My Croxley - March 2009

Spring tends to be one of the busiest times of the year for MPs. It is the election season (June rather than May this year, because of the European elections), plenty of events in the constituency ( like Ricky Week and the Rickmansworth Canal Festival) and Parliament focuses on the economy, which means plenty of work for me as a member of the Conservative Treasury team.

This year, there are also plenty of local issues affecting the people of South West Hertfordshire. Top of the list are issues relating to schools.

Secondary school admissions has long been a problem in our part of the world and this year’s admissions has left more families disappointed than ever before – especially in the Croxley area.

In some respects, we are victims of the success of extremely popular schools like Rickmansworth School. But that is little consolation to disappointed families.

What can we do about it?

Changing the admissions criteria of Rickmansworth School by banning selection would create more local places, although it would fundamentally change the culture of the school and I am sceptical that this would be the right long term solution all round.

Ultimately, we need more good school places. This can be done by turning round the less popular schools, expanding the existing popular schools or even creating a new school for local children. To do the latter, we will need to change our system which makes it so difficult to create new schools.

As an MP, I do not have control over the distribution of school places. However, I can try to bring together the various authorities to see if we can resolve and I have been pressing the local authority and local schools to see if we can find a solution.

Admittedly, these long term solutions will not help families struggling for a place this September. We need to make sure that the appeals process works fairly and sympathetically, there are no fraudulent applications for places and that everything is done to raise standards at other schools.

A second schools issue has been sixth form funding. At the end of March – and completely out of the blue – local schools learnt that their sixth form funding was to be cut by up to £70,000. Like other MPs, I have been putting pressure on the Government to reverse these cuts which would have given schools no time to budget for the disappearing money.

At the time of writing, the Government have now promised to reverse the cuts but schools are still waiting for the details.

As I mentioned earlier, Parliament focuses on the economy in the Spring. First, we have the Budget where the depressing figures for the public finances were revealed. Following the Budget, I tend to spend a lot of time meeting with local businesses to discuss the economy. We have not been immune from the recession in South West Hertfordshire – unemployment has doubled in the constituency in the last 12 months – but we all hope that economy will pick up before long.

Following the Budget, there is the Finance Bill which implements the tax law changes announced in the Budget. As with all Bills, this gets line by line scrutiny by a Parliamentary committee and for the fourth year running I am serving on the committee. The Bill is 421 pages long, so much of May and June will be taken up with this important but rather unglamorous work.

This is my first House Note and I hope this gives some insight into the range of activities that our undertaken as an MP. But no two months are the same and what we do varies depending upon what is happening in Parliament and the issues facing our constituents. If you have a worry, do let me know.