The Cornerstone Group

Time to heed the advice of Corpoal Jones ‘Don’t panic Mr Mainwaring! Don’t panic!’ Yes Brown has bounced higher than we hoped with Labour hitting 40 per cent in the latest poll against our 33. Yes the news about Tony Lit our candidate in the Ealing Southall by- election takes some of the sheen off the defection of six labour councillors in that constituency. But to quote Churchill (quoting Clough) ‘westward, look, the land is bright.’ The same poll found that seventy per cent of the public think it is better for parents to be married. 57 per cent even thought that ministers should encourage marriage.  There is slightly less support for the married couples’ tax breaks, but 49 per cent in favour against 44 per cent against is not bad going for a proposal which has only just been trailed in the media.

And with the left and right of the party united in support of a policy Brown cannot steal we should be encouraged. I do not say these polls should be simply shrugged off. But look at Brown’s flagship new policy: to build 3 million new homes by 2020. This new target is fraught with hazards for the government. Becasue of density requirements, most of these will be flats not houses.  If, as seems likely, there is to be a slump in the housing market these flats- which will be built with taxpayers’ money- will become less and less desirable.

 House prices anyway have increased on average six times as much as those of flats. And as Macmillan found as Housing Minister in Churchill’s post war government, cocnentration on a target tends to lead to corners being cut in terms of quality. Ultimately Brown wants to return to the traditional labour policiy of council dwellings. So the likely result is that the country will be littered with low quality housing that no one wants to move into.
 
Then there is the environmental impact. The definition of ‘brownfield
sites’ has been extended to include land formerly used as gardens.
Brown’s target is an open goal for us.

Tomorrow I’m going to discuss the great unmentionable about how
immigration fuels a lot of extra housing demand.
 

Edward Leigh MP

This week I have consistently tried to highlight some of the Prime Minister’s schemes enacted as Chancellor.

But one of the most disastrous has been his signature policy - the Tax Credits scheme. Figures for the last year are still to be published but nearly £6bn has already been overpaid to families in the three short years prior to that.

The Treasury assures us these credits help families out of poverty and back into work. They don’t tell us that clawing the money back has the opposite effect. I do not recall any other issue, with the exception of pensions, that has plagued the Chancellor so much. And for good reason.

I meet many families at my surgeries who have been driven to distraction by the problems tax credits have caused and I have received many letters from others facing the same problems.

At the very worst, families have been left distraught and dismayed. At best they are left with a huge headache, increased stress and financial insecurity as they wonder if their payments are correct or if indeed they will be forced into making repayments they cannot afford.

And yet the Government states that the situation is getting better. They must be joking.

Official Government figures claim that 56,000 fewer families were overpaid in 2005/2006 than in the previous year. However, as a percentage that amounts is less than a 3% improvement, despite assurances that the problem would be solved. By my calculations it would take a further 17 years and £13.5bn of overpayments, with all the misery clawback causes, before the problem is dealt with.

The truth is that overpayments most hurt those the system is said to be designed to help. Yet the former Chancellor continues to deny the heartache he has caused.

An apology should be forthcoming but sadly he isn’t big enough to make one. Does that mean he is not big enough to be Prime Minister?

Brian Binley MP

Ok. So it was a bit long yesterday. Sorry about that. But I hope you got the point about the need to smack Gordon Brown with his own record. And nothing underlines the paucity of his record more than his total lack of understanding of the needs of the small business sector.

The Department of Trade and Industry, despite Government spin, has proved to be immensely unfriendly to Small and Medium Sized Enterprises. You only have to look at the Audit report of 2006 to know what a mess the Small Business Service was in and to recognise that 3000 different schemes were falling over one another to spend tax-payers money without providing the help that small businesses needed.

The patchy performance of the regional development agencies provide another area of concern and they have not achieved the sort of success with business that I would want to see and, I assume, would you.

The very clever Mr Brown in 2002 eased the rules for incorporation of one-man businesses, many of whom were consultants, allowing them to gain from the ensuing tax benefit whilst at the same time letting the Government boast of a massive increase in business creation, which of course it never was.

Sadly, the Chancellor then recognised his mistake and in this year’s Budget over-corrected by laying a massive tax increase of 16% on small businesses. This might have helped to compensate somewhat for his mistake but certainly hit those genuine small businesses that wanted to grow. Make no mistake Brown is not known as the Clunking Fist for nothing.

Gordon Brown’s record of supporting business creation and development is unimpressive to say the least, and he underlines that fact by appointing a Cabinet devoid of any real business experience.

In a world of ever increasing global competition, Britain’s wealth-producing sector has to be at the very top of its game if it is to continue to produce the wealth that all our services rely upon, and on which the future of all our children and grandchildren depend.

Is Gordon Brown the man to help business achieve that objective? His record suggests otherwise and we should be prepared to say so on every occasion.

Brian Binley MP

Down to Earth

Although Gordon Brown’s total tax take increased by £25 billion in the last financial year to bring it to a record £423 billion, feeding the inflated public sector is now so costly that even this huge amount does not leave enough to make up for ten year’s neglect of the nation’s road system.

Doing nothing is not an option.  The consequences of inertia were spelt out in a report which he commissioned from his own guru, Sir Rod Eddington last December, who pointed out that an overstretched transport system would constrain economic growth. 

Crucially though, when it came to public spending on roads, Sir Rod also gave Gordon the ultimate opt-out.  He told the Chancellor that comprehensive road-pricing could cut congestion by half and produce economic benefits worth a total of £28 billion a year by 2025.

“Given the scale of the congestion challenge, I believe that there is no attractive alternative to road pricing,” he wrote.  “Without a widespread scheme by 2015, the UK will require very significantly more transport infrastructure.”

Hidden in the small print though was a warning that is now proving only too prescient: “… road pricing on this scale is new and at this stage has unknown implementation costs. There are very significant risks and uncertainties involved in delivering a pricing policy, particularly around the technology needed for its delivery. Potential technologies exist but have never been used at a national level.”  The costs, he estimated, could be between £10 and £60 billion.

However, there is an even more mundane show stopper.  In 2005, 2,193,000 vehicle owners failed to pay their vehicle excise duty, compared with 1,240,000 in 2004.  One in 15 are dodging road tax and speeding fines and, even more striking, more than a million speeding fines are not paid each year, partly because the drivers cannot be traced.

I have seen successful road pricing schemes in North America and Europe; the key to their success is firm but fair enforcement, based on an accurate database and the active co-operation of the majority of drivers.

In contrast, a recent survey of the data held by our own Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency showed that 32 percent of records contained errors, and 10 percent contained significant errors.

Therein, lies the problem.  To process all these data requires a massive database, on a scale that has never yet been attempted, yet the government is unable even to maintain an accurate record of vehicle registrations and drivers.  New Labour are already notorious for their expensive IT failures, so the chances of them maintaining an accurate road charging database are next to nil.  Without it, comprehensive road pricing cannot succeed.

To all intents and purposes, this immensely ambitious project is dead, leaving Gordon Brown squeezed between rising congestion and the need for more road capacity, with nowhere to go and no money in the kitty

Tomorrow, I offer some ideas for the way forward.

Pay up and pay the game

New Labour was elected on a simplistic anti-car platform; increasing public transport would replace car usage. After the 1997 general election, the spectacularly incompetent Transport Secretary, John Prescott, said, “I will have failed if in five years time there are not … far fewer journeys by car. It’s a tall order but I urge you to hold me to it.”

In December 1999, he promised: “We’re going to have a transport system to rival the best in Europe” (only to telephone a senior official the next day for the facts and figures about how far behind Europe our transport system was).

The following year, in his 10-Year Plan, he then promised congestion would be reduced by up to six percent by 2010.  Despite massive spending on public transport, local bus use was to decline by 11 percent on the decade and even with over £1 billion in subsidies, fares would increase by 20 percent. Gordon Brown’s extra spending simply failed to prevent the remorseless rise of vehicle ownership, from 26.3 million in 1996 to 29.7 million in 2001 and to 33.4 million in 2006.

By the time Alastair Darling took over in 2001 he could do nothing other than admit the obvious: Prescott’s policies had utterly failed. Darling conceded defeat and announced that he expected a 20 percent rise in congestion by 2010.

To deal with this, however, was going to require expensive new roads – a complete U-turn in New Labour policy – and, as long as Gordon Brown was paying the bills, this was never going to happen.  The new Transport Secretary, therefore, came up with an answer – universal road charging, imposing pay-as-you drive charges on every motorist in the country.

The only way such an ambitious scheme could work though was to adopt relatively new and untried technology using satellite positioning, such as the GPS system that was being provided free of charge by the United States government.  On the grounds that there were doubts about whether GPS would be continuously available, Darling gambled on the EU developing a rival system Galileo. 

In 2002, he and his EU colleagues staked £3 billion on its development; this has so far cost the UK taxpayers an estimated  £500 million.

Then, in June 2005 he announced his intention to launch his nation-wide scheme, with trials starting in 2010, the charges eventually replacing road tax and petrol duty.  The change was needed, he said, if the UK was to avoid the possibility of “LA-style gridlock” within 20 years.

Nevertheless, Darling was not to see the plan through.  He gave way to the current Transport Secretary, Douglas Alexander, who said in one of his first speeches in office that he considered road pricing “a personal priority” which could be introduced nationally by 2016.

He proposed a series of regional trials, “to inform the debate” in return for substantial payments for local infrastructure improvements, from a new Transport Innovation Fund.  His declared aim was to move “…the debate from ‘why’ to ‘how’ we might make a national system work in practice”.

However, public opinion was moving the other way and Alexander was confronted with 1.8 million signatories to a Downing Street petition who called for road pricing to be abandoned.  Meanwhile, the technical wheels were coming off Gordon Brown’s transport wagon. 

Tomorrow, I explore the reasons for this.

Stuck in a traffic jam?  Blame Gordon.

We groan under the weight of over 150 stealth taxes since Gordon “Prudence” Brown took office in 1997 – now amounting to £1,500 for every working person in the country – but, as every driver knows, to enable him to sustain his reckless level of spending, in ten years as Chancellor, he has also milked the road transport system. 

During that period, Britain’s major road network has increased by less than one percent, motorway traffic has grown by 36 percent.

Yet, for the “privilege” of suffering more and more congestion, Mr Brown has been extracting £42.2 billion a year from road users: fuel tax £22.1 billion; Vehicle Excise Duty £4.6 billion; VAT on vehicles £6.8 billion; VAT on fuel £5.6 billion and company car tax £3.1 billion – plus another £75.2 billion into the economy through their purchase of vehicles, fuel and basic running costs.

By contrast, the expenditure on UK roads infrastructure in 2003 (the last figures available) was a mere £6.7 billion.  As a result, our motorway network now ranks among the least developed in Europe (motorway network length to unit of GDP). The UK is fourteenth out of a European league table of 15 - only Ireland has fewer miles.  Congestion is estimated to cost the country at least £15 billion a year.
 
Not only that, Gordon Brown has also been skimping on road repairs, threatening irreparable damage to the very infrastructure on which he so much relies.

By 2002, the repairs backlog was estimated at  £7.4bn, and by this year, English local authorities were complaining that it would take 11.1 years just to clear the existing shortfall.  However, instead of being allowed to spend funds already paid by road users, to repair roads properly, local authorities were having to fill potholes at a rate of over one million a year, at a cost of £37 million.

Remarkably, in 2007, even more was spent on compensation for damage to vehicles, which amounted to £43 million. This did not include the cost of the 42,000 days of local authority staff time spent handling claims.

This fiasco is the responsibility of Gordon Brown.  Not only has he had absolute control of the money, he has manoeuvred into post the last two Transport Secretaries, two Scottish lawyers - Alistair Darling (so close he is now hot favourite to be the next Chancellor), and former Edinburgh solicitor Douglas Alexander, who started off his political career as Brown’s Parliamentary researcher and speechwriter.  Between them, they have come up with a cunning plan: to charge us even more.

Tomorrow, I will reveal how the wheels are coming off this “cunning plan”.

Owen Paterson is MP for North Shropshire and Shadow Minister of State for Transport

In the Brown Stuff

How rapid and comprehensive is Gordon Brown’s attempt to distance himself from Tony Blair’s legacy. But we know that when he says ‘mistakes were made’, what he really means is ‘we made mistakes.’ The very strong influence which Mr Brown demanded – and has exercised – over government for the last decade compromises his strenuous effort to disown the government’s failure.

Rarely before Brown has a Chancellor ranged so widely over government policy. From foreign affairs to health policy, he has issued ideas and direction throughout the Blair years, usually without the direct involvement of relevant ministers and often to the Prime Minister’s annoyance.

As a result, Brown has been the instrument of much of what’s gone wrong and the barrier to putting it right. Nowhere is this more true than in the public services. More rooted in orthodox Labour thinking than Blair, Brown is reported to have blocked radical reform early in the life of the government. He has certainly spent lavishly, but his case on public sector cost effectiveness and productivity is very unimpressive.

Brown’s strategy is clear – to push Labour to the ‘right’ on issues like Britishness (for which we should read Europe), geopolitics, and aspiration; and, simultaneously, to pull to the left on the Third World and disadvantage. As for environmental policy, he’s more ‘push me, pull you’ – heading in different directions at the same time. But he knows well that all of this will come to nothing unless he can detach himself from the public’s conclusion that New Labour has let them down.

By linking Labour’s misdemeanours to Blair, Gordon Brown hopes to escape punishment. Turning Queen’s evidence is risky enough when you are a mere accomplice, but when you planned and executed the job, as Brown has, you are likely to be judged very harshly indeed.

John Hayes is Co-Chairman of The Cornerstone Group