Coinage (Measurement) Bill

Debate between Iain Stewart and Lord Lancaster of Kimbolton

Friday 4th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mark Lancaster]

My hon. Friend makes a valid point. I would like to think that that would be the case. It is my understanding that the coins will be put up for sale—and sale only.

The Royal Mint wants to ensure that the two commemorative kilogram coins will crown the range of coins. Judging from the reception of similar coins around the world, and after consulting representatives of the coin trade and collectors, the Royal Mint is confident that the UK kilogram coins will be well received—but hopefully not by the IOC.

[Iain Stewart (Milton Keynes South) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on introducing the Bill. Does he agree that the coins, as well as being of interest to collectors around the world, could usefully serve as prizes for different communities, which will try to emulate the Olympic games by hosting, for example, inter-village competitions? A kilogram coin would be a fitting award to the community that triumphed in those sporting contests.

[Mark Lancaster]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful point. Indeed, the coins will be for sale, and there is an opportunity for doing what he suggests.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mark Lancaster]

Having seen the production line for myself, I am confident that they will indeed be 100% gold and 100% silver. I would hate to think that what my hon. Friend describes would happen again, and after my visit I am quite confident that that will not be the case.

It may interest hon. Members to hear that there is a common misconception about the meaning of legal tender. The face value of the coins will be very different from the cost of buying them. The parties involved in a transaction are free to agree the means of payment, whether bank notes, credit card or other payment arrangements. However, in the absence of any such agreement, the creditor is entitled to require payment in legal tender. Conversely, the debtor is entitled to use it. Bank of England bank notes are legal tender in England and Wales, but not in Scotland or Northern Ireland. However, Scottish and Northern Irish bank notes are not legal tender anywhere in the United Kingdom. I see my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes South (Iain Stewart) nodding. I am sure that he has suffered from this. Coin is also legal tender throughout the UK, although in most cases only up to certain specific limits.

The Olympic programme would generate royalties for London 2012 and the Exchequer, because the Royal Mint corporate entity is 100% owned by Her Majesty’s Treasury. Of course, the royalty payable would depend on sales and the final price of the coins, which will be determined by the price of gold, as I have said. However, as I mentioned, it is expected that demand will be similar to, if not greater than, that associated with previous Olympics. It is also important to note that the project is self-funding. The coins form just part of a wide range of products the Royal Mint is issuing to commemorate the 2012 Olympics. As Lord Coe, the London 2012 chairman, said in 2009:

“we’re thrilled to be working with the Royal Mint to commemorate three years to go. As the excitement builds over the next three years, it is fantastic to know that the Royal Mint will be alongside us, helping the whole country to join in with our celebrations.”

It is important to remember that the sporting, cultural and historical significance of London 2012 is not limited to the area within the M25 boundary. The athletes aspiring to compete under the Great Britain banner come from all over the United Kingdom. I would particularly like to recognise those from my own constituency and its environs: Greg Rutherford, Nathan Robertson, Bobby White, Joey Duck and Mervyn Luckwell are just a few of the Buckinghamshire athletes hoping to take part in the Olympic and Paralympic games in 2012. Furthermore, in recent weeks, my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes South and I have been to a number of local events organised by Roger Fennemore and his wife, Sally, helping to raise funds for our local athletes and their training for the Olympic programme. I pay tribute to them. I am pleased that Milton Keynes has also been selected as the site of one of the 2012 Olympic training villages, owing to its strategic location and strong infrastructure, offering training for five Olympic and four Paralympic sports. Her Majesty the Queen planted the first tree on the Olympic park—next to the waterways, adjacent to the stadium—a mature willow tree grown in Milton Keynes, the first of more than 300 that will be planted on the stadium site.

[Iain Stewart]

My hon. Friend makes an important point about the significance of the Olympic games to towns, villages and cities throughout the United Kingdom. As well as supporting the elite athletes who will be competing in the games, an important part of the Olympic legacy will be inspiring young people to take part in sport and to develop their talents. This Bill, in addition to the measures that he has mentioned, will be instrumental in inspiring that new generation.

[Mark Lancaster]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. The whole programme is excellent, particularly the 50p coins, of which I think there are 29 versions, celebrating each individual sport. One of those coins was designed by a “Blue Peter” viewer, so we have indeed managed to engage the whole country in the programme. That is important if we are to continue to inspire young people to take part in the Olympic programme.

Let us not forget the Paralympic mascot, Mandeville, named after the Buckinghamshire village where the precursor to the Paralympics was born. I would also like to mention Dr William Penny Brookes, the founder of the Wenlock Olympic games, which have been held almost every year since 1850 in the historic town of Much Wenlock, in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Mr Dunne). As the House knows, the Wenlock games were the inspiration—here, in England—of the modern Olympic games, which started in 1896 in Athens, after Baron Pierre de Coubertin, a Frenchmen, had witnessed them. The London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games has recognised Much Wenlock’s place in British Olympic history by naming the London 2012 mascot Wenlock. That is an excellent tribute to my hon. Friend’s constituency town.

The striking of kilogram coins will not be limited to commemorating the Olympics. Future events of cultural significance and historical anniversaries, as well as sporting occasions, could all be celebrated in that way. The Coinage (Measurement) Bill therefore presents an exciting opportunity, with far-reaching implications. I am looking forward to a lively debate, but would urge hon. Members to let the Bill pass unopposed to the Committee stage.

Schools Admissions Policies

Debate between Iain Stewart and Lord Lancaster of Kimbolton

Monday 13th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mark Lancaster (Milton Keynes North) (Con)]

Tonight, I shall try to find the balance in schools admissions between the right of schools to set their admissions policy and the right of parents to get their children into a local school. In Milton Keynes, a growing city with many in-year admissions, that is no mean feat. Hopefully we can find a resolution tonight, but it is fair to say that for many, school admissions is a sore subject. It preoccupies parents, has the power to inflate house prices and has even been the stuff of TV drama.

In Milton Keynes, schools admissions has gained renewed controversy since changes were made to the allocation process. The previous Government said that those changes would ensure fairness, but combined with other factors, they have had the unintended consequence of leaving scores of children out of education or having to travel miles across the city to get to school. The delays and distances endured by many of my young constituents are simply not fair.

From September, local authorities were charged with co-ordinating all applications for foundation schools and academies for those applying outside the yearly round. Previously, these in-year applications, usually from people moving into the city, were submitted directly to schools. Now councils must match each child’s three preferences with the schools’ admissions criteria and capacity, and allocate a place. Nationally, councils have reported concerns to the Office of the Schools Adjudicator about this new role. Pressure group Parents Outloud even championed the previous system, and admissions staff at schools have bemoaned the new layer of bureaucracy. Locally, the impact of the change has been compounded by the fact that all our 12 state secondary schools are foundation schools, with one voluntary aided and one academy. Milton Keynes council only has a team of five to deal with its new responsibility.

Since September, I have been inundated with complaints from parents about delays in the process, as well as about what has been offered. Children are now sitting at home for weeks while the council finds them a place, and then further weeks for the school to induct them. When places are offered, many of them are on the other side of the city.

[Iain Stewart (Milton Keynes South) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is raising an important topic. Is he aware that on my side of Milton Keynes I have received a similar number of complaints, and that some of the complaints about admissions relate to primary schools as well as secondary schools?

[Mark Lancaster]

I am aware of the problem, because it is the same in Milton Keynes North. However, I am also aware of my hon. Friend’s sterling efforts in getting many of his constituents into school. I congratulate him on that.

This is a particularly timely debate. The Government are reviewing the school admissions framework and the school admissions code, with a view to making it simpler and fairer. A White Paper on “The Importance of Teaching” has just been published, putting the onus of fair access to schools on local authorities. Fairness is the driving force of the White Paper. I want therefore to outline the situation in Milton Keynes and consider how we can make admissions fairer for schools, authorities, parents and, most importantly, pupils.

As I have said, many of the complaints I have received relate to the delays in council allocation and school induction. This year, Milton Keynes council received 327 secondary school in-year applications. This influx is to be expected in our city, which is an area of rapid growth. The Department for Education—or the Department for Children, Schools and Families, as it was then—recommended that places be allocated within five school days. Milton Keynes council aims for a turnaround of 15 days. Owing to this year’s influx, however, parents have seen a reported six-week wait for their child’s three preferences to be processed. Then, once a place is allocated and accepted, there is a further delay as the school conducts its induction arrangements.

Bus Services (Milton Keynes)

Debate between Iain Stewart and Lord Lancaster of Kimbolton

Tuesday 29th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Iain Stewart (Milton Keynes South) (Con)]

I am grateful to have secured this debate. I requested it because of the significant level of disquiet in my constituency and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North (Mark Lancaster) over the new network and timetable introduced by Arriva buses throughout Milton Keynes on 25 April. The new network and timetable were introduced with hardly any proper consultation, and there have been significant complaints about the punctuality and reliability of the new services.

It is fair to say that, in the seven or eight weeks for which have been a Member of the House, I have had more letters and e-mails on this subject than on any other. On 11 June, my hon. Friend and I attended a forum organised in Milton Keynes. It was a protest meeting organised by the Milton Keynes older persons forum, and I congratulate Peter Ballantyne and his colleagues on organising it. I have never been to such a packed public protest meeting—it was literally standing room only. That gives an indication of the level of disquiet in Milton Keynes over the new bus system.

Before detailing the concerns expressed and outlining what I hope are some of the possible solutions, I shall explain why the design and geography of Milton Keynes makes the provision of good bus services more complex than in many other cities and towns. Unlike most towns and cities, the normal pattern of travel is not just in what one might term a hub-and-spoke arrangement, under which the broad direction of travel is from outlying residential areas into the urban centre, where most businesses, shops and leisure activities are. There is that travel in Milton Keynes, but our grid system disperses places of employment, leisure and retail throughout the city. So the patterns of travel are not just from the outskirts into the middle, but multi-directional at any given point in the day. That presents a challenge to bus operators to put in place an effective system.

[Mark Lancaster (Milton Keynes North) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful case on behalf of his constituents and is to be congratulated on securing this important debate. Of course, the added complication in Milton Keynes is that about 80% of the unitary authority is rural, so as well as a rather complicated grid-row system we have the rural bus network that makes it even worse.

[Iain Stewart]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. Some of the villages in his constituency, as in mine, either do not have a bus service at all or have such a limited one that it is not reliable for people without cars. Little Brickhill, in my constituency, is one of the villages that lost its post office jut over a year ago. Now the residents there do not have a bus service to get to the nearest post office in the town, so they have had a double whammy in the loss of services. That is an important additional aspect to devising a good bus network.

The other curious and unique feature of Milton Keynes is that the grid road system has fast roads skirting around each of the residential areas, so that cars and buses can travel at high speed. It presents a trade-off between the speed of services and accessibility. There is a choice of either driving buses down the grid roads, which are far away from most people’s homes, or going into the estates, which inevitably lengthens the journey. I appreciate that the bus operators have a difficult task in marrying up those two objectives.

Arriva stated when it introduced the new system that it wanted a faster network. That is what it has achieved, but it has done so at too great a cost to many of the services people rely on. There has been significant opposition to the changes, as I detailed earlier.

I will spare the House a detailed analysis of the individual routes that have changed, but I hope the following gives a little flavour of some of the problems that have arisen since the changes at the end of April. I have had letters from students who have either been late for their exams or missed them altogether; they could not rely on a bus service to get them there in time. Similarly, patients have either missed their hospital or doctor appointments, or been unable to attend them without an inordinately long journey, which they are sometimes not physically capable of making. They are therefore forced to rely on the charity of neighbours or families to transport them, or to face the expense of a taxi.

The Stony Stratford business association wrote to me about its considerable concerns about a downturn in trading following the changes. That is because a direct service into Stony Stratford, which many pensioners used, was lost. I have had reports from volunteers and carers, saying that they are now finding it so difficult to get to the homes of the people they are looking after that they have had to reassess their commitments. Finally, I have had reports from employees, who used to enjoy fast and frequent service to their places of work, but now have to endure such a long and convoluted journey that they are often late into work and have to use up their lunch hour to make up time. These are serious disadvantages, and I believe that many of them are a product of insufficient consultation among Arriva buses, the parish and town councils and different organisations in Milton Keynes.

I have also received complaints that Milton Keynes council itself has not been attentive to the implications of the changes and that there has been a lack of co-ordination. It spent a considerable amount of money putting up fancy new signs saying “this is where the buses come”, and it has put up fancy new bus stops at great expense, which are now not used. There has been a considerable waste of money, which I do not think should have happened. Advertising and notifying passengers of the changes have also been a problem. When I raised that subject briefly in Transport questions a couple of weeks ago, the Minister kindly indicated that he might look at changing the regulations that govern this matter.

The situation is getting so bad that I understand that the traffic commissioner is now aware of the problem and is actively considering whether to intervene if the proper notification from different organisations in Milton Keynes is forthcoming. I do not want to spend this evening looking for scapegoats, going into who caused the problem and who did not do what. I am more interested in solutions and learning any lessons that might be applicable elsewhere.

There have been some positive developments. A new bus users group has been set up by the council, which is starting to act as a good conduit for complaints. Arriva is now looking at adjusting some of the routes to ameliorate some of the major problems that have arisen. It is a helpful development that the remit of Passenger Focus has been broadened to include bus services, which have always been the Cinderella service compared with train services.

I appreciate that it is right for much of the detail to be resolved at the local level rather than coming before Parliament, but I have sought to raise this subject in the House because I think we can learn some lessons from this unhappy state of affairs that may be helpful across other areas of the country. The Minister has kindly indicated that he will look at the notification period and I hope that that might be extended to review the process of consultation, as different groups in the affected constituency must be involved if there is to be a major restructuring of the bus network. I suggest that that should include not just unitary authority councils, but parish and town councils, and I also suggest it should include the local hospital and GP practices, because if people are unable to get to their appointments in time, that is a serious public health issue. It is vital that schools are involved as well, because if pupils cannot get in to sit their exams on time, or simply cannot arrive on time for ordinary classes, that is an issue. Milton Keynes has such a low housing density that schools have large catchment areas, so pupils have to travel considerable distances.

[Mark Lancaster]

There might have been more than 450 people at the meeting that my hon. Friend and I attended. Does he agree that they expressed great anger that there was almost no consultation and that they did not have the opportunity to make their voice heard about the changes that were made?

[Iain Stewart]

My hon. Friend is exactly right. If people had been consulted at the outset, many of these problems could have been avoided.

There is a trade-off between having a fast route between any two points in a city and having the route go through the main residential areas, but it is surely not beyond wit and wisdom to have a two-tier service with, perhaps, one express bus that does not call everywhere and the next bus as a stopping service that goes to all the different residential areas. These details should be worked out between the operators, the council and the different groups that I have identified, and I would also include local employers in the consultation. I am pleased that the coalition Government agreement has a provision to encourage greater co-operation between councils and bus operators, and I am interested to hear what further comments on that the Minister might be able to make.

Finally, I ask the Minister to take account of the evidence from Milton Keynes and other areas where there are bus problems and to look again at the effectiveness of the provisions of the Local Transport Act 2008, particularly in relation to quality partnerships and contracts. I know they were introduced fairly recently, but I think it is appropriate now to review their effectiveness and consider what further changes might be made.

The decentralisation Bill is due later this year. We want to encourage greater devolution and decentralisation, and also open-source planning that leads to properly sustainable communities. I hope that that Bill might be an appropriate vehicle through which to address the changes I have discussed in this debate.

I do not believe it is right for central Government to be overly prescriptive in determining what bus system operates in what area. What works in one area might not be applicable elsewhere, and, as I have said, Milton Keynes is unique in its design. However, I hope that by raising this subject I have brought to the Minister’s attention the fact that there is serious disquiet in Milton Keynes, and I would be grateful to learn of any steps he might take to encourage greater co-operation and consultation. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to raise this issue, and I hope my postbag on it will start to decline after this debate.