Letter from Westminster and Bristol March 2009

It's a beautiful sunny Saturday in Bristol and thoughts turn to longer hours of daylight, days out…oh and elections too. At least this years election season will take place mainly in late April and May so it will be great to be out meeting lots of voters on the doorstep. But it's also a great time to wander round and explore Bristol. It's possible that the economic circumstances of 2009 will compel more people to visit more of Bristol's attractions and holiday in Britain. Along with the MPs for Bristol East and Kingswood I went to what is arguably one of the best tourist attractions in the entire country, Brunel's SS Great Britain, to promote the start of the British tourist season. So if you haven't been down to the harbour recently, please pay a visit!

I made lots of other local visits and attended Bristol events throughout March. Further down the harbour I visited the Underfall Yard by the Cumberland Basin to hear about long term plans for the area. I also attended dinners and events to celebrate community policing, media innovation and the local business community. I attended the Clifton Police Partners and Communities ("PACT") meeting and the launch of the 6th Form Academy at City of Bristol College. Staying with local education, I spoke at an event in the Council House to discuss raising achievement and educational opportunities for black children.

In Westminster there were votes on a few key Bills. The Labour and Tory dinosaurs were out in force to block reforms to party funding in the Parties and Elections Bill. Labour will still get millions from the unions and the Tories will still spend millions in marginal seats all year round.

Gordon Brown promised when he became Premier that he would strengthen the House of Commons and improve regional accountability. I thought setting up regional select committees of MPs would be a step forward in scrutinising regional policy and quangos. But control freak Brown has insisted that Labour have a majority on each one. The seats are to be divided up seven for Labour, three for the Tories and one for the Lib Dems in each region. This is a nonsense in both the South West and South East, where Labour are the third party and the North East where the Tories have only one MP and would have to import members from outside the region. We voted against the proposal and have refused to take up our seats, as have the Tories. Two of Bristol's Labour MPs have taken places on the lame duck South West committee.

I also attended the House of Commons on one of the Fridays in March. I prefer to spend Fridays at constituency events but occasionally in the last four years I've stayed in London (though this time I was back in Bristol for a Thursday night event and then got the train back on Friday morning…) to support Private Members' Bills. At least a hundred MPs have to vote for a Bill for it to progress to the next stage. I supported my colleague David Heath's Fuel Poverty Bill. The Bill had two simple measures, more home insulation and a social tariff for fuel bills. It was supported by a broad coalition of anti-poverty, elderly rights and climate change related charities. But the government declined to back it, meaning few Labour MPs turned up and some that did were there to "talk it out".

In the end the Bill failed by 11 votes. Very irritating.

As well as visiting schools and college or university departments in Bristol I also encourage them to come to Parliament. This month there was a visit by the junior section of Badminton School. I've received some lovely thank you letters from the girls. Bishop Road school's year 6 have done some great paintings for a Big Ben Christmas card competition and it was a hard job to choose an entry to put forward for the national competition. Several engineering Phd students from both Bristol and UWE showed a display of their work in the Terrace Pavilion and some chemistry students also came to an event to discuss science teaching.

March saw the Lib Dems' Spring weekend conference in Harrogate. I spoke at two fringe meetings, for the NUS and also the schools and colleges teaching unions. The main business for me was the debate on my paper on Further and Higher Education policies. We now have a full set of interesting proposals for all the different types of adult learners.

Back to law making. I've spent a lot of time this month on the Apprentices, Skills, Children and Learning Bill. As you might guess from the title this is a bit of a camel of a Bill, jointly promoted by the Department of Innovation, Universities & Skills that I shadow and the Department of Children, Schools and Families shadowed by my colleague David Laws. The Bill has 256 draft clauses and each of this, plus all the accompanying schedules, is examined in detail at the committee stage. The committee is made up of 19 MPs and the government of course has a majority. Opposition MPs proposed amendments which are debated and then either withdrawn (the points being made "on the record") or voted upon.

The government will usually win. But one Thursday morning at just after 9am there weren't enough Labour MPs present so the government lost three votes! The government's deputy chief whip (a Glaswegian charmer who scares the death out of many Labour MPs) was so angry that he refused to allow the committee to rise in the afternoon. Fortunately as I had covered the two previous Thursdays so David could be in Yeovil, hew as covering this particular afternoon. The Committee in the end continued until 4.30am on Friday morning and then reassembled at 8.15am to finish the Bill. What a way to run a country. A lucky escape for me, but it would have made a good Parliamentary nonsense anecdote…

Among my other Shadow DIUS duties in March was to speak at a reception for the Chancellors of UK universities, a pretty distinguished body of the national great and good. I also spoke at the NUS Lobby of Parliament, met the Royal College of Nursing about student nursing issues and two industry

bodies about intellectual property.

The chief exec of the Learning and Skills Council resigned this month over the fiasco of the delays in Further Education colleges' capital expenditure. Colleges up and down the country have their building plans on hold. The government have said that during the recession that they want to accelerate capital spending. But the LSC have more schemes approved than there is money available. In the special Commons debate on the issue I point out this is a slamming of the brakes rather than an acceleration. We need colleges to give people new skills and the construction industry certainly needs the building work. Architects and other construction consultants have been losing their jobs in Bristol over this mess.

One big construction project on the horizon is the Severn Barrage. For a few months Lib Dem MPs, Welsh Assembly Members and councillors from either side of the river have been hearing evidence on the various schemes to harness the tidal power of the Severn. We had our final meeting this month at the National Assembly in Cardiff Bay and will announce our conclusions later in April.

Another infrastructure scheme, which I'm keen to promote, is the electrification of the Great Western main railway line out of Paddington to Bristol and South Wales. High speed rail is the way forward for inter-city travel in Europe, not expansion of aviation. I tabled a Commons motion on the issue in March and discussed it on Radio Bristol.

Several constituents visited Westminster on lobbies in March. Students came to discuss funding for HIV/Aids medicine. A group came to discuss the terrible situation in Gaza. Another group came to discuss Tibet, on the fiftieth anniversary of the uprising against Chinese rule. On the following Sunday I went to the Pierian Centre in St Pauls to meet with a larger group, many of them Bristol Amnesty members who write to me on a large variety of human rights issues. The event was to welcome Tibetan dissident Palden Gyatso, a survivor of the 1959 uprising who had spent 33 years in a Chinese prison. My colleague Norman Baker is President of the UK Tibet Society and when I told him earlier in the week that I was meeting Palden he said he was "serene" considering all he'd been through And so he was. We both spoke to the meeting (with an interpreter) and I was presented with two Tibetan silk scarves. There was also a Tibetan buffet. I enjoyed the savoury items but don't recommend Tibetan tea, made with yak's milk!

In Parliament I attended events for Cancer Research UK, to promote further tobacco control measures and Cadbury's…er, which was an excuse to stuff my face with Easter eggs! I also hosted WWF's giant light switch, in order to promote Earth Hour on 28th March. This was a world wide event to turn off lights and save energy and draw attention to climate change. There were several events in Bristol and I marked it with over fifty other Lib Dems at Cotham Parish Hall where we gathered together councillors from the past, present and the hopeful futures…which comes back to those elections to be held on 4th June. Let's hope for lots of fine campaigning weather between now and then.

Stephen Williams MP

Bristol West (Liberal Democrat)

Parliamentary email - stephenwilliamsmp@parliament.uk