MP Blogs

Policy Exchange's latest report – Cities Unlimited – puts forward some radical proposals to address the continuing economic gap between Britain's cities. While we don't agree with everything they've put forward, the basis for the report is right - geography and history do constrain the economic potential of some British cities and towns. Places like Sunderland and Hull have undergone wrenching economic changes over the last half-century, leaving them with enduring economic and social challenges.

It's also true that the Government's regional economic policy, which seeks to promote convergence between the greater South East and the English regions, is increasingly unrealistic.

However, it's not time to write off the cities of the North – or to encourage a mass migration away from Britain's less-successful cities and towns.

Instead, policy-makers need to do more to prioritise resources – focusing regeneration, economic development and transport funding on areas where it will deliver the biggest economic impact. With careful planning, it's still possible to improve the economic performance of Northern cities and sustain the success of the greater South East.

How could both these goals be accomplished?

First, steps should be taken to build up the North's regional economic hubs, Leeds and Manchester, and to ‘network the North'. In the short term, resources should be focused on supporting business growth in the North's best-performing cities – for example, by improving infrastructure and the skills of local workers and thereby encouraging businesses to locate there. With improved transport links, neighbouring towns and cities like Burnley and Halifax would be able to tap into regional growth hot-spots – and develop a new economic role linked to Greater Manchester or the Leeds City Region.

Second, house-building in the South East needs to be geared towards making the entire region both denser and better-linked. There is a strong case for careful expansion in Cambridge, Oxford, and London, using some green-belt land, to ensure that these cities have the houses they need to support their local workforce. Massive expansion in places like Cambridge is both politically and economically unlikely, given local opposition to greenbelt development and the well-documented downturn in the house-building industry. Instead, policy attention should focus on adding denser, high-quality development in these cities – together with the transport links that enable residents to access jobs.

Finally, cities and towns across England need more control over the money that is spent in their areas. The Policy Exchange report makes a strong case for the devolution of regeneration spending – giving councils the ability to experiment with new ways to jump-start their communities. We agree that greater local control over resources would help to grow local economies. However, rather than give every district council in England its own budget, economic development funding should be allocated at the level of ‘real economies' – that is, the sub-regional or city-regional level.

Policy Exchange's urban vision presents challenges to politicians on both sides of the Commons. The Labour Government has staked significant political capital on its regeneration record and is not happy to hear its achievements questioned. The Tories, meanwhile, have been battling to regain votes in the cities, towns and suburbs of the North – and will find it hard to support calls from “Cameron's favourite thinktank” to ‘close down' the very places where they have been working to expand their political base.

Both parties should be focusing on policy ideas that help to improve the absolute economic performance of the North's biggest economic hubs – with complementary policies that help smaller cities and towns to benefit from their growth. That's the best way to keep the North open for business – and to underpin regeneration in the decades to come.

Dr Adam Marshall is head of policy at the Centre for Cities
www.centreforcities.org

Just a year ago, very fortunately, my constituency hadn’t really experienced knife crime. 12 months on, there have been six murders; more than anywhere else in the country. These unprecedented events have left the local community feeling shaken and scared, and have brought the issue of knife crime and its consequences to the forefront of all of our lives.

These tragic deaths are part of a wave of knife (and gun) crime that has hit the capital in recent weeks. I believe we must act now to take the lethal weapons off our streets and impose stiffer penalties for crimes of violence. I welcome the Government’s new measures to crack down on knife crime; such as the proposal that anyone over the age of 16 who is caught in possession of a knife will now be prosecuted on the first offence, instead of receiving a caution. Those who carry a knife need to know that they will be caught and should expect to end up in court and facing tough consequences. Young people need to understand that carrying a knife doesn’t protect you; it actually increases the danger for everyone, destroys young lives and ruins families.

But we also must recognise that robust action to rid our community of these weapons is no good in isolation. We need to employ both the carrot and the stick, and that means addressing the gang culture that breeds so much of the youth violence in our society, as well as investing in our young people.

This is where voluntary and youth groups have such a vital role to play; by getting young people off the streets, they are making a real difference. I see this every day in my constituency, where several local groups have been really successful in engaging young people and providing them with an alternative to the street. But what many people don’t realise is that they survive on a shoestring; dependent on the goodwill of volunteers to keep the show on the road. Without more funding it’s hard to see how they can continue or expand this vital work and address the real need out there on the street.

Isn’t it high time that we invested more in our young people rather than being so quick to condemn them? Let’s give them a chance to show us what they can do.

Click here for more details of a Westminster Briefing event on the Youth Crime Action Plan on October 23

This week President Sarkozy addresses the European Parliament on his priorities for France's six-month EU presidency as Euro-MPs debate China one month before the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Beijing.

Many MEPs hope that there will be a political boycott, as increasing reports of massive purge of dissidents and religious activists filter out of China. The regime is using terror as never before to control dissent. Sarkozy's earlier decision not to attend the opening ceremony after the events in Tibet during March, has apparently been reversed because of renewed talks between the regime and the Dalai Lama's representatives. He should think again.

Any politician planning to attend should first get informed about what happens in the real, hidden China. Below is my summary of the list of more than 50 methods of torture used against a middle-aged woman, now in prison again for the fourth time, to get her to recant her religious belief.

Tibet is a country which deserves to be freed from the oppression it has suffered since the Chinese occupation in 1949. Instead, this devout and quiet people see their monks being imprisoned in their hundreds for taking part in the March riots.

Such riots are now common across the whole territory ruled by the most vicious and murderous regime the world has ever known. The Chinese Communist Party is responsible for 70 million deaths of its own people, 38 million through deliberate starvation.

The growth of internet use, despite the thousands employed by the regime in the ‘great firewall of China’ has also seen a new activism. One group collected more than 10,000 signatures for its ‘we want human rights, not the Olympics’ campaign, before the organiser was imprisoned.

This week I am submitting a dossier to the UN on torture and religious freedom in China. It details the treatment of just two of the people I had contact with during my last visit to Beijing, in May 2006. All were subsequently arrested, some imprisoned, and three have been tortured.

Mr Cao Dong was a tour guide in Beijing. When I met him he was 42. He was terrified, but he came to a dingy hotel room to tell me about his life in a prison camp in North East China. There are about 15 such camps in that province alone, each holding thousands of the 7 million Chinese undergoing forced labour, or for many, torture.

Cao Dong said that one evening, his best friend was taken from their cell. Next, he saw his friends cadaver in the morgue with holes where body parts had been removed.

Cao Dong was one of hundreds of thousands of one religious group which the UN rapporteur on torture, Dr Manfred Nowak, believes make up the majority of torture victims. Falun Gong is a harmless and popular Buddha-school set of spiritual exercises.

Founded in 1992, by 1999 the movement had between 70 – 100 million adherents when the paranoid premier Zhang Zemin decided to persecute it. A Gestapo-like network of ‘610 Offices’ in most towns and cities, named after the June 10 1999 decree which initiated the scourge, systematically arrests, imprisons and tortures these innocent people, whose watchwords are ‘truthfulness, compassion, forbearance’.

The popularity of Falun Gong is in part the belief by all practitioners I have met that they have been cured of some malady, and that is important in a country without a health service. Practitioners neither smoke nor drink, and many believe that executed practitioners have been the source for the 40 – 60,000 recent extra organ transplant operations, a profitable monopoly organised by the People's Liberation Army.

Earlier this year, the regime announced that it was moving to lethal injection from execution by a bullet through the head – the mouth was propped open to minimise damage, but still a messy way to kill. It is not hard to understand this change. In one province alone, 16 buses have been specially adapted to perform on-the-spot eviscerations.

Another interview I had in Beijing was with Mr Niu Jinping, then 52, another former prisoner. He brought his three-year-old daughter along. As she played on the bed, he told me how his wife was being beaten black and blue in the nearby Beijing Women’s Labour Camp, and had lost her sight and hearing. He had lost his job, sold his house, and now subsisted on tips for guarding cars; he was destitute and desperate.

At one point his wife was taken unconscious to the prison hospital after a particularly severe beating caused a cerebral haemorrhage. Zhang Lianying, now 48, was released in December 2007 after she and her husband - both practitioners - were invited to give evidence to a European Parliament hearing on human rights in China. Both were rearrested in April this year as part of the pre-Olympic crackdown, especially severe in Beijing.

In a letter to me, Zhang Lianying lists the torture methods she suffered, from brainwashing to being made to eat excrement, from systematic beatings to force-feeding. The torture she feared most was regularly being smothered until she passed out: one thug said to her “we want you to have a taste of wanting to die but can’t, and wanting to live but can’t.”

If we had known what was already taking place in Germany’s camps in 1936 the Olympics would not have taken place in Berlin. When US Supreme Court judge Felix Frankfurter was told in 1942 about the death camps by the young Pole Jan Karski, he said “I did not say the young man was lying. I said that I am unable to believe him. There is a difference."

There is ample evidence that the regime in Beijing is guilty of what amounts to genocide against sections of the population under its control. A boycott of the Games, held under the Olympic banner of ‘universal fundamental ethical principles’, is the least we can expect of our leading politicians.

Edward McMillan-Scott is a Conservative MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber and Vice-President of the European Parliament

Following the review from Sir John Baker on parliamentary pay, pensions and allowances the leader of the House of Commons, Harriet Harman, has tabled motions to allow MPs to debate the proposals.

The government has backed the main proposals to remove the need for decisions on MPs salaries to be subject to a debate or a vote by the House.

The debate also follows the report by the members estimate committee, which suggests stringent checks on the expenses and allowances system are required in order to restore public confidence in the probity of Parliament.

The debate will take place on Thursday July 3.

What is your opinion? Should MPs vote on their own pay?

And should rules on allowances simply be tightened or written off all together in favour of a higher wage?

In conjunction with the Office of the Leader of the House of Commons, ePolitix.com is running this debate to allow members to have their say on the issue.

Too many people in Britain are out of work – and most of them live in our biggest cities. The government is aiming for an 80% national employment rate, yet many of our largest cities are nowhere near this figure. We published new research this week which found that while cities are home to 59% of the UK population, they also contain 64% of those without jobs, and 68% of those claiming benefits. In Liverpool, for instance, more than one-third of the adult population is not in employment.

James Purnell is right to announce a new approach to getting more people into work, signalling today that he’s ready to devolve outwards from Westminster in the interests of raising employment rates. The traditional approach to employment and skills provision, whereby budgets and services for jobseekers are run centrally from Westminster, has failed to reach the millions of people who are on benefits but who would like to find a job. Purnell has the right idea – but we’d like to see him go further.

Getting more people into work will take more than an approach based on choices for individuals: it requires services which meet the needs of specific labour markets. People without jobs don't just need places on training courses - they need to fit their skills to the needs of local employers so that they can find employment once they’ve completed their training. They also need to be supported at city-level with good public transport and housing.

As a first step, the government could extend its City Strategies programme to all urban areas where there is high worklessness. This programme brings together key local players – councils, employers, and agencies such as Job Centre Plus – to develop a single plan.

But local action needs to go beyond formulating strategies. Our research shows that city leaders and local employers need to build on existing relationships and work together more closely on a formal basis, perhaps via the London model of an Employment and Skills Board. This would mean that employment and skills programmes would match the needs of local employers, and boost entire city economies.

Cities also need financial incentives - and we think employment and skills funding should be fully devolved to large city regions such as Birmingham or Liverpool. As in the Netherlands, this would give cities a clear incentive to reduce worklessness - namely the ability to keep and reinvest any benefits savings they make by getting people back into work.

The government needs to give cities the power to get people back into work and grow local economies.