Monthly Archives: October 2013

RORY PROMOTES NATIONAL ENERGY ACTION AWARD TO TACKLE FUEL POVERTY

Rory has urged Cumbrian communities tackling fuel poverty in their area to nominate themselves for an NEA Community Action Award, with the chance to win up to £3500 for their local project.

The Community Action Awards aim to reward projects throughout England which demonstrate excellence in the field of tackling fuel poverty and improving energy efficiency. Held jointly with the Department of Energy and Climate Change and British Gas, entries are accepted from community groups, charities, local authorities and third sector organisations.15 winners will receive up to £3,500 to develop or enhance a project which demonstrates excellence in one of the following areas;

· Community action to tackle fuel poverty across all vulnerable groups

· Community action to tackle hard to reach groups (in fuel poverty)

· Community action to tackle fuel poverty in rural areas

Winners will also receive additional financial and practical support to run a community engagement event to showcase their project and share best practice with others. It will run in two phases, with phase 1 closing on the 31 October 2013.

Rory Stewart said:

“Fuel poverty affects Cumbrian communities in ways that I feel much of the rest of the UK often does not really understand. Our traditional homes are difficult to heat, and much less likely to be connected to the mains gas grid. A trip to the shops or access to even the most basic of public services can easily be a journey of a few miles, often more, and so we are acutely affected by high fuel prices.”

“This is why so many communities throughout Cumbria have taken it upon themselves to address local fuel poverty; from smart metering in Wigton, to oil buying syndicates in the Northern Fells or in the Lyvennet valley. This NEA Community Action Award is a fantastic opportunity for local initiatives to receive additional funds and support to tackle the crippling effects of rural fuel poverty, and I would be more than happy to offer any community in Penrith and The Border support in the nomination process.”

For further information about the competition, please visit: http://www.nea.org.uk/footprint

RORY SHORTLISTED FOR THE DIGITAL LEADERS 50 AWARD

Rory has been shortlisted for the Digital Leaders 50 award for his work in Cumbria on broadband and mobile coverage. Launched by the Digital Leaders Programme in association with Digital by Default News, the award seeks to recognise leaders and organisations who have demonstrated “a pioneering and sustainable approach to digital transformation”, and who have shown “leadership and innovation in harnessing digital technology and the internet as providers of information, key services and social interaction”. Rory said:

“I feel enormously honored to be nominated for this award. But I feel it is Cumbrian communities themselves who should be nominated – since it is Cumbrian community projects which have been in the national lead. Few things are more important for the future of Cumbria than good broadband and mobile infrastructure. It remains the single most important investment we can make to our economy and to businesses, and to the lives and well-being of residents and families in our remote rural areas.”

“We have come a long way in just a few short years, and so much of this is down to the extraordinary hard work, tenacity and imagination of Cumbrian communities, coming up with their own innovative solutions. I still receive emails every week however from constituents desperate for better broadband. The only way we will get as close to 100 per cent coverage as possible, is for communities, business and government to work together on affordable solutions. If anyone in rural community remains concerned about their broadband speeds, please do get in touch.”

RORY ENCOURAGES CUMBRIAN BUSINESSES TO STRENGTHEN THEIR EXPORT ACTIVITIES

Rory is urging Cumbrian businesses to attend regional events during the UK Trade & Investments Export Week during the week of November 11-15, which aim to get businesses to either start exporting or expand their export activity. 130 UKTI Trade Specialists from over 70 markets will hold pre-booked 1-2-1 meetings for any company that signs up, as well as holding seminars and presentations on logistics, banking, export market research and IP Protection for SMEs trying to make their first overseas order.

Rory said:

“Cumbria has an incredible depth of talent when it comes to manufacturing, and the quality of our goods is second to none. I do worry sometimes though that we don’t shout enough about this. The opportunity therefore for local companies to meet with UKTI experts on a 1-2-1 basis and talk through their export strategies, is definitely something I would encourage local businesses to explore further.”

Further information on the UKTI export week, and how to sign up for advice sessions can be found at:

http://www.exportweek.ukti.gov.uk/full/

Rural MPs push government for fairer funding

Highlights of a debate in which Rory and other MPs from rural constituencies argue for a fairer deal for local authorities that are historically underfunded compared to their urban counterparts.

TED Talks: Time to end the war in Afghanistan

British MP Rory Stewart walked across Afghanistan after 9/11, talking with citizens and warlords alike. Now, a decade later, he asks: Why are Western and coalition forces still fighting there? He shares lessons from past military interventions that worked — Bosnia, for instance — and shows that humility and local expertise are the keys to success.

RORY ENCOURAGES CUMBRIAN BUSINESSES TO STRENGTHEN THEIR EXPORT ACTIVITIES

Rory is urging Cumbrian businesses to attend regional events during the UK Trade & Investments Export Week during the week of November 11-15, which aim to get businesses to either start exporting or expand their export activity. 130 UKTI Trade Specialists from over 70 markets will hold pre-booked 1-2-1 meetings for any company that signs up, as well as holding seminars and presentations on logistics, banking, export market research and IP Protection for SMEs trying to make their first overseas order.

Rory said:

“Cumbria has an incredible depth of talent when it comes to manufacturing, and the quality of our goods is second to none. I do worry sometimes though that we don’t shout enough about this. The opportunity therefore for local companies to meet with UKTI experts on a 1-2-1 basis and talk through their export strategies, is definitely something I would encourage local businesses to explore further.”

Further information on the UKTI export week, and how to sign up for advice sessions can be found at:

http://www.exportweek.ukti.gov.uk/full/

CITIZENS OF BRITAIN

Last weekend I met some charity volunteers in Alston. It was a warm, late summer day – none of the leaves yet falling – and the volunteers were heading cheerfully into the hills. Twenty other groups were setting off at the same moment: all from different points along a route that Alfred Wainwright first walked 75 years ago. I found the walkers had a deep and surprising relationship with the landscape. One man had an encyclopaedic recall, field by field, of the archaeology from the Iron Age to the Steam Age. Another woman lacked book knowledge but knew the soil. A third could recite poetry about the Pennine mines. A fourth drew maps by hands. It was a day – organised by David Pitt, Ian Forbes, Claire Lumley and many others – that combined voluntary work, the outdoors, and understanding of the landscape. I could not think of a better way of catching the genius of our communities.

Only two things troubled me. First, there were very few young people out on the hills. Although it was not a school day, or work day, the majority were over 60. Second, one of the younger people there – who had been born elsewhere and moved to Alston – refused to shake my hand. He was as pleasant as he could be, given the circumstances (‘Nothing personal’, he said, ‘I’ve heard good things about you’). But he wouldn’t shake my hand because I was a politician.

Relatively few younger people seem to want anything to do with political parties, elections, or government. This is, I think, a relatively new thing. For an ancient Greek being a ‘citizen’ – an active participant, voter, decision-maker, shaper of the politics of your own state – was one of the central purposes of being alive. It was important for us in the past. It is still a very important value in many parts of the United States. The man on the hill by Alston, however, was comfortable supporting charities which were either very local or grandly global, but he was much less comfortable with national issues, and he felt politics was a dirty word, and politicians dirty people. And I suspected he was far from alone.

Later that day I saw the beginnings of an answer to the lack of young people, and the lack of ‘citizenship’. It was in the Methodist Chapel in Wordsworth Street in Penrith, and I was meeting some 16-year-olds from Ullswater Community College and QEGS who had just finished their National Citizen Service. They had done a two-week course in an Outward Bound centre. I had seen a bit of it with the Prime Minister at Ullswater. We worked with the students to build a rickety raft out of oil drums – and then the Prime Minister waded out into the lake.  (I learned that the Prime Minister liked swimming in Ullswater and that he felt his own life had been changed by going through an outward-bound course when he was 16.)  When I saw the students in the Methodist Chapel, they had just finished working on voluntary projects in their communities.

It was, I discovered, a powerful combination. As I wrote afterwards about the programme, the participants had spent almost all their lives in their families or schools. Now, they were learning to live independently in an outdoor centre, and then in a rain-soaked tent. They were pushing themselves to climb mountains, or ford streams. They were learning how to work as a group. They were taking responsibility for real projects in communities. And they were succeeding, often to their surprise, in all these things.

The benefits were even more dramatic for students not from Cumbria. A girl from London, for example, described how surviving on her own on the hillside had given her confidence for the first time. Many of them had never lived outdoors.  Students from cities were discovering directly that the countryside was also theirs. They were working in teams with people from different backgrounds. They were learning how they were part of a more varied society that included Brighton or Newcastle as much as Penrith. And they were learning it in a very British way. Like those walkers in Alston these students had gone outdoors, in a country which first discovered the romance of landscape; and they were working in charities in Britain – which has a particular genius for community action.

The National Citizen Service has been piloting for three years, and growing steadily and successfully. 50,000 people should pass through this year. But I feel we should put ten times as many students through, expand it to Scotland and Wales, and make the experience deeper and longer. There are already many good youth programmes. But this would be different because it would be truly national: reflecting our imagination and values as a nation.  We should also aim to make it close to universal. It will cost money – perhaps as much as half a mile of Crossrail – but it is difficult to think of a single programme that would make as much difference to as many people.

National Citizen Service is helping students to understand a little of what we share in our landscape, and to see a potential beyond their families, or their work. It may also encourage them to engage – in a positive sense – with politics again. I hope that if I can get onto that Alston hillside again, in forty years’ time, I will see some of them there with me. And that they will be more than simply citizens of a parish – or simply, blandly, citizens of the world – but, in a fuller sense, citizens of Britain.

“COMMUNITIES CAN CONNECT THE FINAL 7%” IN MAJOR RURAL BROADBAND MEETING

Rory on Saturday held a major gathering of broadband hub co-ordinators from his constituency where he was joined by representatives of BT and Connecting Cumbria (Cumbria County Council), and at which local Councillor and community broadband activist Libby Bateman of the Fell End broadband project presented on the community-led model. He convened the important event in order to give hub coordinators from all over Penrith and the Border the chance to engage with BT and Connecting Cumbria on the detail of broadband rollout plans on a community-by-community basis. Over thirty attendees from all corners of Rory’s constituency – including Alston Moor, Matterdale, Castle Carrock and Geltsdale, Scaleby, Brampton, Orton and the Northern Fells – benefited from the event at Rheged, which came after a week in which rural broadband and the ‘value for money’ of the government’s  BDUK programme came under scrutiny in the course of the Public Accounts Committee’s investigations. The event is the latest in the MP’s campaign to promote the broadband needs of communities in remoter parts of the constituency, and to encourage them to take a proactive approach in delivering superfast broadband in an affordable, community-led manner, such as in Fell End. Speaking at the event Rory said: “My prime concern remains that no single home or business is without superfast broadband by the end of the government’s roll-out. It is up to all of us – politicians, communities, councillors, officers and of course the private sector – to ensure that it be affordable to deliver fibre to every home in the country, and not at the costs originally suggested.” Helping to facilitate one-to-one meetings with communities and BT, to discuss in greater depth the detail of each area’s proposed connections, he said: “Fell End is a replicable model. It proves that 58 houses in probably the most remote valley in this area, are able to get superfast broadband to their premises reliably and affordably.  This is an important story: a hybrid option that brings some government contribution, some contribution from community, and some contribution from BT. It works in an atmosphere of goodwill and is a complicated thing to do. BT has however demonstrated that they are willing to work with communities and be flexible, but community investment is also significant.”

BT has promised to meet communities one to one to look at the detail of the rollout and implications for each community.

MPS JOIN TO INAUGURATE FIRST EVER NORTH PENNINES WALKING FESTIVAL

Rory joined parliamentary colleague and neighbouring MP for Hexham Guy Opperman on Saturday at the Roman Fort of Epiacum, just outside of Alston in Rory’s constituency, where they joined fellow local walkers to officially launch the inaugural North Pennines Walking Festival – “Inspired by the North Pennines” – coinciding also with the 75th Anniversary of Alfred Wainwright’s Pennine Journey.

On a brisk sunny day the MPs joined with organisers Ian Forbes of North Pennines Walking Festival Steering Group, David Pitt and Jill King of the Pennine Journey Supporters Club, Claire Lumley of Alston Moor Partnership and representatives from an array of local organisations all involved in collaborating on the festival, including the North Pennines AONB, the National Trust, the Weardale Visitors Network, and the Heart of Teesdale Landscape Partnership. The event coincided also with a day-long fundraising event “PJ in a Day”, whereby local groups walked different segments of the Pennine Journey – a 247-mile circular walk beginning and ending in Settle and taking in Hadrian’s Wall – to raise funds for a number of local charities. Local MP Rory also set off the local Hospice at Home team on their leg of the walk from Alston’s market cross, where he wished them luck and spoke of the importance of bringing together community spirit with a love of the landscape.

Speaking at the launch of the first ever North Pennines Walking Festival, Rory said: “Today is about  bringing together three great things: history; hills; and community action. We have history right here where we’re standing –  the Romans created our nation, and made us the people we are; secondly, our landscape – the thing we love, and which from the nineteenth century onwards people have celebrated; thirdly, community – we are a people in Cumbria and Northumbria with a genius for community action, connected to charity. To bring these three things together – the history that created us; the landscape that created our souls; and the charities that symbolise our hearts – into one event, is an extraordinary achievement. Many many thanks and congratulations.“

Claire Lumley of the Alston Moor Partnership said “We thank Rory and Guy for supporting us with our launch of the North Pennines Walking Festival today, and for walking with us from Epiacum to Alston. It was a brilliant day and both MPs were great company. We felt privileged that they were willing to take time out of their busy schedules to support our community in this way.”

RORY DELIVERS 2013 WAINWRIGHT LECTURE

Rory has delivered the 2013 Wainwright Lecture, on the 75th anniversary of Alfred Wainwright’s ‘Pennine Journey’ – the celebrated author’s 11-day walk through the Pennines in 1938. It was this walk that inspired Wainwright’s first full-length book, although it was not to be published until 1986. He also received a lifetime honorary membership to the Wainwright Society.

Introduced as a “man who could outwalk Wainwright”, Rory declared that it was an honour and a privilege to speak to the assembled audience, which filled Rheged’s main auditorium. In a talk that was based on his walk around his constituency and the Border region in 2012, Rory discussed the area’s history as a Middleland and as a Roman colony; the importance of geological divisions; and the relationship between communities and landscapes. He paid tribute to Wainwright, who he declared “symbolised someone at one with the soil and the landscape, at the very end of the age of Romanticism.”

Wainwright Society Secretary Derek Cockell said: “It was an inspirational lecture and we have received only complimentary comments about Rory’s talk.”
For a full-length version of Rory Stewart’s lecture, please contact the Wainwright Society at http://www.wainwright.org.uk/.