Monthly Archives: June 2018

RORY STEWART MP CONGRATULATES CHoC ON ITS LATEST SUCCESS

Rory Stewart MP at CHoC

Rory has visited Cumbria Health on Call (CHoC) to congratulate them on being rated “outstanding” in the recent CQC inspection, and to wish them luck in the NHS70 Parliamentary Awards.

CHoC, which is based in Carlisle, operates from three locations in Penrith and The Border and, in grateful recognition of their outstanding work, Rory nominated them for the Excellence in Primary Care category of the NHS70 Parliamentary Awards, for which they have been shortlisted. The winners will be announced on 4 July at a national awards ceremony at the Palace of Westminster, which Rory will attend to wish his nominees luck.

Commenting on this success, Rory said “I am incredibly proud of CHoC and this is really fantastic news, particularly in the NHS’ 70th anniversary year. Operating in one of the most rural and sparsely populated areas of the country requires real adaptability and ingenuity, and this latest CQC rating is testament to their success. I would like to congratulate and thank everybody at CHoC for the work that they are doing and I very much forward to welcoming them to the Palace of Westminster in July”.

​RORY THANKS VOLUNTEERS ON A VISIT TO CARLISLE CASTLE

Rory Stewart MP with Carlisle Castle VolunteerRory visited Carlisle Castle to see the Poppies: Weeping Window installation on Friday and to talk with volunteers.

While at Carlisle Castle, Mr Stewart met with representatives from English Heritage and discussed visitor numbers, the overwhelming response from volunteers and the development plans that will follow. Rory also spoke to several of the volunteers, almost a hundred of whom kindly answered the Castle’s call, who have worked to help make the Poppies’ arrival and installation such a great success.

Commenting on his visit, Rory said “it was a very great privilege to visit Carlisle Castle, see the Poppies and speak to the staff and volunteers. I was impressed to hear that the number of visitors that have gone into the castle over the last few weeks has gone up nearly fivefold, and that English Heritage has attracted nearly a hundred volunteers. I would like to pay a huge tribute to all of those who have given their time and effort to making the installation of the poppies such a great success, combining a moving evocation of the First World War with the deeper history of the Border”.

 

RORY NOMINATES OUT OF EDEN FOR PRESTIGIOUS PARLIAMENTARY AWARD

Rory has nominated Out of Eden as his 2018 Responsible Business Champion, praising the company’s commitment to sustainability and its sensitivity to the environmental impact of its operations.

Each year MPs are invited by the All Party Parliamentary Corporate Responsibility Group (APPCRG) to select an outstanding local business which, due to its work in their constituency, deserves to be recognised as a Responsible Business Champion.

This year’s nomination criteria meant that Rory was looking for a company which supports the local community, invests in healthy workplaces, offers apprenticeships and training, works to reduce its environmental impact and cooperates with suppliers and SMEs to support responsible business practices.

A Parliamentary judging panel will now consider Out of Eden’s nomination against the APPCRG’s criteria and select one company as the winner of the National Responsible Business Champion Award. The winner will receive their award from the Corporate Responsibility Minister, Andrew Griffiths MP, on 4 July.

Commenting on the nomination Rory said, “Out of Eden is a very worthy nominee for the Responsible Business Champion Award. The company operates at the heart of its community, supporting local, family run businesses and is also fiercely loyal to its customers and its employees. Out of Eden cares about sustainability and the environment and I wish it the best of luck.”

sheep

ON REWILDING

Rewilding seems to be fast becoming as much a fashion amongst landowners as Capability Brown parks were in the eighteenth century. It is spreading from Yellowstone National Park to the Cumberland plain. In Scotland Anders Povlsen, the richest man in Denmark, is turning 220,000 acres of land  – about a third the size of Penrith and The Border constituency (itself the largest in England) – into a rewilding project. In Sussex, another four hundred separate dairy fields have been abandoned to nature.

This might simply be a diverting chapter in the history of the British landscape, if increasing numbers of people were not now calling for the entire uplands of England – and in particular the Lake District – to be rewilded, attracting increasing interest from politicians, government agencies, lobby groups and landowners. In the Lake District in particular the idea is often introduced as though it were simply a sensible and moderate way of addressing some of the problems caused by over-stocking of sheep in the 1980s – most especially over-grazing, water pollution, and methane. And it is disguised in vague statements about addressing climate change, biodiversity, ‘natural flood prevention’ and restoring natural woodland, and shrouded in disingenuous statements about ‘respect for farmers’. But how many are aware quite how extreme and radical this vision seeks to be?

The ultimate objective of rewilding is to remove all impacts that humans have ever had on the landscape. Unlike a conventional environmental scheme which relies on carefully scientifically-tested human interventions (tree planting, river management, seasonal grazing and the rest), this aims to allow animals and plants to restore the landscape by themselves, through entirely natural processes, by reinserting extinct animals which humans removed from the landscape, centuries or even millennia ago: predators such as lynx and wolves, or high impact species such as beavers and bison, which can control the landscape ‘top-down.’

Rewilding is not done because it is the most cost-effective, reliable way of restoring biodiversity. In fact, it comes with environmental risks. This can include species loss, which can already be seen in the abandonment of meadows, oak trees and hedgerow to bogland on the Cumberland plain; or in the replacement of the rich biodiversity that exists on woodland edges (from hedgehogs on), to the less rich species that emerge in the centre of dense forest. Or the alien parasites which were inadvertently introduced into Denmark when Polish bison were reintroduced; and the loss of alpine meadows and ultimately of water reservoirs that followed the abandoning of land in the Pyrenees. But this risk is taken because there is a fundamental emotional commitment to the ‘pre-human’, carnivore-dominated, wilderness of the Pleistocene – out of a sense of guilt at the impact humans have had since, and out of a desire to escape what is felt as a tame, safe, modern environment. And it tries to work at a very large scale – not by simply creating a nature reserve in one Cumbrian valley, but by creating a vast core of interlocking corridors potentially covering the entire uplands of England.

Many of the apparent environmental benefits of rewilding come simply from imposing environmental costs on someone else. Clearing sheep from a Lake District valley doesn’t mean humans stop eating lamb; they just begin to eat lamb which is grazed somewhere else. The methane continues to enter the atmosphere, and while Cumbrian fellsides may become wet and boggy – more dominated by reeds and mosses  – Patagonia would desertify, only for the sheep to be shipped thousands of miles back to Cumbrian tables. Or the sheep will be crowded in indoor sheds, where instead of being sustained by free grass and rain, they will be sustained by imported animal-feed, which uses tens of thousands of hectares of land to grow, powered by oil-based products.

But the most fundamental problem is that rewilding was originally intended for places like the Yellowstone National Park – a vast, unfarmed, uninhabited wilderness considerably larger than Cornwall. But when applied to our much more densely populated and small island, which has been farmed for thousands of years, the consequences are quite different. It is not simply turning the clock back  a few decades to the time before modern farming techniques, but turning it back millennia.  There have been farms on the fellside, with pasture, grazed by livestock, for at least six thousand years. The Eden Valley had been cleared of its primeval forest well before the Romans built their signal stations, and the Cumberland gap was ploughed before Hadrian’s Wall was laid (you can see the plough marks under the wall).

All the distinctive features of the Lake District landscape – the pollarded ash trees, the contrast between the more tightly cropped pasture, below the head-dyke of the dry stone walls, and the wilder common land – were in place at the time of the Vikings, from whom many of our farmers descend. Close-cropped sheep lawns surrounded Shap at the time of the monks. This farmed landscape is the landscape of Turner and Wordsworth. And unlike the Highlands of Scotland, where the farms were removed in the Clearances, or the barley farms of East Anglia, here the small family farms have survived providing one of the only fragile surviving connections to our historic landscape: a foundation for our tourist industry, the bedrock of our communities, and for the children in our village schools.

Rewilding is not gentle return to a natural past. This is not simply because it is sometimes naïve about food production, careless of the impact on other countries, blind to the texture and history of our landscape, and its links to our literature and identity. It is fundamentally because it leaves no place for humans in the landscape.

PENRITH AND THE BORDER TO BE A PART OF THE QUEEN’S COMMONWEALTH CANOPY

Rory has agreed to accept the donation of a tree from the Woodland Trust, which will make Penrith and The Border part of the Queen’s Commonwealth Canopy (QCC).

The QCC was launched at the 2015 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting by Frank Field MP and aims to save the association’s members’ forests. By creating a network of forest conservation projects, the QCC will demonstrate the Commonwealth’s unity, raise awareness of the value of the planet’s forests and create a lasting environmental tribute to the Queen’s leadership. To date, over 40 Commonwealth countries have agreed to participate.

Mr Field has written to every member of the House of Commons to request their participation and Rory was delighted to accept. Mr Field has indicated that he will extend a similar invitation to Commonwealth parliamentarians in due course.

Commenting on this, Rory said “I am delighted that Penrith and The Border will participate in this fantastic initiative, which will create a lasting tribute to Her Majesty, across the Commonwealth that she has led with such distinction for over six decades. I would like to pay a huge tribute to both Frank Field for organising this initiative and to the Woodland Trust for its tireless work in preserving our precious woodland”.

JUSTICE QUESTIONS 5 JUNE 2018

Rory, David Gauke, Lucy Frazer and Dr Phillip Lee, spoke in the House of Commons to answer Justice Questions on 5 June. Watch it here:

TIME TO CLEAN UP

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Article first published in Inside Time by Erwin James on 31 May 2018.

“What I’m trying to work out is what it is that makes one prison, for example Altcourse, work well, and another prison – not too far away – not work well,” says Prisons Minister Rory Stewart when we meet at MoJ headquarters to discuss his policies and vision for the prison system for which he now has responsibility. The Minister, formerly Minister for Africa, has perhaps one of the most colourful career paths of anyone who has ever held his current office, including a two year walking odyssey through rural districts of Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, India and Nepal, (a journey totalling around 6,000 miles which he began in 2000) – and a period of governance in Southern Iraq following the coalition invasion in 2003. In 2004 he was in command of his compound in Nasiriyah when it was besieged by Sadrist militia and was later awarded an OBE for his services. A best-selling author, his book about his time in Afghanistan, ‘The Places in Between’ was a New York Times best-seller described by the newspaper as a “flat-out masterpiece”. He is currently the MP for Penrith and the Border.

In the flesh he looks too young to have lived through such drama and adventure. “I’m ten years younger than my predecessor,” he says smiling. I guess it’s true what they say about getting older; policemen and government ministers all just look so young.

The first thing I want to say to him is ‘please try and sort out prison food’. While there are some establishments that provide sufficient nutrition in healthy portions, and understand the value of keeping incarcerated human beings well fed, there are many others that fail miserably in the servery department. I tell him about Lucy Vincent, a 20-something young woman who is campaigning through her website Food Behind Bars for the government to provide good nutritious meals for all prisoners, regardless of the institution. “Thank you,” he says, and notes down my comments.

“I don’t think there are any easy recipes for success. Its about relationships between prison officers and prisoners”.

Secondly, I remind him of what President of the PGA Andrea Albutt said about the outsourcing of prison maintenance contracts following the collapse of the construction company Carillion. She said the services should be handed back to the works departments so that the governor has instant control of where and what needs to be done. “But when it’s done properly there is no reason why outsourcing shouldn’t work well,” he says. “I agree with him, there were serious problems with that contract.” But I remember as a prisoner that working with a works officer was a way for prisoners to learn skills, or even utilise skills they had before coming to prison. “Sure, sure,” he says, “I’m very, very much in agreement with you there. I’m very keen to get many more prisoners employed. I was talking to a prisoner recently, a qualified electrician, and he’s very rare. He’s employed by the prison to use his skills. But so often, Governors are not taking advantage of the skills available in the prisoner population.” Would he like to see Governors actually taking advantage of the skills and abilities of prisoners in their charge? “Much more. Much more,” he says emphatically.

But traditionally, prisoners are not seen as assets. Does he want to change that? My view, from the 20 years I spent in various prisons from Cat A to Cat D is that prisons can be places where good things happen, not just places of shame and neglect. I believe a prison should be seen by society as a valuable community resource, as valuable as a hospital or a school. So why don’t we do that? I think that it’s because politicians and the media have famously used prisons and prisoners as whipping boys for the electorate. I well remember former Justice Secretary Chris Grayling announcing when he took on the role that prisons under his watch were, “no longer going to be Holiday Camps.” One of the most disingenuous utterances from someone in his position that I could remember.

“A prison is a very, very challenging environment,” he says. “You can see prisons going in three years from good prisons to bad prisons, then from bad prisons to good prisons. A lot of it seems to be about detailed leadership. I don’t think there are any easy recipes for success. It’s about relationships between prison officers and prisoners. It’s a lot about how the custody managers work, the way the POs work, the way that young prison officers engage with prisoners.”

Don’t prison officers deserve more respect from society for the work they do? Why shouldn’t officers have similar cultural and educational opportunities that many of our prisons offer prisoners? Are there any plans to enhance the work of prison officers? “Yes, I am interested in that,” he says, “but I’m also taken back a step. We have to make sure before we start talking about Art groups that prisoners are unlocked and able to get safely from their cells to that Art group. One of the things that frustrates me is that we talk about these wonderful things that might be on offer, but if the prison is filthy, violent, drug infested, out of control – you can’t get to any of those opportunities. Unless you get those basic things sorted – are the cells clean, are the yards clean, are people out of their cells enough – and getting them out of their cells enough also means do the prison officers feel safe? I think we need to get a much clearer set of basic uniform standards right the way across the estate.”

Is it about pride? Should we feel pride in our prisons? “Part of this is about who we are,” he says. “Do we feel proud of our prisons? Is this somewhere I’d be happy to be? You have to find a way of having a very difficult conversation with ourselves and with the public, about helping people understand what a prison is; that it’s doing a lot of different things – it’s punishing people, deterring people, it’s reforming people, educating people. And the really great prison officers manage to find a very practical way of doing these very different things.”

“We have very good evidence that we can reduce the reoffending rate dramatically if we can get people into skill building and education and into employment”

I asked him if he was aware of the Unlocked Graduate programme, whereby students from universities enrol for a couple of years as prison officers as part of their social responsibility development – an idea championed by educationalist Dame Sally Coates. “Yes,” he says, “I think they’re terrific. I’m very much a fan.”

So how do we convince the public that prisons are places where we should expect good things to happen? “For me, I don’t think it’s about having one or two shiny ideas,” he says. “You’ve got to have a system that works across the board. One of the things I’m interested in is what can we do to get a bit of consistency – some sense that you can expect the same basic things whichever prison you are in…

What about the drug problem? Isn’t it time to face up to the fact that when a prisoner is found to have five kilos of ‘Spice’ in his cell or, as in HMP Hewell recently, a ‘brick of heroin’ – that this quantity of drugs has not been smuggled through the visits room? “By and large our prison officers are very professional and honest people, but there will of course, in any organisation, always be bad apples. And one of the things that I am very keen to do is to make sure that it is much more difficult for anybody – prisoner, family or prison officer, to bring illegal substances into prisons. One of the ways I plan to do that is by ramping up our gate security. Scanners, sniffer dogs and more routine searching of everyone who comes through the gate. I’ve spoken to the Prison Officers Association about that and they are quite comfortable with it. They also agree that they are not in the business of protecting people bringing in kilos of heroin.”

“One of the things I’m interested in is what can we do to get a bit of consistency, some sense that you can expect the same basic things whichever prison you are in”.

Stewart was speaking to me ahead of the announcement of the new education and employment strategy for prisoners. “One of the ways we think will be helpful is that we are going to radically improve the way we assess prisoners on arrival and make sure that they have, alongside their sentencing plan, a very clear education plan, for each individual, taking into account their educational needs, and planning out what they want to achieve during their time in prison. What can we do in relation to training to make it easier for you to become what it is you want to be when you leave prison. We will provide national standard examinations. We have very good evidence that we can reduce the reoffending rate dramatically if we can get people into skill building and education and into employment.”

The week before, he says he had a group of leading businessmen and CEOs around his table, including James Timpson. “They talked through what they need, what they are looking for and it was very interesting. Some of what they want is formal stuff, English language etc. but some of it was softer skills. Can you stand for eight hours behind a Timpson’s counter dealing with the public?”

‘Compared to wallowing in the mire of wasted time and chaos that defines much of our prison system’, I said – that sounds like absolute luxury.