Meeting with Jim Paice I was delighted last week to be able to facilitate a meeting between Pillerton Priors Parish Council and the Minister for agriculture and food Jim Paice MP. The residents of Pillerton Priors have been living with a fallen stock waste transfer station in their village for the past 2 years, a facility that has continued to operate despite not having planning permission. Nearly 2 years ago DEFRA gave the site a licence to operate, without first checking the location was suitable in planning terms, and since then it has been a significant stress for local residents with terrible smells and other issues affecting them on a daily basis. Jim Paice took the meeting extremely seriously and gave us an hour of his time, he had senior officials from DEFRA present as well as officials from Stratford District Council and Warwickshire County Council on a conference call. He has promised to go away and look at the issue and the enabling legislation to see what can be done to prevent this happening again in the future. He will also be looking into what he can do as Secretary of State within the confines of EU law (which regulates this area) with regards to the upcoming licence renewal of the site. I am very hopeful that as a result we will find a resolution for local residents. A British Bill of Rights Last week I also acted as a sponsor for a private members bill introduced by Charlie Elphicke MP to abolish the Human Rights Act and introduce a British Bill of Rights. This was a Conservative Manifesto pledge and whilst I think it's right that we protect human rights, it's also right that those rights are decided by British Parliamentarians not those in Brussels. You can read a little more about the bill and why I agreed to sponsor it at this blog post: Repealing the Human Rights Act Fraser Pithie, Conservative Police Commissioner Candidate Fraser Pithie, the Conservative candidate for Warwickshire Police Commissioner made the trip to Westminster last week to meet with all six Warwickshire MPs. Elected Police Commissioners was a core Conservative manifesto pledge, ensuring that Police Forces are accountable to someone and giving the public a single person to hold accountable at the ballot box. Elections will take place across the country in November and I am very sure that we will be able to return a Conservative Police and Crime Commissioner here in Warwickshire. Fraser is an excellent candidate, he's local, not a professional politician, and has years of experience in the world of business. He has some great plans for Warwickshire Police and I hope you'll support him. You can read more about him and his plans for Warwickshire on his website www.FraserPithie.org.uk Speeches Last week I gave two speeches one to a dinner for the think tank Reform and another to the Quoted Companies Alliance, both were on medium sized businesses and their importance to the economy. Despite representing just 1.4% of all UK businesses, so called Mid-Caps generate more than a third of our jobs and GDP. Sadly though this is a sector that is under performing compared to other countries. If UK Mid-cap businesses had grown at the same rate as those in Germany then since 2009 we would have seen an extra 240,000 jobs created. In my speeches I laid out what the government has been doing to help encourage confidence and growth in these important businesses, and also what it can be doing more of. You can read the whole speech to Reform here: Speech at Reform's "Realising the value of Mid Market businesses" event This week I spoke at two events on two very different topics, to the APPG on rebalancing the economy about increasing boardroom diversity and to the Young Diplomats League on the Arab Spring. Both were very interesting and different audiences, you can read my speech on the Arab spring on my blog here: Arab Spring and its implications for the UK and Europe - Speech to the YDL Breakfast Barclays and LIBOR The revelations that traders at Barclays tried to fix the LIBOR interbank rate for their own gain was truly shocking. The culture in some parts of the financial services industry that was allowed to grow up in the years before the crisis is unacceptable and is one we challenged in my book Masters of Nothing. In the book that I co-atuhored with fellow MP Matthew Hancock, we also called for criminal sanctions to be considered for those individuals who act wrongly, and I am pleased to see the SFO announce this week that they are opening a criminal inquiry into LIBOR. I am also pleased that Parliament has come together to support a joint parliamentary inquiry into the problem. A long costly public inquiry was not the right answer. It would take months to set up and years to report. We can’t wait until 2015 or 2016 to fix this, we need a new culture of responsibility in banking now. Lords Reform This week the government finally introduced the Lords Reform Bill and we were able to see the detail of what they plan. Regular readers will know that I am very much against the introduction of elections into the House of Lords. I don't want to see the system of scrutiny and review that we have abolished, but I do want to see it work better. What I know is that putting 360 new politicians, 80 appointed members and up to 8 Ministerial appointees in the upper house simply won't do that. You can read some more detail about why I disagree with the proposals and why I think we deserve a referendum on them in a piece I wrote for Telegraph Online about the subject. In the Constituency I've had a range of meetings in the constituency over the past two weeks. Last week I visited the Centarus Trust a fantastic charity based in Stratford that provides horse riding for disabled and disadvantaged children and young people. They'd been awarded a grant from Sport England to build a new all weather riding arena which will make a huge difference to them. I also visited Stratford Market for National Market Day and talked to stall holders old and new as well as shoppers, Visited University Hospital Coventry for a short tour of some of their facilities and a discussion with their chairman, and met with Garrick Huscared, a fantastic local artist who is in the final stages of creating the first bust of William Shakespeare based on his real likeness (all previous busts are based on his death mask). This week I started with a visit to Studley school to talk about Design and Technology and its role in the curriculum with the teaching staff and HME, a locally owned business that manufactures D&T equipment. I also took a tour of the school and stopped in on their Eurovision song contest, where as part of Modern Languages students were holding a mock Eurovision Song contest and singing in French, German and Spanish. Like all our schools Studley High is excellent and has recently received an outstanding rating from Ofsted. Then it was across the constituency to Shipston High, where I was guest of honour at the Shipston Award presentation assembly. Shipston High is another great school whose Shipston Award scheme is fantastic and something I hope other schools can replicate. As a school they hope to convert to Academy status in September and as well as presenting the awards I spent some time talking with the Head Teacher and Chair of Governors about their conversion and future expansion plans. Whilst in Shipston I also did a very wet live interview from the school's car park to Sky News about Lords Reform. Fridays are often spent bouncing all over the constituency and after spending the morning in Studley and lunchtime in Shipston it was then time to head to Alcester to visit the home of a blind constituent who had concerns over our changes to Disability Living Allowance (DLA). The Government is changing DLA to a new scheme called the Personal Independence Payment (PIP) that will be based not on an individuals disability but their own unique needs. PIP will be very similar to DLA in that it will continue to offer disabled people a non-means-tested cash benefit that they can spend as they choose. It will also remain a benefit that is paid to people whether they are in or out of work with the main aim being to support those facing the greatest challenges in living an independent life. There were some concerns with the initial draft of the PIP assessment criteria but government has worked extensively with over 60 disability groups including the RNIB and made a large number of changes. It was great to visit Jan and extremely useful to see her own unique challenges, giving some real-life context and putting a human face to these proposals. I wrapped up Friday with surgery in Studley covering the usual wide range of topics from Government Policy on City regulation, issues with care homes and costs, through to concerns about bullying in a school, and benefits. I also had the opportunity to catch up with Jill Fraser of the excellent local charity Kissing it Better who do fantastic work on improving patient care, their website is well worth looking at www.kissingitbetter.co.uk