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?

Every January when the post-Christmas news is thin, reports of the winter crisis in the NHS take up any slack in the news-feed, and with plenty of hyperbole. Of course, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t severe problems facing the NHS, there definitely are. Nothing however, is ever as bad as reported.

From my own experience, a close relative required treatment and an emergency ambulance over Christmas and the service could not have been bettered.
Over the last 20 years I have measured progress in the NHS by the temperature in my postbag (now replaced by my email inbox). It was once at boiling point, but in recent years has come down to room temperature. That measure is corroborated by patient satisfaction ratings, and the fact that independent think tanks and international organisations rate the NHS the best, safest and most affordable healthcare system in the world.

Yet, there are enormous challenges that the NHS has to deal with more effectively.
First, people are far too fat. This obesity epidemic places an enormous chronic burden on the NHS as patients present with any number of conditions that ultimately arise from eating unwisely and doing too little exercise.
Second, the success of advances in medicine over the last half-century brings its own challenges: new treatments have added eye-watering expense to the system; and the beneficiaries of those treatments over the last few decades, who previously would not have survived, now present in their eighties with multiple and complex nursing needs.

Despite these challenges, the NHS treats millions more patients every year and performs millions more operations. This should not surprise anyone because there are thousands more doctors and nurses in the NHS, more than ever before in fact.
(Statistics often mislead: when figures are published showing that the percentage of patients being treated within the target time has fallen at the margin, they conceal the fact that the absolute number of patients treated within the target continues to rise.)

The NHS winter ‘crisis’ however, has become an annual fixture when flu and respiratory conditions, particularly among the elderly are at a peak. Taken together with all the other pressures facing our healthcare system, the organisation is at full stretch and routine treatments have to be delayed in order to manage. This has become part of the annual planning cycle, but given that none of these pressures are going to diminish in future years –on the contrary they are bound to get worse, clearly the organisation needs to change in order to cope more effectively.

All this is true of every other healthcare system in the developed world. The difference is that because ours is a ‘nationalised’ healthcare system, we tend to blame government and complain to politicians.
I don’t believe that money is essentially the heart of our problem. NHS funding is at a record high, and our adversarial political culture will ensure that the parties always competitively bid up the amounts that we are prepared to spend.
The real problem arises when the NHS needs and wants to change and modernise the way that it delivers treatments in order to be more effective and efficient. Invariably vested interests are affected and local concerns may be at variance with larger regional needs. The appeal is then to the politicians, with the NHS becoming a political football. Alas, politicians are not best placed to decide what ought to be  clinical led decisions.

 

 

There are alarming predictions of the toll that artificial intelligence will take on jobs. Every technical revolution has replaced existing forms of employment but ended up creating many more jobs elsewhere. I doubt that this one will be different. Of rather greater concern is my perception that we are in need of artificial intelligence as a replacement for our own, which is diminishing rapidly.

 

We are informed that we are in the midst of a growing epidemic of loneliness. Yet my lasting impression of months of electioneering is that nobody wanted to talk at all. One is greeted with the little notice displayed at the front door ‘no unwanted callers’. (How on earth is one supposed to know if you are unwanted, until you’ve called?)

If there is an epidemic, it is an epidemic of these little notices. Some are more specific, such as ‘no canvassers’ or ‘no religious callers’. The best one I spotted this year was “no purveyors of religious wisdom of any kind”. Others are downright rude.

 

My correspondence by letter has almost completely dried up, to be replaced by a vast amount of email. This differs not just in volume however, people who sent letters to me composed them themselves, and took the trouble to purchase a stamp and make their way to a post box. By contrast, my emails have largely been composed by a website and arrive with other identical ones. Many even leave the instruction ‘Insert name of MP here’ unaltered.

 

Our reliance on electronic communication is unhealthy. High streets are dying because customers sitting at home prefer to shop alone and on-line. People spend hours alone ‘surfing the net’, exposing themselves to fake news and much worse. Often, the few personally composed emails that I do receive, ask for my comment on some daft story that they’ve seen online and believed to be true.

 

People spend their time communicating by text, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or whatever, becoming anxious and unwell as a direct consequence. Frankly, I resent it every time my telephone buzzes in my pocket to tell me that some other politician has re-tweeted a message first tweeted by the Prime Minister (how nakedly ambitious can you get?), or that a ‘friend’ wants me to ‘like their page’: What drivel human intercourse has been reduced to.

 

In the same way that refined white sugar is poisoning our bodies -we are just not designed to cope with it, so the sheer volume of electronic data, for which our brains were never designed, is similarly affecting us. Our attention spans are getting so short, and we can be persuaded to believe anything.

 

Even teenagers spend mindless hours gawping at electronic screens instead of getting out and doing something useful. When I was that age (14) I was the personal fag to a fellow who rejoiced in the title of ‘Captain of Boats’. One of my daily chores was to wash his rowing shorts: no detergent, only cold salt water. Now that is what I call living.

The Scottish Nationalist MPs at Westminster are a disciplined lot: when they get something between their teeth they stick at it relentlessly as a team effort. Recently their chosen subject for this remorseless treatment has been the closure of bank branches in rural areas. It is an emotive subject and I’ve made my own representations earlier this year against the closure of the last branch in Fordingbridge.

 

The problem isn’t a new one. I recall that when I was working in banking over 20 years ago, we had spotted that our branches were increasingly a cost to us without the benefit of generating much revenue. A cunning plan was hatched to make the branches more productive by having them sell insurance and other financial products to our customers. Well look how that turned out: The banks haven’t yet fully put the payment protection insurance scandal behind them, at a cost of £ billions.

 

The fact is that I haven’t been in a branch of my bank for years, I just don’t need to. It is unrealistic to expect banks to maintain a branch network which is increasingly under-used. Those settlements in this constituency with whom I joined in protest at the closure of their bank, have defied predictions and continued to thrive. The reason is this: there is not much you can do in a bank that you can’t do in a post office, and there is a lot more that you can do besides.

 

It is the post office that is at the heart of communities across the UK, with millions of customers and small businesses relying on their local branch every day to access a wide range of important services. Last week the Government announced up to £370 million of new investment in the Post Office to ensure that the network continues to develop.

Figures published this month reveal that branch numbers are the most stable they have been for decades. There are more branches than last year, with the network growing in size for the last two years to over 11,600 post offices across the country. The number of rural branches has also risen to 6,185. Today, 93% of us live within one mile of a post office.

 

£2 billion of investment in the Post Office since 2010 has led to over seven and a half thousand branches being transformed and modernised, bringing almost a million extra opening hours per month for customers, with 4,400 branches open on a Sunday. Over the next 3 years new technology will be implemented to support products and develop new ones.

 

For the first time in 16 years the Post Office has made a profit. So, don’t worry about the bank, shop at your post office.