Had a really successful day at the Epworth Show yesterday, I am assured by my team that we had far more people come and chat to us this year than in previous years. We certainly had lots of positive comments and plenty of people signed the petition we were gathering.

I did forget to put sunscreen on so my face was a little red this morning! Been an interesting few days nationally with Labour fiddling the crime figures on gun crime and the Tories really taking a lead on crime issues.

Been to Brigg tonight to chat to some residents there about an issue which explains my lateness in getting logged on. I did hope to put a photo of the Epworth Show up but I left my camera in the office!

Tomorrow I am spending the day responding to the huge amount of mail we have received this week. We seem to be getting more and more every week and a few of the letters this week were addressed to me as the local MP! Rest assured, I have certainly corrected that in the responses I have written. I don't want people thinking the letters I write them have been paid for by the taxpayer!

As keen as I am to keep my distance from all that Westminster stuff, it has to be a good sign that people are coming to the local Conservatives for help in such numbers.

Hundreds of residents have taken to opportunity to sign my petition against the Environment Agency's River Aire Flood Catchment Plan.

My decision not to take a holiday this summer seems to have been sensible. I have had well over 50 residents contact me on various issues in the past week or two! I never expected to get such a positive response so quickly when I took this role on. Amazingly, last week in Tesco I was stopped twice by local residents who wanted to comment positively on my local NHS campaigns. Fantastic!

Anyway, this week has been hectic. So far I have met with residents in Epworth and Westwoodside about a couple of local issues, attended the flooding public meeting in Belton, met with more residents concerned about the River Aire Catchment Plan and this evening spoke to the Goole Rotary Club.

Tomorrow I have some ward work to do in my Council ward and then I am off to South Ferriby to meet some residents there. Then in the evening I am at a charity event in Goole. This being a PPC lark is quite time consuming. I have given up one of my jobs to do it, I don't know how other candidates who are not fortunate enough to be able to do that manage it.

On the national front, I like what our party has been saying about the Human Rights Act in the past few days. It really is a worthless piece of legislation. I'm sat here in my back bedroom looking at my copy of the Magna Carta I have up on the wall (its the History Teacher in me) and just musing at how odd it is that the country that created the basic concepts of law governed liberty and freedom should be so appallingly hamstrung by an imported piece of legislation.

The beauty of our ancient liberties and freedoms is that they took centuries to develop and evolve, which ensured that they were always relevant to the period and, most importantly, radical in a very British way i.e. they pushed the boundaries of our system in order to develop but they never broke our ancient structures (Cromwell exempted). The Human Rights Act took a sledge hammer to our system and broke it.

Those are my musings for the evening, I'm off to watch Location, Location, Location now!

Whitehall plans for new bin taxes will mean surge in fly-tipping
New rubbish taxes will harm the environment warns Andrew Percy

The Labour Government’s plans to impose Euro-style taxes for the collection of household rubbish, on top of council tax, were slammed this week as Andrew Percy warned of a massive surge in fly-tipping. With the Whitehall ‘consultation’ on the new tax scheme having now closed, the small print of the Government’s own 228-page research reveals the new taxes will almost double the level of fly-tipping in England.

·The Government’s own research estimates that bin taxes will lead to an additional 155,000 tonnes of fly-tipping a year across England. This would be equivalent to an average of 440 tonnes of rubbish dumped across our area.
·The taxes will almost double the amount that town halls currently spend on cleaning up fly-tipping. Last year, East Riding Council had to deal with 1363 number of fly-tipping incidents.
·Illegal dumping includes household waste being placed in neighbour’s bins, in street litter bins, in next door councils, dumping waste at work, and fly-tipping.

Research by the Countryside Alliance has found that black bags full of domestic rubbish already account for 63 per cent of all fly-tipping; yet just one in every 100 fly-tippers is actually prosecuted.

Bin taxes have already been introduced in the Republic of Ireland where they have caused a surge in fly-tipping; families who do not or cannot pay the bin taxes have their rubbish collections stopped. The Keep Britain Tidy campaign has warned that bin taxes will lead to "people simply dumping their garbage illegally in a bid to avoid paying up".

Andrew said:
“In the last few years, fly-tipping has become endemic. Yet Whitehall plans for new taxes on family homes will make it even worse. We all want to increase the level of recycling, but bin taxes will harm the local environment by leading to a surge in illegal dumping and backyard burning.

“Whether they can’t pay or won’t pay, I fear some irresponsible people will dump instead.The Government also needs to understand that for large families it can be a real challenge keeping rubbish down to a minimum. And no-one believes that council taxes would fall if bin taxes were introduced. Bin taxes aren’t a green tax – they’re yet another stealth tax by another name.

The Keep Britain Tidy Campaign has warned, “the so-called, ‘pay as you throw’ scheme – which involves placing micro chips in bins to asses the amount of rubbish each home creates – may result in people simply dumping their garbage illegally in a bid to avoid paying up’.

We need the Government to listen to these concerns and to understand that, whilst we all want to increase recycling, big brother style micro-chips in our bins is not the way. Much more could be achieved if the Government stopped its under-funding of the East Riding and North Lincolnshire Councils and provided a fair grant which would allow the Council to develop its recycling facilities further.”

Massive Response To Flood Petition

Hundreds of local residents have taken the opportunity to let the Environment Agency know their views of the controversial River Aire Flood Catchment Plan.

Andrew Percy explains, “As soon as we became aware of this plan Cllr Caroline Fox, Cllr Gordon Megson and myself decided to deliver a newsletter to every house in the affected area to let residents know about the Environment Agency’s proposals to increase flooding locally. On the bottom of our newsletter we asked residents who were concerned to fill in a tear-off slip objecting to the proposal. We also asked residents to include any additional objection letters they wanted us to pass on to the Environment Agency.

I am delighted to say that we have already received about 250 replies from local residents, and with replies coming in almost every day, we expect this figure to increase. Many residents also took the opportunity to include additional letters which I shall be passing onto the Environment Agency when we meet with them on August 29th in Selby.

This huge response clearly shows how concerned local residents are about this proposal and I am delighted that we have been able to ensure that people have had a real opportunity to comment on the plan. Many residents expressed concern that the first they heard about the proposal was via the local newspapers and our newsletter. There is clearly a lesson here for Government Quangos such as the Environment Agency; which after all wield a great deal of power over our lives.

We now need more detail from the Environment Agency on what exactly they propose to do locally. The plan as it presently stands is very light on detail which explains why local people are so concerned. That is why I hope the meeting on August 29th will ensure that more detail is forthcoming and hopefully this will help to alleviate some of our concerns.”

The issue of road safety outside schools seems to be a growing one across the constituency. I am pictured here with East Riding Cllr Caroline Fox at Reedness Primary School where we are fighting for improved road safety measures. Tory run East Riding Council are taking this issue very seriously and it certainly looks like we might have action soon.

Have just found out that I have been elected to the Goole Forum, thanks to the votes of Parish and Town Councillors in the area.

I managed to poll 46 votes, compared to the second place person (a Labour Town Councillor) who polled 27. He and I will both serve on the Forum which next meets on September 6th and is a forum for discussing key issues which affect the Goole area as a whole.

Mnay thanks to those Councillors who voted for me.

Fire service regionalisation will undermine flood & emergency response

Local Tri-Service Centres could do more to improve civil resilience

Andrew Percy warned today that the Government’s plan to regionalise the fire service could undermine the effectiveness of the emergency services as a whole in tackling future flood risks and other unforeseen events.

Under Labour’s ongoing regionalisation plans, the local fire control room for Humberside is due to be moved to Wakefield, covering a population of nearly 5 million people and an area of nearly 6,000 square miles (15,408 square km). Local knowledge and expertise will be lost.

Areas which currently have Tri-Service Centres (where the fire, ambulance and police are in one local command centre) will have the fire element taken away. A cross-party Committee of MPs warned last year that combined control rooms for the emergency services would do more to increase resilience than sprawling, regional fire control rooms.

Andrew said:
“The Government’s expensive plans for the regionalisation of the fire control services are flawed. I fear it could actually undermine the effectiveness of the emergency services in tackling disasters like floods – where co-operation between the local council, fire, police and ambulance services is essential. When I met with representatives of the Humberside Brigade recently, at a meeting to discuss the response to flooding in the East Riding, they explained that the move to regional control would mean a loss of local control over the resources of the Humberside Brigade. For example, if we saw a repeat of the recent flooding, resources from the Humberside Force could be despatched anywhere in the country without any local veto by our Chief Officer. That could leave our area exposed to risks.”

Haltemprice and Howden MP David Davis added, “Local Tri-Service Centres could do far more to improve resilience than creating a distant call centre in Wakefield covering all of Yorkshire. The arbitrary government office regions are too distant and too big. These proposals prove that the Government’s talk of localism and local accountability is nothing more than clever spin.”

Just got back in from the Brigg Fayre, via a little job I had to do in South Ferriby which ended up taking quite a few hours!

Anyways, the Brigg Fayre was pretty good and I am thankful to Cllr Carl Sherwood for taking me round and introducing me to a lot of people. I was personally very interested in the horse trading that goes on. One of my ancestors was a horse dealer from Broughton so I did wonder whether or not I was following in my 3X Great Grandfather's footsteps today!

Thank goodness the weather held out.

The picture right shows me celebrating with the Belgravia Carers outside Bartholomew House Mental Health Unit in Goole. I met the carers on Monday after we found out that the Humber Mental Health Trust has agreed to delay their decision on whether or not to close Barts House for between 3 and 5 years.