres would attract shoppers if they made free spaces available.
In any event, car parks cost money to maintain. They have an ‘opportunity cost’ in terms of the other uses the land might be put to. Is it reasonable to expect everyone collectively to foot the bill rather than those who drive and park there?
After all, some patients and their visitors make use of public transport.

The report of the shooting of four Eritreans by Afghans near Calais reminds me of the meeting I had with President Ghani of Afghanistan, but first it should remind us all, in these times of acrimonious negotiations over Brexit, just what a burden the French are putting up with.

The Afghans will have gone through all sorts of privations and misery in Afghanistan, on their journey, and living rough around Calais. So we should always be very careful before we judge.

Nevertheless, back to that meeting. I raised the problem that we were having in securing Afghan co-operation at official level in our attempts to return failed asylum seekers. He said that he would address the issue but that he was a ‘war president’ and that his first duty must be to the young men and women who were taking the fight to the Taliban, and not to those who had abandoned his country.

This week the EU Withdrawal Bill begins its passage in the House of Lords. I doubt that it will be well received.

The Lords has a tiny proportion of euro-sceptics, and is -on the contrary, disproportionately populated with former senior civil servants and ex-Brussels mandarins.

Last February, fully 9 months after the Referendum, I was asked to debate the question ‘the UK is leaving the EU’ in front of a City of London audience. My opponents -arguing that they would prevent our departure- were Lord Butler, a former cabinet secretary, and Lord Lester, one of our most senior lawyers.

Even just a fortnight ago, when the Lords were debating an aspect of the Brexit negotiations, Lord Kerr (who actually drafted the Article 50 clause in the Lisbon Treaty, and was so keen to remind us recently that we can still change our minds) spoke of the UK having to ‘come to heel’. A rather shocking canine analogy of the way that so many of their Lordships view the proper subservient relationship of the UK to the EU.

 

As our negotiations to leave the EU have proceeded a string of parliamentarians have undermined the Government by their public pronouncements and actually going to Brussels to counter-brief Barnier, Tusk, and Juncker.

Their strategy is Threefold: First, to delay the process of leaving as long as possible in order to provide opportunities for events to intervene.
Second, to demoralise the public with a constant diet of gloom and disaster about their chosen path. The ‘project fear’ of the referendum campaign is undiminished.
Third, by these first two means, and any parliamentary tactic, to seek to reverse our course and remain within the EU.

 

The battle will initially focus on undermining and reversing the Prime Minister’s policy of leaving the EU Customs Union and Internal Market. She saw these as essential in honouring the referendum decision.
Remaining in the internal market would require retaining freedom of movement by all EU citizens to the UK; continued payments to the EU in perpetuity; and being subject to jurisdiction of the European Court.
Equally, retaining membership of the EU Customs Union means that our trade policy remains in the hands of Brussels, where priorities and preoccupations differ very significantly from our own. We would not resume our independent leadership in the World Trade Organisation, and our consumers would forgo the lower prices and greater prosperity that leaving the EU properly might have delivered.

 

Whilst the battle will rage about these two issues, the real objective is to just use them to bring about a prolonged delay, to bore and demoralise the British people, and ultimately to defeat them.
If you find all this profoundly depressing, then as an antidote I recommend going to the Cinema to see Darkest Hour.
It is magnificent.

I still wake every morning and my first thought is “we are going to be free!”

On day eleven of the EU withdrawal bill, some 90 or so hours into the marathon, I slipped into oblivion for 39 seconds. Alas, I was behind Ken Clarke when he was on his feet and therefore, in full view of the TV cameras.

 

In an earlier existence I would never have lasted that long. I recall that the lecture theatre at RMA Sandhurst was known by all the officer cadets as ‘the dormitory’, within minutes of getting in there half the company would be asleep.

 

In fact I had felt a bit woozy and thought I’d go for a coffee, but Ken had just got to his feet and I thought it would be polite to wait until he had finished. Alas, the next thing I remember was my phone vibrating with messages from Priti Patel and Colonel Mark Lancaster telling me to wake up as I was on camera. 

I hoped I’d got away with it, but it was Ken himself who informed me that we were ‘tending’ on social media as the most watched video, and that he had never enjoyed so much publicity for a speech.

 

The constant ribbing is no difficulty, what is rather wearing however, are the sanctimonious emails from people who never succumb.

 

I apologise unreservedly. I must develop the habits of getting up later and going to bed earlier.

 

Carillion secured its business by bidding too aggressively. Anyone letting contracts needs to beware of the dangers of going for the lowest bid without the due diligence necessary to determine if it is the best bid.

That lesson aside, are taxpayers being ripped-off in the way that our newly rediscovered socialists claim?
(Just listen to the contempt in their voices when they spit out the word ‘profit’ as if it were a profanity).

The National Audit Office report does not say that we are getting poor value for the 10% of public services that are provided by through private finance. It does point out however, that capital projects like schools and hospitals cost up to 40% more than had they been financed by government in the traditional way. This is for the blindingly obvious reason that government borrowing costs are always lower than any credit that can be had by the private sector.

This points to the fault at the very heart of the Private Finance Initiative, indeed it’s in its very name.
The proper reason for turning to the private sector is to secure expertise, experience, skills, and a project management culture that might not be readily available in the public sector. The one thing that the public sector can always do better however, is to finance the undertaking more competitively.

I have made my belief clear in this column over many years that the original motive for the private finance initiative owed more to meeting the Maastricht criteria for joining the Euro than it did to sound public finance. The mission was to get the borrowing necessary for important capital projects off the government’s books, even if it cost more in the long run.
In the event we didn’t join, but by then we had fallen into this bad habit.

Further to my column on NHS winter pressures last week, events- in the form of the cabinet reshuffle- have intervened: Jeremy Hunt, the Secretary of State for Health has had Social Care added to his brief.  This is an important change.

 

The problems of the social care sector have had a direct impact on the NHS, adding to the winter pressures. Frail and elderly patients living alone, who -for whatever reason- end up in hospital, are subsequently unable to be safely discharged because there is nobody at home to look after them. This then leads to the clinically unnecessary occupation of a hospital bed.

 

We are in the front rank of nations where grown up children no longer live with, or close to their elderly parents. In other cultures there is much greater reliance on the family for social care.

 

In the absence of family, the burden has fallen on local authorities to make provision on a means-tested basis, and the squeeze on their own finances has led to inadequate service levels, the withdrawal of providers, and the closure of care homes.
With the number and the proportion of elderly people growing, this problem has to be addressed by more money, much more.
Ever since I entered Parliament, the key question has been, from where will that money be had ?

 

We can all pay much higher taxes, or we can share the cost more equitably between taxpayers and those who need the care. There has however, always been outrage at the prospect of asset-rich elderly people having to deplete their savings, sell their homes, or have their homes sold after their death, in order to meet the costs of their care.

A number of schemes have been devised to protect assets by shifting some of the care costs and splitting them between the insurance market and the taxpayer.
Such a scheme, based on the Dilnot Commission findings, was adopted by George Osborne for implementation in 2021 (allowing further time for the public finances to recover).
Unwisely, as it turned out, the Prime Minister changed this policy during the election campaign last summer, and now the issue is to be revisited over the coming months.

 

I do not share the horror that many fellow politicians have at the prospect of meeting the costs of care from one’s estate, including the principal asset, the home.

As we have made a decision not to expect families to care for their elderly, then families should in turn, not expect to benefit from heritable assets handed on unencumbered.

 

People should always save for a rainy day (and overwhelmingly the British people have chosen to hold most of their savings in the form of property), well, when you need expensive social care, isn’t that a ‘rainy day’ ?

Why is it that we always expect someone else to pay?