Climate Change – we have discovered enough fossil fuels to fry the planet, we only need to burn 1/5 of what we know is there to cause irreparable damage in ways that are still not fully understood. So why has George Osborne given back £1.3 billion to the North Sea Oil industry to extract and explore for more of the stuff? Why is David Cameron pushing fracking when we don’t need more gas and there are concerns that the industry could cause environmental damage to the water table? The UK is a crowded island and does not have the vast open spaces that make fracking a possibility in the States. The fossil fuel industry are powerful lobbyists but we need leadership now on climate change.
The Greens seem to have endorsed Nuclear as a clean alternative, but it is another example of where we are pushing problems onto future generations. Until we know how we can deal with the nuclear waste and the impact of climate change on rising sea levels that could threaten our coastal installations of Nuclear Power Stations then this seems a risky alternative to fossil fuels.
Renewable energy is clearly part of the mix but is not the whole solution and we need answers to how we effectively store the energy generated for use when renewables are not producing. I would reverse George Osborne’s £1.3bn tax give away to the oil industry and instead spend the money on research for alternative energy sources.
Kennet Husting Speech 2015-04-17
Health – we need a holistic approach to health with a greater emphasis on prevention rather than treatment. We need to acknowledge that the demands for the NHS will continue to grow as more treatments are discovered and as the population ages. Moreover it has to be acknowledge that the treatments themselves are likely to be expensive putting further demands on the NHS finances. If we continue as we are then there will be a forever spiralling upwards of costs that taxpayers will struggle to keep up with.
The current NHS Chief Executive, Simon Stephens, has put forward a 5 year plan that forecasts a £30 billion funding gap by 2020. His plan calls for a rolling programme of efficiency savings that will cumulatively provide £22 billion towards the gap by 2020, this leaves £8 billion to be found from other sources. The political parties have fallen over themselves to commit taxpayer’s money to meet this gap with both the Conservatives and Lib Dems offering the full amount by 2020 “on the back of a strong economy”. That is they are gambling that the economy will by then show sufficient growth to make this £8 billion affordable. Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, when challenged as to what happens if the efficiency savings don’t deliver as much as Stephen’s says, went as far as to say the NHS will have an open cheque book from a Conservative administration to make up any shortfall.
The Labour party and UKIP are being more cautious as to their spending commitments to the NHS over the lifetime of the parliament however all are offering extra finance to the NHS in the short term to varying degrees.
This is all clearly palpable nonsense. The efficiency savings Stephen’s says he can deliver are incredibly ambitious and represent 1/5 of the NHS current budget. To be offering the NHS more money when we are still running a £90 billion current account deficit is fiscally irresponsible and can only be achieved if there are more draconian cuts elsewhere if they are to meet their other promises of a balanced budget by 2020. Even the former CEO of the NHS, Sir David Nicholson, thinks the efficiency savings are a big ask and that politicians offering to expand NHS services when it is likely that there is already a substantial hole in NHS finances, to be revealed after the election, is irresponsible.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2015-32325490
As ever the political parties anxieties to buy votes through falling over themselves to show who will best preserve the NHS in its current form lacks any strategic coherence. The fact is if we continue as we are we will be running just to stand still and the concept of the NHS being free at the point of delivery will be jeopardised.
All strands of healthcare needs to be brought under one umbrella, one budget and offered to the public in a holistic manner. This has been requested by health professionals repeatedly over the years but ignored by the Department of Health under the aegis of their Ministers who under successive governments have had their own ideas as to how health should be delivered. This has resulted in the squandering of billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money through misconceived re-organisations, “efficiency savings” and misconceived IT projects of which perhaps the biggest failure has been Blair’s national patient database, where the need for such a behemoth was never properly established.
The conclusion of all this is that politicians need to step out of the running of the NHS and leave it to the health professionals. The fact that Stephens has been allowed to put together a fully costed five year plan is a major step forward, however the outlook for planning of the NHS should not be restricted to the parliamentary terms of office. Going forward politicians role with the NHS should be solely to work out how to finance it,and to hold the leadership of the NHS to account if financial targets are consistently missed or if the service provided falls to unacceptable levels. How the NHS goes about managing its day to day operations and delivering its services however should not be their concerns.
Which brings us to the thorny question of how do we finance it given the spiralling costs of new treatments and an ageing population? To deliver a holistic health service whilst it may save money in the long term because prevention should lead to fewer treatments being needed, it will require extra finance in the short term to get us to a point where prevention rather than treatment is at the heart of what the NHS does.
If we want to keep the NHS free at the point of delivery then we need to re-think our approach to health, and also re-think how the demands we make on it should be financed. The fact is because the NHS is free we think little about the fact if we do something irresponsible we make a call on it. This culture needs to change to one where we view the NHS as a precious resource that we call on because of inadvertent ill health or accidents, rather than as a back stop to poor life choices. Each and everyone of us in other words has a duty to of care with our health, and abuse of that care should be widely condemn rather than tolerated.
To back this up we need to introduce a system where the purveyors of ill health pay for the consequences of their actions. There is already a precedent for this kind of approach where if a company pollutes the environment they are expected to pay for the clean up as BP has found to its cost in the Gulf of Mexico. In the case of health each of the main polluting industries: tobacco, alcohol and food should be required to set up an insurance fund from which the NHS could draw at will when they are treating the consequences of an industry’s activities.
In the short term this would provide much needed funds to shore up the NHS finances but in the longer term would result in each of the industries modifying their behaviours to encourage a healthier society. This concept of the purveyor of ill health pays could be extended to cover the car manufacturing sector (it would result in slower and safer cars), sporting injuries (through club insurance) and potentially to look at the drugs industry if that was to be made legal under licence.
Along side this to encourage healthier lifestyles the government could look to subsidise membership of licences sports and gym clubs, although lessons would need to be learned from the learning vouchers fiasco where under the previous conservative administration learning vouchers were given to adults to acquire new skills without qualifying the institutions at which they could be spent resulting in widespread fraud and the wasting of millions of taxpayers money.
https://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=11952
Housing – the housing market is dysfunctional delivering neither the houses we need nor at prices we can afford. It represents far too great a share of our economy and the drive to create a house ownership democracy has resulted in over inflated prices. The government continues to subsidise the sector through subsidies that are not granted to other investment options, which in turn has further inflated prices. For example if you take a loan to pay for a buy to let property the entire interest of that loan can be written off against your income. A similar tax break does not exist if you took a loan to buy shares in a company.
Government subsidies have turned homes into investments that attracts a disproportionate share of our economic wealth. In our picturesque towns and villages people invest in 2nd homes that are only occupied for 2-4 weeks in the year. The returns that can be made now attract foreign investors into London City Centres where whole areas are becoming devoid of residents.
To bring normality back to the housing market the government needs to stop the tax breaks and subsidies to the property sector and use the money saved to invest in schools, education and in young entrepreneurs.
We need affordable housing but we should recognise that since the 1950s the private house building sector has rarely built more than 150,000 homes in any one year. The following graph illustrates the problem all too evidently, Margaret Thatcher’s right to buy programme has proven to be a catastrophe in ensuring we have sufficient housing. From the mid 80s onward house building stopped by local authorities but the private sector has singularly failed to pick up the slack:
The evidence is incontrovertible if we need more homes we need to return to local authorities being able to build affordable housing for our key workers and those houses should meet the highest energy efficiency ratings as is standard in Germany and Scandanavia. Local authorities could be prioritised to develop brownfield sites that seem an anathema to the private sector, greenfield sites should only be built upon as a last resort.
Streatley Husting Speech 2015-04-19
Education – did you realise that schools do not know what they will be teaching in September because it depends on who wins the election? Our children’s futures should be left to the experts not politicians, their sole concern should be how to finance it. Inequality – whilst most of our wages have been in the doldrums FTSE 100 directors have seen their remuneration packages increase by over 20% per annum. This is not even the City. There is a moral disconnect between the bosses and their workers that needs resolving.
London Road Industrial Estate, NEWBURY – should be re-developed to provide housing for our key workers, but why won’t the Council consult with the current incumbents about their plans? We will end investment uncertainty and job insecurity for the companies based there through full consultation with them on their futures in the town.
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