John Baron

Conservative Party | Billericay and District

Points of View

Vitamin Victory

Vitamins and supplements may not be everybody's cup of tea, but many people swear by them. But if the EU had its way, many of these would be banned.

During the last two years, I have therefore been supporting in Parliament a Conservative 'Save our Supplement' campaign to stop the EU passing the Food Supplement Directive which would result in many of our vitamins and supplements being withdrawn simply because they contained nutrients which were not on the EU's permitted list.

The Government introduced legislation early last summer to transpose the EU Directive into English Law and forced the measure through the House of Commons.  The legislation was due to come into force on 1st August 2005.

However, very recently the Food Supplements representative bodies won a High Court victory against the EU and will now be able to take their case to the European Court of Justice.  To celebrate this victory I co-tabled in Parliament Early Day Motion 541.

Food supplements and vitamins which are safe should remain available to British consumers regardless of what the EU wishes.  In yet another example of trying to harmonise the market, the EU is needlessly interfering in peoples lives and needs to be stopped."

This issue has been raised with me by many constituents, and they will be very pleased with this development.  However, there are still further battles to win.

Lottery Funding

Recent research has shown that Billericay and District still does badly when it comes to lottery grants - ranking 658th out of 659 constituencies.

Figures show that up to 27th October 2003, Billericay and District had received £1,375,000 in awards compared to a national average of £20,000,000.

I raised this issue with the Government 18 months ago, and helped to organise a National Lottery Roadshow at Hannakins Farm, Billericay on Friday 7th March 2003 the aim of which was to de-mystify the application process so that we could get the number of applications up. The feedback was extremely positive.

However, I have now written to Tessa Jowell requesting a complete breakdown of the constituency's application and success rate since the Roadshow.

This is because it may be that, since the Roadshow, our success rate at both applying for and being given awards for has gone up - and this will take time to show up on the overall figures which have be in existence since the lottery was first launched during the mid-1990's. 

However, if the application rate has remained low then we as a community need to do more to put this right.  But if our application rate has gone up yet the level of awards have remained low then I shall be raising this with the Government and National Lottery.