MacMillan Coffee Morning

Today I joined the worlds biggest coffee morning raising money for MacMillan Cancer support when I joined Emma Russell and her helpers at Cawston Grange Primary School. The idea of lots of events all taking place at the same time is a great one and I know just how much support MacMillan provide. My mum used to be active in the organisation in Rugby and both my parents have benefitted from the back up they provide. Lots of people at the event I visited, and with I understand another half dozen in Rugby and thousands across the country I hope a good sum has been raised.

Business Feedback

Yesterday I joined many former colleagues in the foodservice packaging industry at their annual lunch at the House of Commons. The location and my current regular activity are a coincidence!It is regular date and somewhere the member enjoy attending. I was interested to learn how people were finding the current market and the consenus is that things are difficult. With little new investment in the catering sector, few new restaurant openings and a contraction in the workplace as unemployment increases, the only way for a muanufacturer or distributor to increase sales is at the expense of competitors which is leading to huge pressure on price & margins. This in turn is leading to either business failure or consolidation between companies. Once again I picked up the message of how essential it is that we quickly get business moving again and return to a more orderly market.

Rugby Rail Users Group

On Wednesday evening I attended a meeting of RRUG when Chris Gibb, Chief Operating Officer of Virgin Trains spoke. Virgin operate the London to Scotland service which passes through Rugby on the West Coast Main Line which has just been the subject of massive public investment leading to a revised service . Communcations are vital to Rugby's prosperity and so it was interesting to be involved in a discussion on recent changes among regular and knowledgeable users of the service. The service to London has settled down as much improved both on reliability and journey time as I know from my own experience of fairly infrequent jouneys down to Westminster. More contentious has been the reduced frequency from Rugby to the north west which has arisen from the political imperative to shorten journey times between London and the major connurbations of Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow. The easy way to do this is for the train to stop less frequently and so there are now fewer stops at Rugby and places like Lichfield and Crewe. Again I have had my own experience of this and have decided that it will probably be better for me to travel to party conference in Manchester by car rather than wait to change at Birmingham New Street. It will be important to continue to lobby people like Chris to ensure that the needs of all of Rugby's travellers are taken into account in any future changes.
I learnt a great deal about the structure and operation of the railway industry including the nature of the franchises offered to operators and the tender process; the intensity of use on the West Coast Mail Line and the challenges of meeting all the demands placed on it; the time for a station stop within a timetable (5 minutes) and the minimum time gap necessary between trains (7 minutes); the nature of the Christmas 2007 disruption; the problems caused by the rising price of copper leading to cable theft; the complexities of different IT systems running the ticket booking process; concerns about travelling with cycles; and the challenges of developing a new and separate High Speed Service and the possible implications of that for Rugby.
I hope to take a closer look at the impact of all of these in the near future.

Coldplay at Wembley

On Friday Tracy & I were at Wembley for the Coldplay concert. I had expected the audience to be mainly older and was surprised by the age range and the number of families. Coldplay were superb, put on a really good show of old favourites and all of their latest album, Viva la Vida. This was my first visit to the new stadium and I was very impressed by all the facilities including the link to the Tube station where we were easily able to get into central London afterwards.

The deteriorating economic position

During the County Council election campaign in May, Philip Hammond Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury came to Rugby and spoke to local business owners & managers. Philip out the state of the Governments finances in perspective by telling the audience that the country was borrowing £1 for every £4 it was spending. In today's Times leader column headed "fainting by numbers - new figures on goverment debt show the landscape is rockier than we imagined" there are more scary numbers: national debt at over £800 billion or £25,000 per family; debt increasing at £6000 per second; every day £83 million having to be found to pay the interest and by 2013/14 accounting for £63 billion a year or more than we will spend on transport & defence combined. Surely now no-one can be in any doubt of the magnitude of the task facing an incoming Government.

Leading on NHS policy

ConservativeHome has covered today's Times article here setting out the results of a poll asking which party would do the best on a series of issues. The headline is about NHS reform and the lead across the country is consistent with what Rugby voters have been telling us on this months survey. We have so far been on the doorstep in Admirals, Wolvey, Paddox, Benn & Newbold and in addion have been speaking to people across the constituency on the phone. I have heard many accounts of peoples experience of the NHS when the staff in the service receive much praise but where people find the system at fault and see huge waste and inefficiency. There is a real understanding that much needs to be changed, a point acknowledged by Andy Burnham, Health Secretary in his speech a couple of days ago. The shame is that it has taken the biggest recession for a generation which has led to huge pressure on spending for Labour to consider changes that should have been made years ago. Iain Dale blogged about Browns "cuts" speech "What was most intriguing was the moment when Brown said Labour would spend less on unnecessary things and low priorities. Which rather begs the question as to why any money was being spent in the first place on unnecessary things..." Just what have the Government been doing over the past 12 years, how much money has been wasted and how much better should our services be?

Canvassing in Wolvey

We had a great team out in Wolvey meeting residents with our survey on Saturday morning. Unfortunately our team photo obliterated the fantastic "Inspector Morse" Jag that was parked in the square!