Community Cohesion

Guy Opperman Excerpts

Wednesday 26th January 2011 Westminster Hall

[Guy Opperman (Hexham) (Con)]

I thank you, Mrs Main, and the hon. Member for Sedgefield (Phil Wilson) for giving me the opportunity to speak in this important debate.

We all accept that community cohesion is a wide-ranging notion. We all want to live in a community where we feel safe from crime, where we give our children a good education and where everyone comes together at times of need to help those who need help most.

When I was first selected as the prospective MP for Hexham, and we first started talking about the big society and community cohesion, individuals in the 1,100 square miles that I am lucky enough to represent said, “But we already have this. We do this already.” However, they would then add a “but” and talk about the obstacles that prevented them from going forward and being freed up to do things. I will attempt to identify those individual problems, although I do not particularly seek to criticise previous Governments. None the less, it is clear that there is much in the big society agenda that we can take forward and use as an asset.

There have been accusations—in The Times on Monday, for example—that the big society is not being implemented in the way in which everybody would like, but, in my respectful submission, that is not right. Although the big society is there to a degree, and it comes to the forefront in times of crisis, the coalition has managed to make it an individual, overriding aim. Apart from wiping out the deficit, which clearly must be done, we want to decentralise government. Effectively, we are enablers; we are trying to take government back to the people, who are in charge. I can give multiple examples of that, but that is surely all about trying to give power back to the people with whom it fundamentally rests.

It follows from that vein of thought that it is up to individuals actively to transform community cohesion from being big only in times of need, as it was perhaps in the past, to being something that exists at all times. People need to be aware of it at all stages. I implore my colleagues to get behind this initiative, if they have not done so already.

I want to make an unashamed plug at this point. On 11 February, more than 100 individuals will get together in Hexham to see how we can take community cohesion forward. The event is not sponsored by anybody individually, although I am paying the bill. We are bringing together all manner of people—representatives of different faiths, councillors and housing representatives —to look at the opportunities. I will come to that in a bit more detail, but I just wanted to give the context in which we are working.

Ever since I have had the honour of representing Hexham, we have tried to support many big society initiatives, with the aim of creating more community cohesion. I want to list 10 things that we are doing. First, we have an internship programme in the constituency office to which everybody contributes. We have had 35 young people, which is an awful lot in seven months. They have been aged from 16 to 22, and 10 of them have already completed the programme. A further 30 young people have signed up for the internship programme for 2011.

Secondly, the volunteers and I help to run our MP’s charity quiz nights. We go to local pubs around the constituency raising money for charities. We have worked for Help the Heroes and a local charity, Tynedale Activities for Special Children.

Thirdly, we are committed to an annual Christmas social action project. Lots of people have such projects, but I want to give some idea of the extent of ours. I have a spare office—it is meant to be my surgery office—but I had to move out of it, because so many people contributed presents. The project mushroomed and acquired a wonderful life of its own. We sent those presents to Support Our Soldiers and collected care packages for our serving troops. The response in the community was wonderful. Almost more interestingly, the two regiments involved—one is 39 Regiment Royal Artillery—wrote to tell us what an amazing contribution that we had made. One individual even wrote just before Christmas, but sadly passed away. We saw the impact on the people we were trying to help on a regular basis.

There is also our social action programme, which has ideas for youth training, job clubs and producing community guides. There is not, for example, in the wonderful, wild world of Northumberland, a universal guide to its best parts, so we are producing one ourselves. We managed to persuade the tourist board to give us what it uses, such as photographs, and we shall integrate all those things into our programme, so that during the weekend all the individuals who are trying to set up bed and breakfast or support for organisations will be supported by us.

We also have volunteers who support nature projects such as tree and bulb planting, and community allotment days throughout the constituency. I am not at all green-fingered, but I am becoming better by the minute and have, delightfully, been offered the vice-presidency of the Prudhoe allotments, a welcome activity for destressing on a wet weekend.

There are small projects, but there are also very big ones. One is in the village of Humshaugh, which has a village shop. It lost its post office, which is a problem faced by every constituency. In Humshaugh, with the post office having gone and the shop struggling, the villagers faced closure, because they had no money to go on with. So the community rallied round and enlisted the support of a wealth of individuals. I use the word “wealth” because everyone involved—60-odd people—gives their time for free. It is an amazing example of a shop that closed, then reopened and is progressing. There was a contribution by a business man who prefers to remain nameless, but everyone else was involved. People thought that that was so good that they were a bit upset about the pub. The Crown Inn, Humshaugh, had not gone into receivership but it was not far off, so the villagers took it over as well.

I want to discuss broadband. Everyone knows that there are efforts to take it forward. I am lucky in that my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart), whose constituency neighbours mine, has money and funding for the Eden Valley project, which is a very successful and good project. It is just over the border—I wish it was with us, but such is life, and we must get on with it. We have gone to see what is happening, and we are trying to dovetail with what it is doing. Kielder forest and the Northumberland national park cover huge areas, with probably the largest forest in the country. We have no broadband or mobile phone coverage, and we have a problem with making progress, so we work with a host of different providers. How are they helping us? We have worked on the concept, of which the Minister will be aware, that there are alternatives, and we are considering how we can use Northumbrian Water, which is a substantial, FTSE 100 company. One might consider it and think, “How can you help? You are a very wealthy company.” In reality it is telling us that it is possible that it can provide pre-existing sewers and the like, and that we can use them to make alternative provision. There are other good examples to assist us, and I am hopeful that as the Eden Valley project expands, we shall be able to do more.

Ninthly, I want to talk about planning, which is a huge issue in every constituency. You have got individual people, on a regular basis—

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

Order. I have no individuals, and the hon. Gentleman should refrain from using the word “you”.

[Guy Opperman]

I apologise, Mrs Main.

Hon. Members have individual problems with planning, and they are struggling, but that can be addressed. The Localism Bill will be of huge import, and it will be a huge success in the effort to free up the ongoing planning crisis. I urge hon. Members to get behind it. The Bill is a large one, and we could talk about it for hours, as we saw last week. All the things that I am discussing are about enabling people to do things. I keep coming back to that, because with such enablement we can take good ideas forward. Instead of a system that requires five or six different referrals to go through the Leader programme or other One North East programmes and get a result, things should be much quicker, simpler and faster. I hope that they will be.

I want to finish by talking about the Tynedale big society summit, which will be held in just over two weeks’ time. There will be representatives from business, faith groups, voluntary organisations, local politicians, health and housing, and environmental groups to help people with local government. I hope that the key players in expanding and enabling the big society will come together across Tynedale with the intention of sharing best practice and past successes, and developing a local framework that will help organisations and volunteers to play a strong role in delivering the ideas behind the big society. Participants will be able to question a range of guests on the opportunities ahead for the third sector to play a central role in the procurement and delivery of services.

There will also be specific examples of project-based best practice shared between the various sectors, in which local groups have made a difference to their communities, as well as group discussions on a plan of action taking forward ideas of further co-operation between those existing groups and volunteers. Best of all, the whole day will be staffed—aside from being paid for by my good self—by local volunteers who are interns. The sandwiches will be provided by a start-up company that wants to expand. The essence of what we are trying to do is there.

I could talk about the effect when previous councils, who suffered the blame for unpopular decisions, blamed Whitehall in the face of local anger. Things have developed to the point where very few people seem prepared to accept responsibility for a mistake or for unpopular decisions, whether right or wrong. That has even been transmitted to the social level. We live in a democracy where it is important to feel that someone can have their say, if they want their view to be heard.

We need to consider the glue that binds us together. On a national level, it can be a range of things, such as sport, conflict or even a general election. Those things bring us together, but often in different or separate camps. There are few instances where we are all unequivocally united on one side. We may be divided over the fighting in Afghanistan, but we are united in supporting our troops and doing our bit to ensure that they are supported. It is that sense of shared investment, a shared contribution and a shared goal that brings us together into a cohesive community not only nationally but locally. With the investments and projects that I have described, and with us as enablers, we can and should take that forward.