Christmas Adjournment

Jack Lopresti Excerpts

Tuesday 20th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Jack Lopresti (Filton and Bradley Stoke) (Con)]

I wish to address two very important constituency issues: transport infrastructure improvements, and education provision in Filton and Bradley Stoke.

The Metrobus scheme will provide a dedicated bus route from the south of Bristol to the northern fringe of Bristol, including my constituency, in order to provide an alternative to private car journeys. It should carry 600,000 passengers per year, which equates to roughly 820 two-person car journeys a day. It is a key element in encouraging economic growth and unlocking future housing potential. It is a £100 million project funded by the Department for Transport, South Gloucestershire Council and Bristol City Council. I have always been a keen supporter of the scheme and remain so.

However, the Metrobus works have caused major congestion, disruption and delays for the residents of Bradley Stoke and the surrounding areas. For example, one of my constituency team usually has a 10 to 15-minute drive home during the rush hour, but one evening she had a journey that took nearly two hours, most of which was stuck in stationary traffic. As a resident of Almondsbury, with my constituency office in Bradley Stoke, I have experienced and shared the frustration of people stuck in these jams during commuting hours without much evidence at times, it seems, of work actually taking place on the Metrobus route. Constituents have reported to me that, while stuck in their cars in traffic jams, they have seen workmen asleep on the site. The works have taken too long and are over time, and initially there was no understanding or appreciation that people have to get in and out of Bradley Stoke every day to travel to school and work. The project has suffered from a lack of communication by the contractors and the council with locals.

I organised and chaired a public meeting earlier this year to get local people face to face with the contractors, the council and First Bus representatives. A few weeks ago, I organised a meeting with the Alun Griffiths road contractors, MetroBus, South Gloucestershire Council, including the lead councillor responsible for transport in South Gloucestershire, Councillor Colin Hunt, and local Bradley Stoke town councillors, to try to find a workable solution to the congestion. I also met the Secretary of State for Transport a week or so ago to bring the issue to his attention and ask for his help.

Of course, I understand that major transport infrastructure projects and improvement works will cause disruption and jams occasionally. However, right next door to the congestion is the M4-M5 managed motorway scheme, which was constructed by Balfour Beatty on time and on budget. Often the contractors worked through the night and at all hours. One evening they removed a pedestrian bridge and replaced it that same night. The works were completed with minimum disruption to local residents.

I suggested to the Alun Griffiths contractors that those ought to be the methods that they should aspire to adopt, but I was told that they could not work longer hours due to health and safety considerations. Future transport infrastructure improvements should be done along the lines of the managed motorway scheme, with minimum disruption to local road users, rather than along the lines of the initially shambolic MetroBus works in my constituency.

Since the recent meeting that I organised with the stakeholders, greater efforts have been made to communicate with local residents, and progress has been made in assisting the flow of traffic to minimise the impact on local road users at peak times. However, the MetroBus works need to be completed as quickly as possible, so that we can start reaping the benefits of the scheme.

The other local issue that I want to raise relates to Winterbourne International Academy in my constituency. The Ridings Federation of Academies, which runs that academy and Yate International Academy in the constituency of Thornbury and Yate, was issued with a financial notice to improve and provide a plan on how it would achieve a balanced budget, as it has a potential deficit of £1 million. Winterbourne International Academy has had some issues with its leadership and management over the past year or two, and it now finds itself in a position where it needs to be re-brokered into a new academy structure.

During that process, parents, teachers and pupils felt that they were not being kept informed. I and my parliamentary neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Thornbury and Yate (Luke Hall), were contacted by a large number of constituents who were very concerned about what was happening at the school. My hon. Friend and I met my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education to bring the matter to her attention. We also met Rebecca Clark, the regional schools commissioner for south-west England, and I met the chair of trustees, Claire Emery. That enabled us to get more background information about the situation in which the federation finds itself, and to respond to our constituents and reassure them that everything possible was being done to find a solution to the difficulties in which the schools find themselves.

Winterbourne International Academy will now be taken over by a new trust. The trustees of the Ridings Federation of Academies have considered their options and communicated their recommendations to the regional schools commissioner, who has taken them to Lord Nash, the Minister, for the final decision. There should be full clarity about who will run the trust early in the new year, but I want to place it on the record that, in future, better communication with parents, pupils and staff is needed.

I understand that the outcome that parents, pupils and staff are hoping for is that the school becomes part of a multi-academy trust managed jointly by the existing Olympus Academy Trust, which runs the successful Bradley Stoke Community School, and the Castle School Education Trust, which runs the successful Castle School in Thornbury. I welcome the recent news that, with effect from 3 January 2017, Dave Baker, chief executive officer of Olympus Academy Trust, and Will Roberts, CEO of Castle School Education Trust, will jointly provide interim leadership support for Winterbourne International Academy, with a view to appointing a principal at the end of January.

The third issue that I want to address ties in with my membership of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee and the Defence Committee. After the Good Friday agreement, hundreds of convicted terrorists were let out of prison in the name of peace and reconciliation. There are, therefore, lots of former terrorists walking the streets, some of whom have worked their way up into eminent positions in political life. We had the debacle over the on-the-runs letters and the John Downey case, where there is essentially a de facto amnesty for former terrorists, and yet the full force of the law is being used to prosecute people who were on the other side of events: former soldiers who were just doing their best, doing their duty and serving our great country. This is clearly wrong, and it smacks of victors’ justice. It cannot be right to let terrorists out of prison and give them get-out-of-jail letters at the same time as we pursue former British soldiers. Surely, if there is to be lasting peace and reconciliation, there needs to be fairness on all sides—not that I think for one minute that there is any moral equivalence between terrorists, and soldiers and security forces trying to keep the peace and protect lives.

My younger son, Michael, passed out of his basic military training in Pirbright a couple of weeks ago. Of course, I am immensely proud of him. When he is, as I hope he will be, deployed on an operational tour and he asks me for advice—not that sons are very good at asking their fathers for advice, but I have done an operational tour myself—do I say to him, “Be careful,” because if mistakes are made, if things go wrong or if the politics change, even 45 years later, he could be pursued through the courts in his retirement in nothing less than a politically motivated witch hunt? I do not think so. My advice would be the same as the advice I received before my operational tour: “If you feel as though your life is in danger or your comrades’ lives are in danger, do not hesitate to defend yourself.” Our Government need to support former servicepeople against this injustice, because what is happening is a stain on our country’s honour. We are letting down so badly the people who risked their life to keep us safe, protect our freedoms and preserve our way of life.