Category Archives: Blog

Pensioners set to lose millions in benefits

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I’ve blogged preivously about how one of Labour’s rule changes is set to deprive pensioners of millions in benefits. The Daily Telegraph has the story again today:

Pensioners are going to miss out on hundreds of millions of pounds of benefits owed to them under a government move to cut the time they get to claim tax credits.

In a move that could trigger another backbench revolt against Gordon Brown, ministers have abolished the 12-month period in which the pensioners can claim backdated pension tax credits and imposed a new limit of three months.

The rule change, which comes in on October 6, will affect 110,000 of some of the poorest pensioners many of whom are struggling with soaring fuel and food bills.
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As a result, ministers believe they will be able to save hundreds of millions of pounds because claimants will not apply for payments in time.

A Parliamentary answer to Lynne Featherstone MP shows the cut will save £240million between now and 2010, and a further £285million will be saved between 2015 and 2050.

Read the full story here.

Benefits "helpline" charges for free advice

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I’m in the Mail on Sunday today:

A telephone ‘helpline’ is charging parents up to £28 for child benefit information that is available from the Government for free.

MPs and consumer groups last night branded the £1.50-a-minute service – run by a 24-year-old businessman – a rip-off and demanded that it be shut down immediately.

Callers who ring the premium-rate line receive nothing more than a recorded message repeating details from official websites and Government leaflets. The tape runs on for nearly 19 minutes…

Parents seeking information are encouraged to ring a non-geographical 0871 number for up-to-date advice on eligibility, application procedures and addresses of benefit offices around the country.

From there, they are directed to an 09-code premium-rate line which regurgitates a mass of information about child benefit, ranging from how much you are allowed to claim if your baby is stillborn to the rules on what action to take when your child leaves school and goes into full-time education.

As the service has no automated menu facility, some callers have to listen to the entire tape to get information relevant to them. Listening to the full tape would land them with a bill of £28.50. Calls from a mobile would be even more…

Labour MP Mark Todd said: ‘The people running these so-called helplines are preying on the unwary and it’s pretty unpleasant. If they offer nothing more than what you can get from official sources, the regulator should close them down. They are nothing more than a rip-off.’

Liberal Democrat MP Lynne Featherstone said: ‘People searching for information about benefits need help, not exorbitant phone charges. Despite the disclaimers, anyone glancing at the website would assume it was official.’

Ceri Stanaway, principal researcher for Which? magazine, said: ‘All the information on this line is available elsewhere, either much more cheaply or for free. It would be in the interests of consumers to have it closed down.’

Another day, another Haringey parking fiasco

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Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse … Martin Newton (councillor for Fortis Green ward) has been doing a survey of parking bays in Muswell Hill and found that many of them don’t meet the rules for how parking bays should be laid out and explained to the public.

Earlier this year we forced Haringey Council to replace confusing and contradictory parking signage – and also to add further stickers to pay-and-display machines to try to explain bewildering restrictions. More recently investigations by Liberal Democrat councillors also uncovered that at five of the seven yellow box junctions enforced by CCTV in Haringey, penalty notices had to be cancelled due to incorrect lines, signs or Traffic Management Orders. And now this!

Given the number of parking scandals involving Haringey Council, you could start to think it’s a conspiracy rather than incompetence. The Labour council leaders need to act soon to resolve faith in our borough’s parking rules.

What do you see when three kids in hoodies walk towards you?

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Today’s speech was about fighting crime – again. This time it was at a Local Government Association event, with a particular focus on young people.

Three kids wearing hoodies walking down the street towards you. What do you see? Three people about to mug you? Just another three people passing on the pavement? Or three kids whose birthdays you know? And who do they see in you? A suspicious stranger who doesn’t like them? Or a neighbour they say hello to?

It’s in that range of different actions and reactions that sits so many of the issues around youth crime and fear of youth crime – why it takes place, what its impact is and how to tackle it. It’s about how to tackle the evil-minded, how to reduce irrational fear – and also – and crucially – about how to build happy, cohesive communities where people are free to do there own thing – but also get along with, rather than fear, their neighbours.

So I am grateful to the Local Government Association for bringing us together to discuss this important topic and for inviting me to open this debate.

As an MP that represents an inner London constituency where our youth crime has become a national headline issue with stabbings and gang violence on the door step – answering the question of what we can do to tackle youth criminality is of great concern to me and my constituents.

And as our party’s Youth & Equalities spokesperson, I have been vocal is pressing our pro-youth agenda as opposed to the anti-youth agenda that dominates the news and the rhetoric of Labour and the Tories.

My third role and one that is perhaps less public is my continued and personal interest in home affairs issues. It’s really the area in which I cut my teeth as an MP, and I’m now a co-opted member of our the Home Affairs team in Parliament. I was pleased recently to endorse Chris Huhne’s new policy proposal on youth justice and crime.

The paper was called: “A life away from crime – a new approach to youth justice” – which I think goes someway in answering the question the LGA have set: is the balance right between prevention and enforcement?

The simple answer is no. Better enforcement simply will never be enough in itself.

We know this from some of the crime fighting successes – most notably cutting car thefts by making cars harder to steal, and not just trying to catch and punish car thieves. It’s been a similar issue with mobile phone thefts – yes, high profile policing has its role, but making a stolen phone unusable has a much bigger impact.

We also know this from a simple thought process: imagine a massively successful drive to better enforcement, with five times as many crimes resulting in a court punishment than at the moment. That’d be a pretty impressive leap forward wouldn’t it? But only around 1 in 100 crimes is punished in court at the moment. So we’d be multiplying up hugely the number of court cases and – even with any changes in sentencing rules – the number of people going to jail. And yet – both our courts and prison services are already hugely overloaded and frequently at breaking point. And in the end? We’d only have upped that figure from 1 in 100 to 5 in 100.

This isn’t just theoretical – we’ve seen a massive 86% rise in the number of 15 – 17 years in custody, and yet youth criminality remains the weeping sore of public policy. Because as the courts and jail services crack under the numbers, rehabilitation suffers, reoffending rates go up and crime doesn’t fall.

If you want to cut crime, we need to stop people committing it not just be punishing but also by preventing. That’s why I – and my party – are so keen to drastically increase spending on youth service provision. We have plenty of ideas of how increased spending would be spent. But sadly we seem alone in the national parties in advocating a coherent set policy that would see a significant redistribution of resources in favour of spending money on youth services to prevent crime in the first place.

The logic of this seems indisputable and the finances alone are pretty sound – preventing crime saves on money further through the judicial and criminal systems. In any question of how public resources should be allocated – prevention is always better than cure – if for no other reason than that it is cheaper. There are many five star hotels that are cheaper than a night at young offenders’ institution.

Our Home Affairs paper sets out clearly how we would charge local councils to draw up Youth Community Plans for more youth activity. But more radical than that, we would want to pass real spending powers to youth councils and the Youth Parliament.

Let’s be honest – what does a group of crusty councillors and politicians like myself know about providing service that will really capture the imagination of young people and instill the idea that there are alternatives to crime? A dilapidated youth centre, with ping pong and servicing Kia-Ora and a few stale biscuits is not going to cut the mustard with any self respecting teenager.

Another part of prevention is getting knives and guns off the streets. I have little doubt that this can be achieved by intelligence-led policing. Whilst not a new policy, the Liberal Democrat position of 10,000 more police officers instead of ID cards is relevant to our discussion. These officers, with youth dedicated PCSOs and neighbourhood teams, would be better placed to identify young people carrying offensive weapons.

And then there is rehabilitation, where local authorities have a pivotal role to play in rehabilitation. Whilst some young offenders do require incarceration where public safety as risk, prisons for young people just don’t work. Whilst they might create a few months respite for the communities plagued by antisocial behaviour, just think of how more anti-social those people are with the skills they have learnt on the inside.

Punishing someone for a crime in the past, but setting them up to offend many more times in the future is just short-sighted – vindictive rather than effective.

Liberal Democrats in Islington led the way with successful Acceptable Behaviour Contracts, which have slowed superseded ASBOs. The point is to work with the young person in addressing the causing of the problem and to set realistic targets – looking not just to remedying the past but also to stopping more crimes being committed in the future.

Anyway, I have spoken enough. I am keen to hear about successful ideas from the floor of how your local authorities have been addressing this issue.

But just to conclude. There is no silver bullet. It is a situation that is exacerbated by gimmicks and political attempts to steal the headlines by out toughing each other.

But that is just part of the story. I think at the heart of liberalism is the genuine belief of personal freedom – and one of those
f
reedoms is to be young. If we continue to demonise our youth, neglect public service provision and treat young criminals as outcasts is it little wonder they will turn their backs on us and ignore the rules we set.

A secular society does not just protect those without faith – it protects those with faith too

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Earlier this evening I spoke at a Stonewall / DELGA meeting, along with Chris Rennard, Sarah Ludford and Ben Summerskill on the theme – ‘A safer Britain for all’.

Today I would like to talk about what fairness mean to us as Liberal Democrats and more importantly how we can achieve it.

As liberals I think we have instinctive sense of what equality means. This doesn’t mean we have all the answers or always get it right, but equality is one of the main reasons we get out of bed and fight the political battles we fight we do.

As a country, I think we’ve come a long way from lesbians having to hurl themselves off the House of Lords gallery to get their point across.

I know Chris is going to touch on the Conservative Party’s dodgy attitude to gay people in his speech, but publicly even they claim to have realised the error of their ways and eschewed the bigotry of social conservatism.

Indeed, the political consensus appears for the most part heading in the right direction. The post–1997 Parliaments have piece by piece removed many of the anomalies that saw gay, lesbian and transgendered people treated unfairly in the eyes of the law. There are still some laws that need changing, but Labour majorities with the willing support of Liberal Democrat parliamentarians have brought British law into the 21st century.

But when it comes to fairness for the LGBT community, does this mean we can hang up our capes and pat ourselves on the back for a job well done? Of course this is not the case. Unfair treatment sadly still remains an everyday experience for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. The discrimination they face is perhaps not as blatant as before, but the consequences can be just as harmful to those at the receiving end.

To illustrate the challenge for fairness that faces us I wanted to choose three examples. They are:

1. The teacher that ignores kids calling each other gay as an insult
2. The Islington registrar who refused perform civil partnerships because of her religious belief
3. The BP boss Lord Browne being forced to resign because of his long-term affair with a male prostitute

Firstly the teacher. In some respects, education is the very much the last bastion of the worst of how society perceives and treats the issue of sexual orientation with the ‘not in front of the children’ mentality persisting.

I am sure many of you could imagine several racial or religious insults that would rightly be severely punished if overheard in the playground. So why is the word gay as an insult not treated with the same severity in so many schools?

And it’s not just about the immediate hurt caused by bullying that is let pass as acceptable – it’s also the longer-term message to children, as they are forming their views of the world and of how people should behave, that it’s ok to view gay as something objectionable and that it’s ok to make casual insults based on sexuality. That’s not a happy society we’re creating.

I know Stonewall has been hot on the case in tackling homophobia in education and our very own Stephen Williams has been leading the charge in our own campaign.

Changing attitudes must start in the playground and the classroom. Homosexuality is not an unmentionable awkward topic – and to treat it as such compounds the prejudice that there is something wrong with being gay.

The second case I wanted to discuss involves a registrar from Islington in London who won a case for unfair dismissal after she was dismissed for refusing to oversee civil partnerships because of her religious views. I don’t know if we have any councillors or activists from Islington here this evening that would be able to give their perspectives, but for me this case revealed a major fault-line in the battle for fairness.

Please don’t get me wrong – I am just a likely to be plucky and stick up for the right for one person’s religious freedom. But for me this freedom is guaranteed in the framework of a secular society. We could argue until the cow come home about the extent of religious freedom, but for me one thing is clear – when the freedom of the individual comes into direct conflict of religious belief of another, then individual freedom takes precedence.

There are many who see this issue differently, even within our party – a point demonstrated by a minority of MPs in all parties who voted for the amendment to impose the need of a male role model for women seeking fertility treatment in the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill.

Whilst some Parliamentarians wrangle with this issue and their moral compass, the practical implications of religious conviction undermining the rights of gay people are very real and act as an obstacle to fairness.

If we fail to combat erosion to principles of a secular society, it will not only be the rights of the LGBT community that will suffer. Millions of people rely this protection to live their lives in the way they want – from the women who has freedom over own body in deciding when she will have a child to couples freed from a loveless marriage because of the freedom to divorce. Not forgetting too those who – by being protected for the imposition of any one religion’s views – are therefore free to practice their own religion too.

A secular society does not just protect those without faith – it protects those with faith too.

So, I have looked at two bastions of the state – schools, religion. Finally, I want to look one last arm of the establishment –that of the press.

“Complaining about the press is like complaining about the weather.” Wise words reportedly whispered from Tony Blair to his wife. And to some extent, I agree with him. A free press is a sign of a healthy democracy. However – sometimes what is in the public interest is a far cry from what sells papers.

Look at the case of Lord Browne being forced to resign because of his long-term affair with a male escort, over which he told a white-lie about how they met. Hardly the stuff of resignations, particularly when as the dust settled we saw allegation after allegation about alleged misuse of BP resources disintegrating under the microscope.

The truth is that the heart of the story was simply that the Mail on Sunday was able to out an extremely senior business leader after 40 years of him keeping his sexuality private. As a result he felt compelled to resign.

Decriminalising gay sex in the 60s prevented gay people from being the victims of blackmail. But it still seems to have some way to go before sexuality ceases to be a newsworthy for those who choose not disclose it.

Clearly we have some way to go until we reach complete fairness. As leaders in the communities we serve, Liberal Democrats must act to challenge and to change systems that are inherently fair – whether it’s the schools we govern, the registrar offices we control or the laws we can influence.

Public service providers need to be proactive in dispelling the perception from gay people that they will get worse treatment. Hopefully the next major steps in their transformation will come with the extension of the duty of public duties to promote equality for people of different sexually orientations.

And in the private sector we need to give force to their complaint, speeding up tribunals and making sure those who practise discrimination fear redress.

So we have gone a long
wa
y on this journey to equality and fairness – but equality under the law does not reach into all hears and take away the prejudice and hatreds which rest beneath well-behaved exteriors. That has to be the ultimate goal.

Engaging young people through volunteering

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This lunchtime I gave a speech about volunteering to one of the fringe meetings at our Bournemouth party conference:

When I was younger – much younger! – and at school, I took part in a volunteering scheme to call on older people – whether they wanted me to or not!

Subsequently, I worked on a hospital radio station and did programs from the wards, and then was a volunteer at a local hospital giving out menus – but really spending time with patients undergoing rough treatment and holding their hands if they didn’t have family – and sometimes sitting with them while they died.

Deep in me it instilled not only the benefits being engaged in positive activities – but a life-long memory of not just how good it was for the recipients – but how it made me feel too.

So I’m glad that we’re having a discussion about how positive volunteering can be for young people, and how it can fit into the wider emphasis on education and skills.

Young people have a lot of bad notices thrown at them – condemned in the media almost daily, criminalised by our justice system and often let down by an education system that so often sees young people as exam statistics fodder rather than as human beings. And all that is without even getting started on the peer pressures of commercial acquisition.

But look at many volunteering organisations, and you see young people bounding in energy, enthusiasm and altruism. More than that though, I believe volunteering is so important it should be at the centre of local communities because it helps to empower young people.

Volunteering can play a large part in building cohesive communities so that young people feel a valued part of them – and hence take part in them – rather than them feeling that they are out on a limb and their community’s biggest inconvenience.

They can bring their enthusiasm, creativity and imagination when they are engaged in constructive, productive volunteering projects, and this can have a rejuvenating effect on local communities, as well as bringing a whole host of benefits to the young people that take part.

For example, in Nottingham, when it came to revamping the 70 year old, unattractive, concrete Market Square in the centre of the city, the council made sure that young people were involved in all stages of the process for selecting a winning design.

And volunteering can be an education in itself. It can provide young people with a whole range of skills that not only increase their employability, but also equip them to deal with the challenges they will inevitably face in life – leadership, teamwork and prioritising tasks.

Taking part in more specific projects can also equip young people with skills that are directly related to employment, such as design skills from producing a magazine to a catering qualification from volunteering at a kitchen for the homeless.

For those young people who succeed in formal education this is a great way for them to pick up all those transferable skills that employers constantly talk about and complain that nobody has! In a crowded labour market it also gives them a distinct advantage over their peers who have no experience outside of academia, and therefore helps employers to choose the best candidates for their vacancies.

Another advantage, which I think is often overlooked, is that volunteering develops young people’s confidence and maturity so that they feel able to face the challenges of formal education head on, and are often capable of making much more intellectual contributions than if they had not been volunteers.

But volunteering can also have a profound effect on those young people who are let down by formal education. It gives those young people a second chance at developing their potential in a way that our formal education system sadly doesn’t allow.

It’s an alternative way to earn recognised qualifications, for young people to build their confidence and start believing in themselves again, even if formal education has left them feeling worthless and undervalued.

Volunteering can be an innovative way of learning and by getting so involved in a project where they feel valued and where they think that they’re making a positive contribution, they don’t realise how many skills they’ve learnt or how much they’ve developed whilst taking part.

Of course – we need to get much better at selling volunteering. Volunteering has had a bit of a bad reputation in the past as it’s been seen as nothing more than free labour, and people think that they may well end up just on tea duty! But it’s nothing like that any more. It’s so much – so much more engaging, involving and adventurous and rewarding and complicated.

With volunteering being so great, the obvious question is: how to we encourage more? We need to encourage stakeholders to promote volunteering more. This includes formally accrediting volunteering – making it easier for employers, educators and young people themselves to see the benefits that can be gained from volunteering.

For goodness sake – even the government has realised that volunteers bring something to the table that the statutory arm cannot. There is nothing like volunteering for the good of people, for the good of the individual and for the good of the cause.

Women and the vote

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Tonight I gave a speech at our party conference at a fringe meeting to mark the 90th anniversary of women’s suffrage:

Thank you for inviting me to speak at this reception. It is an honour to be here celebrating 90 years of women and the vote. I am always still shocked to remember that there was a time – in fact a majority of the time – in history when we didn’t have the vote.

Now, the arguments made against extending the franchise to women 90 years ago seem preposterous to you and me today. I looked at the old Parliamentary archives of the debates around giving women the vote and I was taken with Sir Frederick Banbury’s comments on why women should not be allowed to vote. He said:

“Women are likely to be affected by gusts and waves of sentiment…Their emotional temperament makes them so liable to it. But those are not the people best fitted in this practical world either to sit in this House… or to be entrusted with the immense power” [Hansard, 19 June 1917; vol. 94, c. 1645]

He was talking about the power that the vote would bring. Thankfully, he was in the minority, and, luckily and happily, I am entitled to be full of as much sentiment as I care to be.

But the role of women in politics and our representation seems to have stalled at giving us the vote and electing a few of us to Parliament, when it needs to move beyond that.

Sadly, I am one of only 126 female MPs in a Parliament of 646. Parliament remains an old boys club, with its adversarial style of politics where bully-boy tactics are the norm – any of you who’ve watched PMQs will be fully aware of this!

A small but telling example of the Parliamentary mindset: there was no objection to David Blunkett joking about his sexual exploits, but when I asked if all the fuss might be distracting him from doing his main job – oh no, that was inappropriate and not the done thing.

All very old boys club. And this feeds a political system that is so busy being adversarial that it forgets to be effective.

This lack of representation is repeated throughout our political system. In local government, women make up just over a quarter of local councillors, whilst with Euro-MPs it is a similar story: just one quarter female.

The quality of our government suffers from these imbalances – an impact which therefore affects us all, men and women.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the allocation of resources, where the macho boys culture so often summons up the massive project and neglects the important details.

When I was chair of transport at London Assembly it was starkly clear. Why is it that an obsession with boys toys – the macho game of whose got the biggest airport or the longest train – delivers multi-billion pound budgets for massive transport infrastructure projects yet not even a fraction of those budgets were spent on so called ‘soft measures’, such as making sure you can fit a double buggy through the door of a bus and making sure that local shopping centres and services are easily accessible – really easily accessible – through using public transport.

But it should not be a question of either or – it should be a matter of both.

Women need to be there, with men, making these decisions, to ensure that public services and policy are relevant to all people and are capable of having a real effect on the lives, not just of women, but of everyone in society.

Some of our Nordic counterparts are light years ahead in terms of female representation, and we can see the practical effect on policy and resource priorities.

Take Finland – with its childcare allowance for women who stay home and look after children under the age of 3 and its municipal care for children who are below the school age of 7.

But I don’t want to concentrate on the negative aspects of this issue today – after all we are meant to celebrating!

We have come a long way in 90 years. It’s not enough, but we are constantly pushing, and constantly forcing change. I hope that within the next decade we will able to celebrate the achievement of equal and proper representation of women in politics, as another 90 is far too long to wait for this change!

I would encourage every woman here tonight to at least consider taking the plunge and get involved in formal, elected politics, and for the men to support and encourage them all in doing so.

It isn’t enough that women have the vote, and it isn’t enough that Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan all rank above us internationally when it comes to women’s representation.

Equal representation and involvement in politics is our right, and it is the women in this room today who will bring about change tomorrow, by demanding the equal representation they deserve and by working together to achieve it.

Tackling crime – the speech I didn't get to give on being effective, not vindictive

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I didn’t get called to speak during the Liberal Democrat conference debate on our new crime-fighting policy paper (details on the main party website), but it seems a shame to let my would-have-been speech go to waste – so here it is for the internet audience instead!

The bitter irony of the debates around crime in this country is that so often those policies presented as being tough on crime are also those that not only do the least to cut crime – but actually increase it.

Because often we are faced with this choice: do you wish to be vindictive about past crimes, or effective at avoiding future crimes?

Punishing for the sake of punishing may meet instinctive emotional repugnance at the people who carried out awful acts – but punishment that spirals out of control in a bidding war over who can be toughest just results in more reoffending and more crimes.

Let me explain: imagine before you someone who has committed a crime. Should they be jailed? If so – for how long? And how should they be treated in jail?

In ever-raising stakes bidding world of being tough on crime, the answers are always more jailings, longer sentences, worse conditions.

But what will happen to that person? For the very worst crimes – yes they will be locked up for the rest of their lives. But for the rest – at some point they’ll be back in our communities. And will they reoffend? If they are simply locked up and forgotten – so often the answer will be yes. And it will be scant consolation for their future victims to know they were heavily punished for a crime in the past.

So we need to be smart – not just tough – and be effective – not vindictive.

If your kids did something wrong and you locked them up in a room for a few years – do you think they would come out as develop, well-balanced, better behaved, sorry and repentant for their misdeeds – or would they be sullen, maladjusted and resentful and angry – with no new ways or means to deal with the pressures of life next time something tempted them from the straight and narrow?

The answer is to balance punishment with rehabilitation, to use jail where necessary and appropriate – but not to mindlessly send everyone into the universities of crime for any offence.

So – what is effective?

Community Justice Panels are effective. Chard Liberal Democrats pioneered them. Young people have to face up to the consequences of their actions and then make amends to the community. Guess what – it works! The re-offending rate is just 5%! Proof and pudding. Liberal Democrats want to establish community justice panels in every town in the country.

And then there is restorative justice. That’s where victims and offenders are brought together and the offender apologises to the victim. It does sound wet. But it ain’t wet. It works. Proof and pudding.

I visited Brixton Prison about 18 months ago where a criminal – a serious criminal who had served a couple of decades – had come back to talk to the assembled worthies about what worked. Even for him at that end of the criminal scale – he said being faced with what he had done got through to him in a way that nothing else ever had.

It’s kind of redemption – even for the non-religious. The need to apologise and make amends runs deep.

So – effective not vindictive.

And it’s not just a few future crimes we can prevent – because re-offending rates for people released from prison are shockingly high.

Around six in ten prisoners released are caught committing at least one offence in the subsequent two years.

Amongst those who steal from vehicles, the re-offending rate is around nine out of ten.

So tackle reoffending amongst those who already get into the legal and prison systems – and there’s a huge cut in crime to be had. And of course because they’re already in the systems, we have the advantage of knowing who they are and where they – at least on the days the Home Office hasn’t lost another bundle of prisoner data!

We can’t go back in time and undo a crime a criminal has committed, but if we stop them re-offending – then we have zipped forward in time and stopped a crime before it occurs.

It’s time to get real, stop the posturing, catch the criminals – change their behaviour – and so – cut crime.