David Cameron appoints Lord Young to reintroduce common sense into the operation of health and safety laws

Excellent news from Downing Street this morning: David Cameron has appointed former Trade and Industry Secretary Lord Young of Graffham to conduct a Whitehall-wide review of "the operation of health and safety laws and the growth of the compensation culture."

Announcing his appointment, David Cameron said:

“I’m very pleased that Lord Young has agreed to lead this important review. The rise of the compensation culture over the last ten years is a real concern, as is the way health and safety rules are sometimes applied. We need a sensible new approach that makes clear these laws are intended to protect people, not overwhelm businesses with red tape. I look forward to receiving Lord Young’s recommendations on how we can best achieve that.”

Lord Young added:

“Health and safety regulation is essential in many industries but may well have been applied too generally and have become an unnecessary burden on firms, but also community organisations and public services. I hope my review will reintroduce an element of common sense and focus the regulation where it is most needed. We need a system that is proportionate and not bureaucratic.”

Amen to that. The press and organisations like the Campaign Against Political Correctness regularly keep us aware of the nonsenses arising from the excesses of the health and safety culture (I recently highlighted the ban on cheese-rolling in Gloucestershire and today's Daily Mail has more).

But there is a very serious side to this whole issue. Needless regulations have made people less inclined to do voluntary work on account of the required box-ticking and jumping through hoops; meanwhile children's development is being hindered as school trips and all sorts of other activities fall foul of the health and safety brigade. Julian Brazier wrote about this very matter in this Platform piece last year, so I very much hope that Lord Young will feed his research into the review.

Jonathan Isaby

Conservative MPs must keep making the case for scrapping the Human Rights Act

I believe that our Government shouldn't be compliant in the torture of Abid Naseer.  Were it to return him to Pakistan, he probably would be so treated.  So he shouldn't be sent there.

But I accept the view of the Special Immigration and Appeals Commission, which says that he represents a "serious threat" to public safety.  A Commission panel saw closed material including "pointers to an imminent attack".

It follows that Naseer should therefore be put on trial if possible.  (The Party's been campaigning to make intercept evidence admissible in court.)  If not, he should be put in prison.

Theresa May has said that the Government's taking "all possible measures" to ensure that Naseer doesn't engage in terrorism.  The use of the qualifying word "possible" suggests that it may be impossible to stop him.

What helps drive this risk to public safety?  The Human Rights Act, of course.  The Party was pledged to replace it with a British Act of Rights.  Such a measure might have helped to protect the public in this case.

But it now looks unlikely to be brought forward.  The Liberal Democrats are among Parliament's leading champions of the Human Rights Act.  So we read that a committee is to examine the issue - i.e: boot it into the long grass.

That Naseer is to be constrained only by the discredited Control Orders regime - one that provides neither security not liberty, and which is gradually being picked to pieces by the courts - is a vivid demonstration of why the Act doesn't work.

Nick Clegg's speech this morning on new politics here was in many ways admirable.  He referred at one point to "great, British freedoms".  But there's nothing British about the Human Rights Act.  It helps pass power from elected to unelected people - and is therefore, in a profound sense, anti-democratic.

The Naseer imbroglio, then, provides further evidence of the deep problems thrown up by coalition.   An impasse on the Act was in neither Party's manifesto.  There's certainly no mandate for it.  If Conservative MPs don't keep making the case for scrapping the Act - and strongly - there's little point in them being there.

Paul Goodman

Nick Clegg to announce the Coalition's plans to hand power back to people from the state (though he still doesn't want to reduce the tax burden)

Nick Clegg is to make his first major speech as Deputy Prime Minister today, and he will use it to outline how the Government intends to reduce the power of the state over the individual.

He will promise to "tear through the statute book" - with the public being consulted on which laws it would like to see scrapped - the point which the Telegraph leads on today.

The Independent, meanwhile, lists some of the measures which the Coalition intends taking:

• scrapping the identity card scheme and second generation biometric passports;
• removing limits on the rights to peaceful protest;
• a bonfire of unnecessary laws;
• a block on pointless new criminal offences;
• internet and email records not to be held without reason;
• closed-circuit television to be properly regulated;
• new controls over the DNA database, such as on the storage of innocent people's DNA;
• axeing the ContactPoint children's database;
• schools will not take children's fingerprints without asking for parental consent;
• reviewing the libel laws to protect freedom of speech.

All this is music to the ears of all libertarian-minded Conservatives (like me) who became increasingly outraged at the way in which the Labour Government accrued more and more power and assembled the trappings of a Big Brother state over the last decade or so.

However, in an interview with The Times, Nick Clegg rather blots his copy book with the same small state Conservatives when asked about the issue of tax:

Asked whether he expected the Government to reduce the tax burden, he said: “No, I am saying we will rebalance the tax system. We’re not making great claims about the overall tax burden... The Conservatives have always been ideologically in favour of a tax reduction and the Liberal Democrats in favour of fairer taxes and the coalition agreement strongly emphasises the latter.”

Is not reducing the overall tax burden the ultimate way of reducing state power and giving people lower tax bills the best indication that you favour restoring power to individual people?

Jonathan Isaby

Exclusive preview of the latest phase of the Conservative poster camapign

Monday will see the launch of the latest phase of the Conservatives' national poster campaign.

Earlier in the week saw the launch of this poster stating that the Conservatives would cut benefits for those who refuse to work and another highlighting Labour's jobs tax.

The latest four posters all project positive messages about what a Conservative Government under David Cameron has to offer and will appear on 2,200 billboard up and down the country from Monday morning:

Jonathan Isaby

Tories use Sunday newspapers to preview three more manifesto policies

The Conservative manifesto will be launched on Tuesday but the party has used the Sunday newspapers to highlight three more policies (although only the first is, I think, genuinely new)...

"The Tory manifesto will include a guarantee that everyone will be able to see a doctor in their area for 12 hours a day, seven days a week. Nearly a quarter of GPs’ practices are shut beyond the normal closing hours of 6.30pm, Monday to Friday, and there has been uproar over the poor quality of out-of-hours cover." - Mail on Sunday | Sunday Express

The NHS - alongside the National Insurance policy - will feature prominently in the Tory campaign. Yesterday I noted a Tory pledge to provide an NHS dentist for one million more people. Last week Andrew Lansley announced plans to dramatically increase the availability of cancer-saving drugs.

400,000 more apprenticeships and training opportunities for the young

"The Tory leader aims to put tackling the scourge of youth unemployment at the heart of his push for power. A £750million rescue plan for the jobless army of under-25s will be unveiled in his party’s manifesto on Tuesday. Mr Cameron believes they are among the “Great Ignored” he claims have been betrayed during 13 years of Labour rule. He will pledge to create 200,000 new apprenticeships by 2012 to give youngsters the skills to compete for work. There will also be 100,00 extra training places at colleges and 100,000 work pairings, which give out-of-work teens the chance to work alongside a tradesman for six months." - News of the World

"Under the Tory plans, all officials except police officers and emergency workers would be required to obtain warrants before demanding access to properties. The Conservatives say there are now 1,242 pieces of legislation public servants can use to enter homes, including powers to search for unregulated hypnotists, a dancing bear without a permit, bovine semen or a fridge with the wrong energy rating." - The Sunday Telegraph

This policy will be added to Dominic Grieve's restoration of civil liberties charter that is summarised here.

Tim Montgomerie

* With apologies to Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish readers.

David Cameron reaches out to the gay community

In this recent Platform piece, David Bridle of the gay magazine Boyz took his hat off to David Cameron for celebrating the importance of civil partnerships.

Today he ought to have further cause for satisfaction as the Independent features an interview with the Tory leader conducted by the paper's columnist Johann Hari for the forthcoming edition of gay magazine Attitude.

He repeats his view that Section 28 was a mistake, speaks about he value of civil partnerships and says "there will be occasions when gay couples make very good adoptive parents."

And that's not all. On refugees fleeing homophobic persecution, he says:

"If you are fleeing persecution and that fear is well-founded, then you should be able to stay. As I understand it, the 1951 Convention [on the rights of refugees] doesn't mention sexuality, but because it mentions membership of a social group, that phrase is being used by the courts, rightly, to say that if someone has a realistic fear of persecution they should be allowed to stay."

He also indicates that he would want to reverse the ban on gay men giving blood:

"It sounds perfectly logical and sensible to make the change... Logic would dictate that it's time to change."

Needless to say, this is not sufficient for Labour-supporting Hari, who wants a specific pledge on dealing with homophobic bullying in schools - despite Cameron's pledge to seek a crackdown on all bullying in schools.

Hari also goes down the well-travelled path of the Left over the last year by attacking the Conservative Party's allies in the European Parliament. Cameron admits that allies taking a more socially conservative view on homosexuality makes it "more difficult" for him to persuade gay people to vote Conservative and that some parties in Eastern Europe have longer journeys ahead in terms of changing their attitudes. However, he emphasises that European alliances are naturally based on "views on the broad direction of the future of Europe".

And so they should be. Will Johann Hari pursue Gordon Brown with the same vigour over Labour's unsavoury allies in European as highlighted brilliantly here, here and here by Dan Hamilton?

Jonathan Isaby

NB I have deleted a number of off-topic comments in the thread below, as well as several which I deemed inappropriate. Any other comments in a similar vein will also be subject to deletion.

David Cameron declares war on the "nonsense" of the "over-the-top health and safety culture"

David Cameron is making a very welcome speech to Policy Exchange later today in which he will outline how he wants to dismantle the ridiculous elements of "the great knot of rules, regulations, expectations and fears that I would call the over-the-top health and safety culture."

Whilst most health and safety regulations over the last couple of centuries have been noble and welcome, he will say that "something has gone seriously wrong with the spirit of health and safety in the past decade".

Citing some of those stories that you couldn't have made up - like the children who were forced to wear goggles to play conkers - Mr Cameron will expose how two thirds of the 202 statutory instruments enforced by the Health and Safety Executive were passed in the 99 years before Labour came to power, but that one third have been introduced in the last 12 years alone.

He will also attack the "compensation culture" which has "helped to create a legal hypersensitivity to risk, accident and injury" and damaged the economy and society.

The Conservative response will be to reduce the burden and impact of health and safety legislation and bring some common sense back into compensation in a responsible, fair and sober way.

Continue reading "David Cameron declares war on the "nonsense" of the "over-the-top health and safety culture"" »

Radicals can still have hope in Cameron

Benedict Brogan uses his Telegraph column to list Tory MPs' concerns that Cameron will be a trimmer rather than a radical. My responses are in italics after each paragraph.

• On tax... "The Tory Right remains disbelieving of George Osborne's decision to accept – for the foreseeable future – Labour's new 50p rate. They would prefer sizeable increases in indirect taxes, specifically VAT, booze and fags – to allow some cuts in business and personal tax. The Tories, they argue, should be about long-term certainty on tax rates. For 20 years, business knew that the top rate was capped by consensus at 40p; restoring that certainty should be a Conservative clarion call." George Osborne's plans to progressively reduce corporation tax and make Britain a headquarters for international business should reassure all supply-side conservatives.
• On immigration... "[Traditionalists] see Labour moving to the Right, with self-serving confessions that its open-door policy has been wrong all along, and wonder why Conservatives shouldn't follow." I don't think the Tory cap on immigration from outside the EU is tough enough (I'm with Nicholas Soames on this question) but Labour cannot recover credibility on this issue.
• On civil liberties... "Spend any time with a Conservative MP these days, and at some point he will report his constituents' anger over police and bureaucratic intrusion. "Why aren't we promising to roll all this back, to pull down CCTV cameras, to abolish the Independent Safeguarding Authority, to tear down the human rights industry?" says one." I think this is an unfair charge. Dominic Grieve has put forward an eleven point plan to reverse Labour's illiberal measures.
• On the family... "[The Cornerstone Group of social conservatives] suspect [Cameron's] pledge to abolish the penalty for couples in the tax credit system, and make marriage and civil partnerships pay, will tumble down the priority list in the name of fiscal realism." This is likely given the public finances but there are other pro-family measures that will be enacted quickly. IDS won't have agreed to serve in a Tory government unless he believes Cameron is half-serious about the social justice agenda.
• On welfare... "If the Tories want to be radical, their MPs wonder, then why not put a time limit on paying benefits, as happened successfully in America?" I hope we'll eventually do this.
• On education... "Those of a suspicious disposition claim – with scant evidence – that he is wobbling on whether to allow private-sector operators to become involved in the setting up of a new generation of independent schools. Others, who take an interest in Swedish models of education, complain about his seeming reluctance to allow those who do set up schools under the scheme to make a profit." On the contrary, policy is moving in the right direction on education. The Guardian and Fraser Nelson have suggested new schools will be able to make profits.

My biggest area of concern is public spending control. George Osborne has only given us a very small indication of the efficiencies that he will make. His party conference speech was widely seen as brave but does not tackle even one tenth of Gordon Brown's budget deficit. Time is still on Osborne's side but we do need to hear much, much more. By that I don't mean lots of detail but we do need something like Andrew Lilico's suggestion of broad, strategic economies.

So are the concerns highlighted by Brogan fair at all? Yes. David Cameron is an authentic, full spectrum conservative but he is also very tactical, very focused on opinion polls. Only time will tell which of those two great characteristics will dominate the premiership we all hope for. For the time being he deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Tim Montgomerie

Dominic Grieve unveils how a Conservative Government would reverse the rise of the "Surveillance State"

Later this morning - at a time that will curiously overlap with a press conference David Cameron is giving - Dominic Grieve, the shadow Justice Secretary, is launching a new policy paper, Reversing the Rise of the Surveillance State.

You can download the full document as a pdf, but here is a summary of the paper's 11-point plan on how a Conservative Government would respond to the trend of ever-increasing intrusive Government:

1. Scrapping the National Identity Register and ContactPoint database.
2. Establishing clear principles for the use and retention of DNA on the National DNA Database, including ending the permanent or prolonged retention of innocent people's DNA.
3. Restricting and restraining local council access to personal communications data.
4. Reviewing protection of personal privacy from the surveillance state as part of a British Bill of Rights.
5. Strengthening the audit powers and independence of the Information Commissioner.
6. Requiring Privacy Impact Assessments on any proposals for new legislation or other measures that involve data collection or sharing at the earliest opportunity. Require government to consult the Information Commissioner on the PIA and publish his findings.
7. Immediately submitting the Home Office's plans for the retention of, and access to, communications data to the Information Commissioner for pre-legislative scrutiny.
8. Requiring new powers of data-sharing to be introduced into law by primary legislation, not by order.
9. Appointing a Minister and senior civil servant (at Director General level) in each Government ministry with responsibility for departmental operational data security.
10. Tasking the Information Commissioner to publish guidelines on best practice in data security in the public sector.
11. Tasking the Information Commissioner to carry out a consultation with the private sector, with a view to establishing guidance on data security, including examining the viability of introducing an industry-wide kite mark system of best practice.

Mr Grieve, the leading civil libertarian in the shadow cabinet, summarises his approach thus:

"This Government's approach to our personal privacy is the worst of all worlds - intrusive, ineffective and enormously expensive. We cannot run government robotically. We cannot protect the public through automated systems. And we cannot eliminate the need for human judgment calls on risk, whether to children, or from criminal and terrorist threats.

"As we have seen time and time again, over-reliance on the database state is a poor substitute for the human judgment and care essential to the delivery of frontline public services. Labour's surveillance state has exposed the public to greater - not less - risk."

Jonathan Isaby

Chris Grayling asks whether we want to live in a country where everyone has to be checked before they can do almost anything

4.15pm update: Iain Dale has spoken to Chris Grayling and reports that abolition of the Independent Safeguarding Authority is being considered, but that he did not want to pre-empt discussions going on between shadow ministerial teams:

James Brokenshire from his Shadow Home Affairs team and Maria Miller, the Shadow Children's Minister have been working on a review of this scheme for some time. They are looking at several options, and outright abolition is indeed one of them. Chris said: "We are considering all options, including abolition." He understandably didn't want to pre-empt their conclusions in his article.

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Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling has written an instructive piece for today's Independent in which he expresses the ludicrous level to which the Government now plans to take vetting of those who come into contact with children. He writes:

"The idea of checking the background of every parent who is an occasional helper, or driver to a kids' football match, or to a local dance club, or going along to help on a school outing just defies that common sense. Bear in mind that these aren’t strangers. They are parents escorting their own children and their school friends. Just how far do we want to go as a society?

"If a couple of dads with people carriers drive some of the team to an away football match for the Under-10s some weeks, do they need to be checked for a criminal record? If a school asks for volunteer mums to help with the visit to the local childrens’ farm, do they need CRB checks before they can go?

"We’re not talking about people who run youth groups week after week. We’re not talking about paid staff in schools and other childrens’ centres. We’re talking about parents helping out in their own communities on activities that keep their children and their friends busy and not hanging around on street corners."

It has already been widely reported how difficult it can be these days to get people to volunteer at scout groups, holiday clubs and so on due to a number of factors, not least the delays in processing exiting CRB checks and some of the associated "health and safety" measures which have to be implemented; these further regulations will only make those kinds of activities more difficult to put on, as Mr Grayling laments.

He concludes:

"Is this really the kind of country that we want to create? One where everyone has to be checked before they can do almost anything? One where we no longer trust parents and families to do the right thing? Where the State has to do everything... Of course we need to take sensible steps to stop predatory paedophiles from becoming leaders of youth groups. But we need to trust the parents of the children who go to them."

Jonathan Isaby