Flooding
Debate between Daniel Kawczynski and Bill Wiggin(4 years, 8 months ago)
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Bill Wiggin (North Herefordshire) (Con)
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for mentioning Tenbury Wells, which was in my constituency in 2007 when it flooded three times. The fact that somebody lost their life there is a proper tragedy, and when one talks about flooding, there is only one thing worse, and that is efforts to politicise it.
In just two days, we had a whole month’s worth of rain, on 15 and 16 February, which has caused about £10 million of damage in my constituency. Some 110 properties have been flooded, and 389 people were evacuated or led to safety. The fire brigade has done a phenomenal job. It also rescued 30 dogs, 12 cats, 55 sheep, a pony, a parrot and a snake, believe it or not. The village of Hampton Bishop in my constituency was very badly affected. We saw the Lugg and the Wye rise to their highest levels since recording began 200 years ago, so people who think that this was a normal flood are wrong. We had 700 tonnes of water per second going past the bridge on the Wye in Hereford. The Environment Agency pumped water out of Hampton Bishop, but the problem is of the one-in-100 year floods meeting one-in-25-year defences, and we need to do considerably better.
Daniel Kawczynski
My hon. Friend is outlining the devastation that Herefordshire suffered during the recent floods. We of course experienced similar problems in Shropshire, but the leader of my council is telling me that the Bellwin scheme is not proving sufficient to meet all the demands that the council has in clearing up the mess. Could he say something about that?
Bill Wiggin
My council has had the same problem. I would ask the Government to think very carefully about training local authorities in how to manage the Bellwin scheme. Certainly, councillors in Herefordshire have been panicking because they do not necessarily understand how the scheme works, they do not know how much they can spend, and they do not know who to turn to. I think the Department that is managing this scheme needs to reach out to the affected local authorities so that at least the officers there know what they are talking about and can advise elected councillors properly.
Adult Social Care in Shropshire: Government Funding
Debate between Daniel Kawczynski and Bill Wiggin(4 years, 10 months ago)
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Daniel Kawczynski
I am extremely grateful for those interventions from my hon. Friends and neighbours. I could not agree with them more. Shrewsbury is listed as one of the top 10 places to retire to in the whole of the United Kingdom because of the beauty of our town—we have more listed buildings than any other town in England. We have a larger number of senior citizens as a percentage of our total population, and that percentage is growing much faster than the national average. Governments of all political colours have poured money disproportionately into inner-city, metropolitan areas while leaving us in the rural shire counties as the poorer cousins, and it is vital that we now start to take action.
Bill Wiggin (North Herefordshire) (Con)
Will my hon. Friend give way on that point?
Graham Stringer (in the Chair)
Order. In half-hour debates on the Adjournment, people who speak have to have the permission of the proposer and of the Minister, and it is not good form to come in after the proposer has started speaking. I ask the proposer and the Minister whether Bill Wiggin has had permission to intervene.
Daniel Kawczynski
I will follow your lead on that, Mr Stringer.
In the financial year 2019-20, the social care budget for Shropshire Council was £103.1 million. That represents 48.2% of the council’s net budget, up from 32.6% in 2015-16, which is extraordinary: our council’s budget for just dealing with adult social care costs has gone up from a third of its net budget to practically a half. I find those figures staggering, and my colleagues from Shropshire agree. Since 2015-16, Shropshire Council’s adult social care budget has risen by an average of £7 million per annum. In the coming financial year, it is projected to rise by approximately £10 million; £6 million of that is inflationary, meaning that only approximately £4 million is due to increasing demand.
As has been said, Shropshire’s senior citizen population is rising at a much faster rate than the national average, and Shropshire Council has become more efficient, which is the point that my right hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow was making. The Local Government Association has assessed our council as being very well managed, and as implementing new and innovative policies in this regard. Shropshire Council has become more efficient and innovative in an attempt to control rising costs in social care. Of all initial inquiries into adult social care, 85% are signposted to external support, and of the remainder, only 14.8% enter paid services. In total, 2.25% of all inquiries enter paid services; in 2014-15, the comparable figure was 32%. The financial pressures on Shropshire Council go beyond single-year budget increases. The most recent available analysis shows that if our council were funded at the English average per head of population, it would have an additional £20 million in its base budget.
I am grateful to have had the opportunity to raise this issue, and look forward to hearing the Minister’s answers. I am pleased that all the MPs from the Shropshire Council area have attended this debate, and I am very grateful for their support. They know as well as I do the huge pressures that our council is under at the moment because of its lack of funding, and will share those pressures with the Minister. Our hon. Friend the Member for The Wrekin also mentioned serious problems with our local hospital acute trust, which we are trying to raise with the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care.
We in Shropshire are experiencing a unique combination of problems at the moment, meaning that our constituents are given services that are creaking at best. That is not something I feel comfortable with. We are the fifth-largest economy in the world; I read today that last year, we reduced our debt as a percentage of GDP by 0.9%, and I am delighted and thrilled that the International Monetary Fund is now forecasting that our country will grow at a faster rate than the eurozone over the next three years. We have turned a corner, so we can start to loosen the purse strings a little bit. We as Conservatives must demonstrate that we have a long-term solution to this issue, which affects so many of our constituents.
Local Government Finance
Debate between Daniel Kawczynski and Bill Wiggin(6 years, 9 months ago)
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Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)
Shrewsbury is one of the most popular places to which to retire in the whole United Kingdom. The beauty of our historic town and the Shropshire countryside attracts a lot of senior citizens to come to live in our community. We celebrate their contribution to our constituencies and to the county, but with that increase in the number of senior citizens comes, of course, additional adult social care costs. I have become interested in the local government finance settlement because, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Mr Dunne) said, our local council has faced increases of £10 million per annum in its attempt to grapple with the spiralling costs of adult social care.
When previously the Labour party ran the local council, it increased council tax by 16.6% in one year. That caused a great deal of distress and concern to people on fixed incomes, especially senior citizens, which is why we have encouraged the council to freeze council tax and do everything possible to limit the increases that local people will have to pay. I am proud that the council has managed to do that.
Shropshire Council has reduced some of the operating costs, as we have asked it to do since we came into office, and a lot of the fat has been cut away. In fact, the council is one of the most efficient in the whole United Kingdom. However, having made the efficiency savings, it is now really struggling to meet additional costs, which is why my hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow and I have spent so much time in discussions with the council leader, Peter Nutting, and the chief executive, Clive Wright, to hear at first hand about some of the difficulties they face.
As a result of those discussions, my hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow and I, along with other Conservative MPs from rural shire counties, decided to meet the Secretary of State and the Chancellor over the past few weeks to highlight the difficulties that rural shire counties face. I wish to put on record my thanks to my hon. Friend and my right hon. Friend the Member for North Shropshire (Mr Paterson). My right hon. Friend is not able to join us today because unfortunately he is in hospital after an accident but, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow will acknowledge, my right hon. Friend has played an important part in the campaign for funding for Shropshire Council.
Bill Wiggin (North Herefordshire) (Con)
May I reciprocate by thanking my hon. Friend for the leadership he has shown in those meetings and for his determination, which has meant that rural counties have got a better deal? Equally, I thank the Front-Bench team for listening to us and being so helpful to people who need their help so badly.
Daniel Kawczynski
I am grateful to my hon. Friend. Of course, we almost think of Herefordshire as part of our area.
Daniel Kawczynski
My hon. Friend is not quite Salopian, but he is certainly our neighbour, and I thank him.
Whether we look at funding for local government, education or, indeed, health, we can see, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Herefordshire (Bill Wiggin) will acknowledge, large gaps in funding—a disparity between rural and inner-city areas.
Badger Cull
Debate between Daniel Kawczynski and Bill Wiggin(11 years, 5 months ago)
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Bill Wiggin
My hon. Friend is absolutely right: TB is found in hedgehogs, cats and dogs, and even sheep. It affects people, usually only those who drink unpasteurised milk. The disease can reach any species, because M. bovis is a species-jumping illness.
Daniel Kawczynski
Given the devastation caused by the disease in our region and the area neighbouring our county, will my hon. Friend work with me and other neighbouring MPs to convince the Secretary of State that when the trials are successful they should be brought to our region—Herefordshire and Shropshire—as soon as possible?
Bill Wiggin
I would make the point that these are pilots. The Opposition have made it clear that they believe they are untested. Well, pilots are by definition untested. Once we have evidence that the proposal is effective, of course we can take informed decisions. There are 300,000 to 500,000 badgers in the UK, and they do well in areas such as our counties, where cattle thrive in some of the most beautiful countryside in the country. Herefordshire is one of those counties. The number of badgers exceeds the number of foxes, and they are most likely to be killed by disease or in road traffic accidents—some 50,000 a year are killed on our roads.
There are valid and worrying arguments about perturbation. The perturbation effect was confirmed by trials that used cage trapping. It is not clear whether it was the trapping or the killing of the trapped badger which caused the perturbation effect. That is a worrying challenge to the argument on vaccination. If perturbation is caused by trapping, vaccinating badgers that may already be infected is likely to be as risky as culling. How can we prove that that is right or wrong without electronic tagging? Badgers have little ears, and would lose an ear tag. I do not think that trimming their fur, which is being done at the moment, will provide the sort of robust scientific evidence that we need.
Despite that concern, I still favour badger vaccination for populations confirmed as healthy, and I would draw the attention of the House to the success of the Dutch in using vaccination to combat foot and mouth disease. We must use vaccination to protect healthy badger populations, particularly those that border infected populations. We know where the disease is not present, as we use cattle as an indicator species. Perhaps that is something the Government can address when they look at the efficacy of culling.
Vaccination costs money, and we spent £90 million on TB control measures in 2010-11, including testing and compensation. Every time a farm breaks down, it costs £34,000. Over the past 10 years, bovine TB has cost the British taxpayer £500 million—the equivalent of Birmingham’s 1,200-bed Queen Elizabeth hospital. If we do nothing and maintain the status quo, allowing the disease to spread once again, over the next 10 years the cost will be £1 billion, which is two 1,200-bed hospitals. Given the financial situation, I think all Members would agree that spending £1 billion on the effects of bovine TB without even trying to cull sick animals would be hard to justify even in the most urban constituencies.
The extremely charming and erudite badger cull opponent, Dr Brian May, asked:
“What would we do if this were our children? We would vaccinate…them.”
EU Council Directive 78/52/EEC explicitly prohibits vaccination against bovine TB in cattle. I therefore urge the Secretary of State not to make us wait until after the referendum in 2017. Surely this is a good reason for leaving the EU, if nothing else. What would be the cost of defying the directive? How much money would be put at risk? What would be lost if the EU banned our cattle exports? What would the French do about our dairy products? [Interruption.] I heard the Minister say, “Quite a lot”—he should tell us how much. Only the Government can tell us so we can have an informed debate. In the meantime, we should go ahead with planning for cattle vaccination.
The Commissioner wrote to the Secretary of State saying that a new vaccine was 10 years away. Ten years would mean £1 billion, or another 1,200-bed hospital. The Secretary of State needs to use every weapon that he can to fight the disease. All cattle have passports, so if we chose to vaccinate we could stamp the passport, “Vaccinated— not for export”. We could use the DIVA test when DEFRA was satisfied that it was proven.
I favour better tests. I received two letters from constituents whose cattle were slaughtered. Those cattle passed the skin test, but they were found to have lesions in more than one organ and were condemned. If they had failed the test, the owners would have received compensation, but because lesions were found they were condemned, and my constituents lost the total value of those cattle. We therefore need better tests. Let us introduce the PCR test that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State championed in opposition, and let us make sure that farmers can choose gamma interferon tests if they want them.
I do not want to see badgers suffer. The Secretary of State used to keep them as pets, and he does not want to see them suffer either. The badger is a much-loved animal, including in Kenneth Grahame’s “The Wind in the Willows”, but unfortunately badgers are a reservoir for TB. Reducing the infected population is the principle that we use for cattle, but which we ignore in wildlife. An experimental pilot cull in the highest-risk areas, with barriers, will prove or disprove whether culling is worth rolling out in other high-risk areas. People should realise that it is a scare tactic even to suggest that the whole badger population is at risk from culling. It is not. Only badgers in the highest-risk areas, where it is thought that one in three badgers has TB, would be culled. The total number at risk would be 5,000—less than 10% of the number of badgers hit by cars every year.
Mr Badger in “The Wind in the Willows” said:
“People come—they stay for a while…they build—and they go. It is their way. But we remain.”
Let us do all that we can to ensure that healthy badgers do.