Season of mists….

With the holiday month of August behind us, September is a very good time of year for Parliamentarians to get down to serious work in our constituencies. October brings the season of Party Conferences and then we return to Westminster for the long slog that takes us through to next July.

Hurricane Katrina and later Hurricane Rita took their terrible tolls in New Orleans and the Gulf States of the USA. In contrast to the hurricanes and flooding, we have had another unusually dry summer in South Wiltshire. Like my father before me, I keep daily weather records in Salisbury. A dry year sees 24 inches of rain and a wet one 37 inches.. So far in 2005 under 17 inches has fallen between January and the end of September. Reserves of water in the chalk aquifers are historically low. The consequences are already serious for the sustainability of our wildlife.

With no end in sight to our house building and industrial development – which the water companies are obliged to service – what will it take for us to care enough to stop plundering our reserves and wasting water? There is already one village on the Plain where it is reckoned that 90% of their stream has already been through the sewage works by the time it flows down to the next village.

Hurricane Katrina also took its political toll. The US Administration and its agencies were in deep trouble for their slow and inadequate response. You have the right to ask what would happen here.

If you visit the Home Office website you can discover that the Government has indeed established emergency procedures to cope with natural and man-made disasters. Locally, Wiltshire County Council has an Emergency Unit that coordinates the response to incidents. It has plans and procedures to co-ordinate the reactions of the police and the medical services.

I can hear some people saying that we are unlikely to be struck by tornados in Salisbury. Mercifully that is true. But we might not be so luck with Bird Flu. I’ve written about the nature of risk before. We were told officially that if a major outbreak spreads quickly around the world, between 5 million and 150 million people may be killed. Even 5 million is a lot of people. So, yes, I have asked our Primary Care Trust to tell me what response is in place to protect our community.

Salt in the wound

Wiltshire County Council has also been preparing for anything the weather may throw at them this coming winter. While the Highways Agency is responsible for the A303 and the A36, our County Councillors care for about 2,600 miles of our major and minor roads. Their road crews are ready for floods and damage from high winds – as well as cold.

The main hazard is ice – so the County’s fifty gritting lorries and smaller pick-up trucks are on standby for action triggered by Met Office forecasts and sensors buried in our roads. One quarter of the County’s roads are priority routes and up to one half can be treated in severe weather. Some 700 salt bins are topped up through the winter.

So, that’s 9000 tonnes of Cheshire rock salt washing into our depleted water courses every winter. That has a substantial environmental cost. Are our journeys really necessary?

Fuzzy logic…

Another consequence of hurricanes in the Gulf States was a sudden hike in fuel prices. Our Government is the only gainer from this as tax revenues rise in line with price increases. Instead I think the Chancellor should vary fuel tax to maintain steady revenue and not exaggerate the hike, risking fuel blockades. While I’m at it, he should also knock another 10p a litre off the duty on biofuels , giving a real incentive to our farmers to grow crops for fuel as well as food. We are way behind other EU countries in this – especially France and Germany.

Change and decay in all around I see….

During the summer I have visited schools, our hospital and health service, our police, local Councils, local army units, factories, retailers, farmers, churches and I’ve spoken to hundred of people of all ages. I cannot recall any period of such change. I’ve learnt how computerised stocktaking has revolutionised distribution to shops, how educational institutions that we have always thought of as schools and colleges are now life-long learning networks serving the regional skills plan. I’ve been told how the Army will reorganise its recruitment and training. I have been told, reassuringly, that even if reform is forced on the police service, our Chief Constable believes the first priority must be strong neighbourhood policing and management at the local Divisional level. Some of this is good and it is necessary.

There is, however, one very large group in our community for whom change has been very bad. Our pensioners have been cheated by this Government. We have seen enormous hikes in our Council Tax for several years now. Pensioners now pay about one fifth of their pension straight back to the Chancellor in local tax. The state pension is increased in line with the cost of living. But the Chancellor has changed the definition of the cost of living. For years the measure of inflation was the Retail Price Index. But that has been replaced with the Consumer Prices Index – which conveniently excludes council tax and all housing costs. Shame on him. I look forward to taking up the cudgels in Westminster.