Disraeli Room

The Bill which I introduced would enable local authorities, should they choose to, to use stronger planning powers to help protect local pubs and shops. It would do this by allowing the use of locally determined “use classes” to separate local independent shops from chains, and supermarkets from other grocers, as well as new constraints on changing use away from pubs

This week has seen the Independent Panel on Forestry publish their long awaited report into the future of England’s forests and woodlands, with particular reference to the Public Forest Estate, an area which provides just 18% of Britain’s woodland – but, astonishingly, 44% of all accessible woodland in Britain. The panel had been set up in the aftermath of the Government’s abandonment of the consultation on the future of the public forest estate, due to the raft of negative feedback towards its proposals. So, what was proposed by the Panel, and do their recommendations go far enough

...It is clear that we have become disconnected from our natural environment and the reality of its ownership and management. The idyll that so many seek to protect was once a working landscape that delivered food, shelter and energy, and was managed sustainably in order that it would continue to do so year after year. We didn’t just love our landscape - we understood it. It had real value that was lived rather than interpreted into aesthetic or financial abstractions

Heredity, incompetence, sleaze, corruption, misrepresentation, lack of transparency – there are plenty of reasons to reform the House of Lords. One only need turn on BBC Parliament to see peers sleeping on the job. But we cannot allow these failures to cloud our appreciation of the system. Wiser than Solon but more democratic than Plato, the theoretical basis of the British bicameral system is a triumph of political philosophy