first time, but I do so with some trepidation, because I am seeking to fill the shoes of some very eminent people who have represented Newbury in the recent past. Many Members of this House will remember Sir Michael McNair-Wilson, who was for two decades the Member of Parliament for Newbury. He was followed all too briefly by Judith Chaplin, who tragically died 11 months after entering the House.
It has taken me a long time to get here. I was first selected for the Newbury constituency 11 years ago, and one reason why it has taken me so long is my immediate predecessor, David Rendel. When he won the Newbury by-election, the information about his majority was passed to his party leader, who said, "That can't be the majority; that must be the total vote." David Rendel remained an active and committed Member of Parliament for 12 years, and it is a great privilege to follow him. I pay particular tribute to his stalwart support for the Newbury bypass, which was a massive issue in West Berkshire, as many Members will remember. He led that debate locally with great courage, and I pay tribute to him for that.
Like the hon. Member for Denton and Reddish, I consider it a great privilege to represent the constituency in which I was born, raised and educated, and where I live with my family today. It is a very beautiful part of England. It starts just to the west of Reading, goes all the way to the Wiltshire border and includes in its landscape the Berkshire downs, many beautiful villages and the Lambourn valley. Given the presence in my constituency of the Lambourn valley and the Newbury racecourse, I look forward to being an active supporter of racing and the racing industry in this House.
My constituency also includes the vibrant towns of Thatcham, Hungerford and Newbury itself. Part of the fascination of the area is that close to such beautiful landscape and long-established industries as racing and agriculture, one finds cutting-edge technology companies such as Vodafone. Some 20 years ago, Vodafone was started by a handful of employees in one office in Newbury; now, more than 5,000 employees work at its headquarters and in the immediate vicinity of Newbury. It is a model of corporate responsibility, and there is scarcely a school or voluntary body that has not received substantial funding from the Vodafone Group Foundation in recent years.
We are extremely proud of our new hospital in West Berkshire, which was opened last year. It was opened thanks to the hard work of many local people—[Hon Members: "Thanks to a Labour Government."] I am coming to that. The hospital was opened thanks also to a legacy from a generous local person. The private finance initiative process was progressed under the previous Conservative Government, the hospital was built under the Labour Government, and the credit for it was taken by the Liberal Democrats. So we all feel a sense of ownership.
West Berkshire is no stranger to protest. In 1868 there was an election in which a previous Richard Benyon was elected for the constituency, and Newbury assizes were filled for many weeks afterwards with many cases of riotous assembly. I am glad to say that elections these days are much more orderly and good natured. However, in my constituency we have the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, and Greenham Common, both of which have excited certain protest activities in recent years.
The Atomic Weapons Establishment is close to where I live, and I do not subscribe to the hysteria with which some people regard it. It is a good, conscientious local employer. It is conscious of the safety of local employees and of local people, and it is a centre of excellence for science and engineering. I commend it on the decommissioning work that it has done throughout the world.
Greenham Common is a living, breathing example of the peace dividend. In the 1980s it was a scene of mass protests, but more people work at the base now than worked there at the height of the missile deployment. The open area has reverted to public access, and all profits from the rentals are ploughed into the local community.
The sense of security, or insecurity, that people feel stems, to a great extent, from the sort of community in which they live. Communities both large and small need to have a sense of worth. There seems to be a relentless centralisation of resources and vital facilities that sucks the lifeblood out of communities. The loss of village shops and post offices, the closure of rural schools and churches and the conversion of pubs to housing have all been debated at length, but it is not just in rural communities where that is a feature.
In my constituency, towns have lost police stations and ambulance stations. Last year we suffered the great and severe loss of a number of suburban post offices. Each time a community loses one of these entities, its sense of self-worth is diminished. Nothing is achieved by standing by and watching as this centralisation continues. We have to look forward to see the risks that will come if this scourge continues, and what we can do to prevent it.
My local magistrates bench sits just in Newbury, but many years ago it sat in Hungerford and Lambourn. Perhaps for very good reasons, it withdrew to Newbury. I am convinced that in future somebody could make a good case for centralising all magistrates services to a larger town such as Reading. I have nothing against Reading, and I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Reading, East (Mr. Wilson) would have words to say if I did. However, it is absolutely crazy to persist with this intense centralisation.
We must protect individuals who will be affected. Where would such a move leave an elderly person who has been a victim of crime and has to travel many miles to give evidence in court in a city or town with which he or she is not familiar? We have to embrace technology and applaud organisations such as Thames Valley police, which recently opened a police presence in a village that lost its police station 10 years ago, thereby adding to the sense of worth of that community.
That is the point. Too often the centralisation of services is done for the convenience of organisations rather than for the communities or individuals that they serve. We forget that the concept of best value means more than financial prudence; it must encompass a human element. Enhancing the sense of a community's worth by retaining or reinforcing services and pushing services back into it is a concept that will feed into any current zeitgeist, such as the respect agenda.
I look forward to debating these issues, and to trying to protect the communities of West Berkshire, for many years to come in this House.
House Magazine - 9th July 2007
A turkey with no twizzlers? When it comes to farming, the public survives on a diet of ignorance and hysteria, says Richard Benyon
We live in an age of 24-hour rolling news when stories have to be exaggerated if they are going to justify a news channels existence. So when a swan with a slight cold was discovered on the East Coast of Scotland the bird ‘flu media circus arrived. Flicking on the news one could have been forgiven for thinking that Fife had become Bhopal. There is no denying that the H5N1 virus is a worry and in Parliament we have been right to ask tough questions about immunisation and outbreak containment plans and the safety of poultry to eat. However it is also right to contemplate our often irrational response to such scares and to try and inject some realism into the whole subject of food standards and nutrition.
Some years ago I took my bad back to a so-called specialist. After a fairly cursory examination he surprised me by asking me about my diet. With a growing sense of disapproval he made a long list of all that I enjoyed eating down one side of a page and then without asking me, wrote all the things I don’t like down the other side. All sugar, dairy products, red meat and white bread had to be replaced with brown rice, wholemeal bread and boiled fish. In short I was to stop enjoying food with flavours and to replace it with stuff that would prolong my life but would give me as much pleasure as eating cardboard. When I objected he looked at me like an Old Testament profit and intoned, "we dig our graves with our spoons".
He and thousands like him feed a scare happy media with truths, half-truths and conjecture. Those who love to put the words "Breaking News" on our TV screens transform such beliefs into blood chilling hyperbole. The Government reacted to increasing public concern by creating the Food Standards Agency. Its existence has been a mixed blessing. If you follow its advice you can be excused for a degree of confusion. The Agency created something called the ‘nutrient profile model’ which assesses food by measuring its calories, the amount of salt, sugar and fats in a standard amount of 100grams. The trouble with this system is that it results in the bizarre phenomenon where honey, dairy products and some good healthy foods are labelled as "junk food". At the same time it allows some fizzy drinks, chicken nuggets and oven chips to be deemed "healthy". Dairy producers are naturally outraged. Milk has been a key element in the staple diet of children and is a source of much needed calcium. Honey is the most natural and healthy of foods. Moses had enough trouble leading his people to the land of milk and honey. Imagine how the Middle East map might look if nutrient profile modelling and the Food Standards Agency had been around at that time.
At the root of our whole attitude to food safety is a culture of detachment from food production. Each year I hold two schools days at home when 1500 school children from nearby towns visit my farm. They learn that milk comes from a cow and how the wheat that becomes part of their Jammy Dodger is grown. The ignorance of young and old about food and how it is produced is behind our often hysterical response to food scares. The answer, as someone once said, is "education, education, education".
House Magazine - April 2006
British agriculture has changed fundamentally in a generation, says Richard Benyon, with farmers and the landscape feeling the effects
My active farming is nowadays restricted to weekends, when I exercise myself and my dogs in a vain attempt to keep up with what has been going on while I have been at Westminster. This brings home to me how easy it is to get out of touch with an ever-changing industry.
When I started farming, talk at any gathering of farmers would be about new varieties of crops or new techniques of husbandry. Now the conversations seem to start with how to cope with new regulations. The new lexicon of the industry is centred around a web of regulatory compliance.
As a mixed farmer in West Berkshire, I am now something of a rarity. As a child, most of the farms in my area were mixed arable and stock farms, requiring a supporting infrastructure. Cattle marts, veterinary practices, feed mills and slaughterhouses, meanwhile, supported a range of farming interests. As a boy I used to skive off school to work on a nearby sheep farm.
Bought-in feeds came predominantly from the area and were milled locally. Lambs were slaughtered in one of the three local slaughterhouses and were processed locally. Now local farms will buy feed with ingredients that could come from Brazil, and stock are slaughtered hundreds of miles away.
This may sound like the whimsical mutterings of a bucolic octogenarian, but I am describing how British agriculture has changed in less than a generation. BSE, foot and mouth, over-regulation and the chill wind of global markets have removed great swathes of the infrastructure that supported stock farming. No-one is pretending it will ever come back.
Today, farms in the Berkshire Downs are almost entirely arable. This has had an environmental effect. Bird species such as plovers and skylarks used to rely on a quantity of grassland in this part of England. The Downs remain hauntingly beautiful and I never tire of them, but I notice less exciting views with fewer people working on the land, and less diversity of landscape.
Does this matter? Yes, of course it does. It is mainly small family farming units that provide the landscape and bio-diversity that everyone values. However, they need help to survive. I can and do join in with the anti-CAP rhetoric. I hate the fact that around 40 per cent of my net farm income comes from subsidies or grants. This is ‘Prozac farming’.
However, some support will always be needed if thoughtful farmers are to continue to provide the patchwork landscape and bio-diversity that so defines rural Britain. No modern western democracy has yet cut its farmers entirely loose to face the vagaries of the global economy, and if we value the countryside then we have to find better ways of protecting a certain type of farmer.
My neighbouring farmers are men of infinite entrepreneurial skill. They have diversified into every conceivable sideline to be able to continue to afford to farm. They find new markets for what they produce and wangle a premium wherever they can. They also invariably find time to be the pillar of their local community. Britain is well served by its farmers and in my own very amateur way, I am proud to be one of them.
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