Air Travel Organisers’ Licensing Bill

Lee Rowley Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 3rd July 2017 Commons Chamber

[Lee Rowley (North East Derbyshire) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for giving me the opportunity to contribute for the first time in this place. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard). I cannot hope to live up to his erudition and obvious knowledge of the subject. I am also grateful for the opportunity to be able to speak on the Bill, which I wholeheartedly support. When times change there is sometimes a need for regulations to change. Sometimes there is a need for no regulation, but in this case there is a need for regulations to change. I support that and I look forward to supporting the Bill in the coming months.

It is an honour and a privilege to represent the beautiful constituency of North East Derbyshire, a constituency of stunning landscapes, vibrant communities, rich ambition and a proud, proud heritage. We sit two hours away from here, nestled between the steel city of Sheffield in the north, the beauty of the Peak District in the west and the market town of Chesterfield in the east. My constituency has been happily and completely intertwined with Chesterfield for hundreds and hundreds of years. From that market town rises the crooked spire, with which some Members may be aware: a church that has been in place for over six centuries and which is notable for its spire not quite being as straight as it should be. It dominates the landscape of Chesterfield and my constituency for miles around. I am a son of that crooked spire. I was born only a few hundred metres away from where it has stood for those six and a half centuries.

There is something unique about having the privilege to serve in this place and I look forward in the coming months and years to doing so, but there is something particularly unique about having the opportunity to represent the place where I grew up and the people who gave me the very values I will speak of in this place when I have the opportunity to do so and to be able to talk about the area that made me. I have that privilege and I am incredibly grateful for that.

Before I enter North East Derbyshire into the obligatory most beautiful constituency competition—I assure hon. Members that my constituency will win hands down—I would like to spend a moment talking about my predecessors. I walk in huge and assured footsteps: the progeny of one of the founders of the industrial revolution, Francis Arkwright; one of the people who opened up the Derbyshire coal field, for which my constituency is so thankful and to which so much of its legacy is accorded, Alfred Barnes; and even a Nobel peace prize winner, Arthur Henderson, the three-times leader of the Labour party who did so much during the dark days of the 1930s for the causes of disarmament and peace.

I would just like to dwell for a moment on one particular person who had the privilege to represent North East Derbyshire: my immediate predecessor, Natascha Engel. I have been here but a moment, and I can already see the love and the respect that Members across the House have for Natascha, and I am happy to report that that love and respect is reciprocated in the constituency. In a time of fierce partisanship and, in my view, unnecessary rancour, I am happy to say that, despite having a different rosette from Natascha, I believe she was an exemplary Member of Parliament. I thank her for her 12 years’ service in the constituency and I hope she returns to public life soon, albeit representing a different area, if she chooses to come back to this place.

North East Derbyshire is a constituency of contrasts, from the beauty of the richly undulating hills of picture postcard-perfect villages such as Ashover and the beauty of the Cordwell and Moss valleys in the north and east, to the fiercely independent market town of Dronfield, with its monument to Sir Robert Peel’s repeal of the corn laws in the 1850s—an indication, I am sure, of my constituents’ dislike of unnecessary regulation, which is something I will remember. They give way in the east to a landscape at once both scarred by the endeavours of man and then rebuilt over time, as we return to our former glory in North East Derbyshire.

My constituency came of age in the service of its nation in the provision of energy. At one point a century ago, a predecessor of mine stood in this place and talked of 40,000 men in my constituency who were mining under its ground every single day. Mining is in my constituency’s blood and, like the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Laura Smith), I share that trait, in that both my grandparents were miners, including one who mined for a time at Westhorpe colliery in Killamarsh, a town that I now have the privilege to represent.

I am the son of a milkman who left school at 15 and went out to work every day before dawn in order to provide for his children and his wife. I am the son of a lady who left school at 16 and, through sheer force of will, went back to school in her 30s and, while holding down a job and bringing up two boisterous young boys, got two university degrees so that she could provide for her kids and make her life better. I am the great-nephew of the lady who ran the post office at Renishaw, a village in my constituency, and I am the nephew of an aunt who once went to work for the National Union of Mineworkers during the miners’ strike.

North East Derbyshire has demonstrated by electing its first Conservative Member of Parliament since 1931 that it has changed. I do not say that in the spirit of partisanship; I say it as it is merely a fact. In the same way that my constituency has changed, I think my family somehow reflects that change as well, from the descriptions that I have just given. That I am stood here today, a working-class boy able to talk in this place and represent the people I grew up with, is something that I will never forget. I will always seek to do my best for my constituency as a result.

Beautiful as my constituency is, and honoured as I am to be the winner of the competition that I have spoken about, my constituency also suffers from unique challenges and problems. We currently have the issue of inappropriate housing developments in the beautiful valleys that I have talked about, because the local council did not put in place the plans that it should have done years ago to avoid that. We have a fracking proposal in the beautiful Moss valley, which my constituents neither want nor wish to see happen, and I will support them in their opposition for as long as it is on the table. We also have the ever-growing burden of congestion, across a constituency as disparate as mine, which stops people getting around and stops businesses doing their daily work and which we have to tackle in these debates.

But my constituency is more than that. I pledge to my constituents that as long as I have the privilege to speak in this place, however long or short that is, I will work hard on their behalf and try my hardest every single day to make life better for them. Although I cannot guarantee that I will solve the problems that I have described or the ones that may come in future, I will try my hardest to mitigate the effects on them and resolve them where I can. If I have any time beyond my constituents, I will seek to dedicate it to this place, in trying to answer one of the big challenges of our time—a challenge that I, as someone new here, believe is growing and urgent and needs to be resolved. That is the challenge, at its most basic, of creating healthy, happy and prosperous communities that are bound together in tight union by energy, grit and determination.

I was born in 1980. According to some social commentators I am, to use that ugly word, a millennial and I sense something deeply amiss in my generation and the one that comes after it—a grave uncertainty, not about the politics of today or the policies that my Government are pushing forward, and which I wholeheartedly support, but something that is more visceral, more structural, more underlying. I feel that my generation is unsure about its place in the world. I feel that it is uncertain about where the world is going—that it feels that it is hurtling untethered into a place unknown and has been for 20, 30 or 40 years. I fear that my generation believes that it may be the first to hand over the world in a worse state than it found it, despite the best efforts of those on these Benches and all Benches in this place. We have to consider that as parliamentarians. We have to realise that my generation and other generations are unsure and uncertain.

However, I would also say to my generation, as frustrated as it is, that the easy words and warm allure of anecdote and emotion that I have seen in recent weeks, months and years is no substitute for good governance. In whatever time I have in this place, I will stand up for cool thinking and understanding and for articulating problems in a proper and clear way. In the time I have here, I will also stand up for the values of my constituency—values of compassion and emotion, but also the values of hard work, aspiration and ambition that my constituency has imbued in me. I will also stand up for the creed of free markets, liberal economics and capitalist progress—unfashionable as they may be in a field in Somerset, but the only engine for us to unshackle ourselves from the bonds of yesterday, that we may face the challenges of today and look forward to the future of tomorrow. While I have the opportunity to serve here, those are the things that I will put forward.