Sir David Amess Summer Adjournment

David Johnston Excerpts

Thursday 20th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[David Johnston (Wantage) (Con)]

May I start by saying what a pleasure it is to see the Vice-Chamberlain of His Majesty’s Household on the Front Bench? She is my Whip, and a very good Whip she is too. I would say that in this House even if she was not a good Whip, because we must keep the Whips onside, but it happens to be true.

I will start with a number of thank yous. First, I thank my staff team: Maoliosa Smith, Jamie Carter, James Williams and Louise Brown. All of our staff make us look better than we are; mine are no different and I am very grateful to them. I also want to thank a number of organisations and individuals in the constituency and this place for helping with various things I have done in the past year. I have run quite a number of events and campaigns locally and could not have done so without the help of lots of different people.

I began a work experience campaign last year because I found—and I think most Members would find this if they checked—that work experience has dramatically declined in the post-covid period. With so many people working from home, it has been one of the things dropped, yet it is crucial for people in their school years and later teens to get experience of the workplace, understand how it works, make connections and observe how they should behave. I started the campaign because young people at local schools—I visit one almost every week—were telling me that it was very difficult to get work experience. I was really pleased with the response from companies such as Rebellion, Hachette and Newton Europe, which essentially said, “You know what, you’re right, we have dropped this and we are going to start doing it again.” They have provided really good opportunities for young people locally.

Most of those companies, along with other organisations such as the NHS, the Army, Elite Youth Sports, and so on, then supported an apprenticeship fair that I ran this year to try to widen knowledge of, and access to, the apprenticeships that we have locally. We have lots of great apprenticeship opportunities locally and lots of great organisations offering them, so I am very grateful to them.

I am also very grateful to Thames Valley Police which has run a couple of crime summits with me locally. They were organised after people had reported an increasing number of crime incidents, particularly antisocial behaviour and also business burglaries. The summits were very much for constituents to be able to raise their concerns directly with the police and find out what was going on, but I think it is fair to say that the police found from hearing from people locally that they could be doing better, particularly in the handling of antisocial behaviour, from the focus they give it locally when out and about to how people report it. People were saying, “When I want to report an incident it takes me 40 minutes online to do your form,” and the police were unaware it took that long and have gone away to address that.

I also want to thank a few colleagues on the Government Benches: the Minister for Science, Research and Innovation for taking part in my science and tech forum which he did with companies in Harwell and Milton Park so that they could talk about the challenges they were facing; the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero for taking part in my third annual climate summit a couple of weeks ago; and the Minister for Food, Farming and Fisheries for meeting farmers just last week. We have lots of great farmers across my constituency, farming dairy, beef and arable and so on, and my right hon. Friend came to the constituency and sat there and spoke to them. As we know, farmers are a challenging bunch, but our farming Minister gives as good as he gets and I was very grateful to him for taking part in that forum.

I want to touch on three things and then give a special mention to someone. “Too many houses, not enough infrastructure”: I hear that every single day—since I was first elected, every week when I knock on doors and in every email I receive. I know my constituency is not the only one facing this challenge, but there is particularly an issue when it comes to health services. We all want Grove station reopened, better roads and so on, but we have not seen an increase in the number of GPs that we need for the people we have in the constituency.

A health survey I ran earlier in the year found that 97% of people felt we did not have enough GPs for the number of people we have locally. The Great Western Park estate has been waiting eight years for its promised surgery, and we have another estate being built right by it, Western Valley. These two estates alone will add 18,000 people to the area and there is not a single new doctor. Much as the Lib Dem-run council and local health leaders all say they are committed to trying to solve this problem, we are just not seeing any progress. I am going to keep banging on about this, because when people feel that an increased population affects their quality of life, it is no wonder that they do not want to see more people being added to their area. They become resistant to houses when they might not have been before, and we just have to bang people’s heads together and try to make some progress in this area.

My second issue is a more local one, which is the AEA Technology pension campaign. Part of AEA was privatised—transferred to a new company—in the 1990s, and the advice that employees received about their pensions at that time proved to be inaccurate and misleading. Lots of people transferred their pensions without knowing the increased risk that they would face, and that company went bust. Those people ended up in the Pension Protection Fund, and have pushed for 10 years to try to get someone to look at their case. Finally, this year, we got the National Audit Office to look at it, and the Public Accounts Committee has also looked at it. We now await the Government’s response, but I am very pleased that people are supporting our campaign. My hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Laura Farris) is one of the people who has been supporting it, because those people have been trying for so long to get their case heard, and now it is finally being heard.

My third issue is the Local Electricity (No. 2) Bill. I am the lead sponsor of that Bill, and just under half of Members in this place now support it. It would remove the barriers for people who want to be able to generate energy locally through renewable sources. At the moment, the start-up costs are too high: it costs in the region of £1 million to get going, which is far too much for a village or a local organisation that wants to generate energy. We have been working on that Bill collectively—working closely with the Minister in charge, the hon. Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Andrew Bowie)—and are just on the cusp of making progress. I cannot talk about that progress at the moment, but although the amendments were not accepted in the Lords, we have had a very constructive relationship with the Minister in the Commons. We are going to have some good news to announce on that front, which I think will make the Bill’s supporters very pleased.

My last thing, as I said, is just a special mention. I am a patron of a number of local charities that I have talked about in this place before, such as Play2Give and Secret Santa 365, but I am also patron of a charity called Team Mikayla—it is incredible how many of the charities in my local area were set up by children. This young lady, Mikayla Beames, had a brain tumour at the age of four, and as soon as she was able to, she decided that she wanted to help all the children who were suffering from cancer. She set up her own charity at a very young age; she is still a teenager, but for years now she has been supporting children in the local community who are facing cancer diagnoses. She is an incredibly inspirational young lady, and this year was chosen as one of the King’s coronation champions for the whole country. It was an incredibly proud moment for her—a deserved recognition. I just wanted to take this opportunity to congratulate her.

Mr Deputy Speaker, I wish you and everybody who works in Parliament a very restful recess.