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Mr. Yeo: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Is it in order for an hon. Member from another part of the country, who as far as I know has not previously shown any interest in Suffolk, to take up so much time in the debate that my hon. Friends who represent Suffolk and who requested the debate will be denied the opportunity to speak?
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Geoffrey Lofthouse): I can assure the hon. Gentleman that it is in order; otherwise, it would have been ruled out of order.
Mr. Rendel: Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. The hon. Member for Bury St. Edmunds certainly said that the revenue support grant for Suffolk was good for his electorate. I should have thought that his electorate would have felt that their interests were best represented by their Members of Parliament coming to the House to fight for more Government money for Suffolk. That is what Members of Parliament for Suffolk, or at least those on the Conservative Benches, have so far failed to do.
Mr. Michael Lord (Central Suffolk): It is clear from the speech of the hon. Member for Newbury (Mr. Rendel) that he does not understand Suffolk. There is no doubt that Conservative Members of Parliament for Suffolk make out the strongest possible case for their constituents and their county. They just do not do so in the ridiculous, high-profile and propagandist way that the present administration is doing. The hon. Gentleman talks about cuts. As far as I am concerned, cuts mean that one does not get next year what one thought one ought to get. The general public tend to feel that cuts mean that they will not get next year what they got this, which is completely untrue--pick a figure, and if one does not get the figure one wants, it is described as a cut.
I shall be as brief as possible as this is a short debate. I am delighted that we have had this debate, but I speak almost more in sorrow than in anger. I am sorry about the way in which the relationship between Suffolk county council, the House and Conservative Members of Parliament representing Suffolk has deteriorated in recent years.
Central Government have always allocated budgets to local government. It has to be that way. The Chancellor has to be in control. One never knows what might happen
to the national economy, and that has always been so. In the past, local authorities accepted the money that they were given--some years they got more and some years less--and got on with it. That was until Liverpool city council started to do ridiculous things a few years ago, and the Greater London council followed suit.
Sadly, that tendency seems to have spread and, since the Liberal and Labour administration took over in Suffolk, it also seems to have spread to our county, doing great damage to the county, to its standing here and in Whitehall, and certainly to the relationship with Conservative Members of Parliament, which had been good. I want that relationship to be repaired if possible, but I fear that it will not happen under the present administration.
I must make two points. The first is the way in which the education budget was treated this year. Despite what the hon. Member for Newbury, who speaks for the Liberal party, and the hon. Member for Ipswich (Mr. Cann) say, there is no doubt that a massive, unfair and grotesque campaign was mounted about the state of education this year. Primarily, it has had nothing to do with the amount of funding that Suffolk has received, but much more to do with pure propaganda on behalf of the councillors who are in charge.
Recently, I attended a meeting of teachers, parents and governors in Stowmarket. I went to talk to them about education and I thought that they would want to talk about the performance of our Suffolk schools, of streaming, selection, opting out or not opting out, of class sizes and of the drugs problem in Suffolk, which sadly is growing. I thought that they would want to discuss those things, but not a bit of it--all they wanted to talk about was more money, more money, more money. We all know that they are not going to get more money, whoever is in central Government. The Labour party will not give them more and that is for sure. I wanted to talk to them, not about money but about all the other issues involved. They did not want to talk about those, and I was surprised.
What saddened me most was the way in which a large number of the people in the audience seemed to have bought the story being sold by the chairman of the education committee. He was present at the meeting, slumped in his seat for three quarters of it, until he finally made his presence known and delivered a ridiculous party political broadcast on behalf of his party as the audience's eyes glazed over. What a farce, and how unfair.
Like all hon. Members, I try to keep in touch with my constituents, with their problems and with education. To go to such a meeting and to hear nothing other than, "Yah! Boo! Give us more money," was appalling. In fairness to the audience, it was because they had been so deceived by the administration and made so anxious about what might happen that they felt that that was the way to go about things. As we all know, the truth has proved different.
Obviously, everyone wants more money for every possible department. We understand that. We have problems with our hospitals in Suffolk and we want more money spent on roads--social services no doubt want more money. It is someone's responsibility to carve up that cake and it has to be done centrally in the House. It will be done that way whoever is the Chancellor of the Exchequer and whichever party is in power. If local
government cannot behave more sensibly when it is given a fair distribution, we are on the rocky road to all sorts of problems.
My second point is on the balance between spending in rural and in urban areas. A quarter of Ipswich is in my constituency--I share the town with the hon. Member for Ipswich. We have a park-and-ride scheme along the Norwich road, and bus lanes have been put in to establish the scheme. An enormous sum is being spent on it--money that could be spent more sensibly in other parts of Ipswich or in rural areas. The scheme will prove a complete white elephant. A bus lane already goes right the way down the Norwich road, but I rarely see buses in it. All it has done is produce queues of cars.
At the Suffolk county council transport committee meeting yesterday, someone told me that it is not a park-and-ride scheme at all, but just a bus lane. That is news to me and to the Secretary of State for Transport. I suspect that it is also news to Ipswich borough council, because it thought that it was on the way to a park-and-ride scheme. I think that the county council has discovered that there will not be enough money for the park, so we are just going to get the ride. There are massive queues of people in cars because of the bus lanes. Those bus lanes are there so that people can leave their cars and get on the buses, but they have nowhere to leave their cars.
What a ridiculous scheme, and what a huge waste of money. Does that not sum up the incompetence of the county council, the difference between rural and urban projects and the fact that the council is incapable of getting its priorities right and looking after the interests of the people whose money it is spending?
Mr. David Porter (Waveney):
We have heard much about the county as a whole, but parts of Waveney in north Suffolk are different. Suffolk is a big and varied county. There is a Suffolk identity but there are distinctly different areas in Waveney that need to be highlighted.
For many years, we were covered by Norfolk, not Suffolk, ambulances. We are still part of the Norfolk and Waveney training and enterprise council. Most of my constituents listen to BBC Radio Norfolk rather than to Radio Suffolk. Most people go to the Norfolk, show, few to the Suffolk show. We often look to Norfolk but we are proud to be part of Suffolk. That is why I share some of the concern of my hon. Friends about how the county council has behaved in the past four years.
There is a remoteness about Ipswich and events there that alienates people in my part of Suffolk. There is a feeling that big brother knows best. That is illustrated
graphically by the traffic exhibition in Bungay, which is as far as one can get in Suffolk from Ipswich. To solve a heavy lorry problem in Bungay, the county council proposed to route several hundred heavy goods vehicles a day through the villages of Flixton and Homersfield on a minor road. It was only after an outcry from the villagers that it reluctantly agreed to public consultation and an exhibition. That shows that big brother knows best unless people make a fuss and fight back.
We have spent much time talking about education--rightly, because it uses a lot of the taxpayers' money that the county council spends. I use the county's education in a big way; I have four children, all in local authority schools. It was as a parent that I first became alarmed by the circulars from schools, heads and, in some cases, governors. Later, my constituents alerted me as their Member of Parliament to the threats and scares about the alleged budget cuts. If the authors of the circulars had waited, they could have campaigned on the facts.
The hon. Member for Ipswich (Mr. Cann) said that the county council had always campaigned like that, regardless of who was in control. The difference is that, this time, heads and some school governors were publicly behind the campaign. It was that which alarmed parents. They believe their head teachers in the same way that patients believe doctors before they will believe the facts given by the Government.
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