Ruritanian Committees and Chinese Lanterns

Written by David Heath MP and published in Western Gazette on Fri 11th Sep 2009

There is something faintly Ruritanian about a body known as a "Grand Committee". In the case of the South West Regional Grand Committee, which met in Exeter on Thursday of last week, the actual proceedings didn't quite live up to the great expectations.

Perhaps I should explain. A Grand Committee in parliamentary terms is a committee made up of all the MPs elected from a particular region or nation. Up until now, we've had a Scottish Grand Committee, a Welsh Grand Committee, a Northern Ireland Grand Committee, but never a similar meeting for parts of England. Last year the government introduced the idea of regional select committees and grand committees, to hold the various regional quangos to account and discuss regional issues.

The select committees were turned into a farce by the government insisting on having a Labour majority on every single one, even in the south west where Labour are the third party. As a result they consist of five Labour members, many of whom are aides to the ministers they're meant to be questioning, but no Conservative or Liberal Democrat members because none have been nominated. They are therefore a complete waste of time and money.

The regional grand committees, comprising every member elected for a region could, however, have been more useful. But don't hold your breath. Again, political management is the name of the game. Ministers announced when and where each committee would meet to their own convenience, without consulting at all with other parties. One is even timed to take place during the Conservative Party conference. They decided, again without consultation, what should be discussed. And they determined, in advance, when each meeting should end.

So, was the South West Grand Committee grand in any sense? Not really. Of the fifty members in the region, only nineteen turned up. We had a few questions which revealed that the Minister for the South West, Jim Knight, spends on his own reckoning a third of his time in that role, (which may come as a surprise to those who might have thought that being Minister of State for Employment on top of representing his constituency was a pretty full time job at the moment), but doesn't have any power to take any decisions; he says his role is to "unblock things". I suggested he might start with the A303. Then we had a debate on the recession where just two backbenchers got to speak and six of us, me included, got no chance because the pre-allotted time of one o'clock had been reached.

Setting aside whether the south west is a viable entity as it is, where Tewkesbury is nearer Scotland than it is to Cornwall, I would like to think there is a value to being able to question ministers and others on what happens here. We in the west country have far too often been taken for granted in the past, and we should realise we're in direct competition with Wales, with far more levers of influence at its disposal. But the costs and effort involved in setting up last week's meeting bore no relationship to its benefit. It's only if we can decide for ourselves what are priority issues, ensure every MP has the chance to contribute, and make sure the right ministers are there, the ones who take decisions about our infrastructure and local policies, that it will be useful. And it would help if those MPs who are elected to represent their constituents took an interest as well.

Meanwhile, I am now a few days in to my annual village tour. Every year I use the recess to do a tour of the majority of the one hundred and thirty or so villages in my sprawling constituency. This year I think I'm visiting one hundred and five in total over a three week period. The weather so far hasn't been particularly kind, and sometimes you can wonder why you bothered standing in the cold and the wet in a deserted village centre. But the important thing for me, as it has been throughout the last twelve years when I've done a similar tour, is that it gives people who may not be able to easily reach one of my regular weekly advice surgeries the chance to come and talk to me, I make sure that there are no communities I haven't had an opportunity to get to during the busier parts of the year, and if there are local problems I can see them first hand. The strange thing is that there is no predicting how many people may turn up at any place, or what they will want to talk to me about.

This year has brought the normal wide selection of topics, but I'm particularly grateful to the gentleman who came to see me equipped with chinese lantern. These have become a bit of a craze this year, particularly with the local festivals. They consist of a paper structure in which hot air is produced by a candle, so they float off into the night sky. And very beautiful they look too. But there is a problem. The main structure is of wood or reed and paper, which is bio-degradable. But each lantern has cross-mountings for the candle made of thin wire. And as they land anywhere, that's not good for wildlife or for domestic animals, and must be a nightmare for farmers when chopped up into forage.

I don't want to be a killjoy, and I recognise the aesthetics of these lanterns. But a small change in the way they're made (and I suspect they're imported from the far east) would make them far safer. I'll take it up with ministers and see if anything can be done.