Gavin Williamson’s contempt over school laptops must end – Tom Richmond

It’s even worse when backbench MPs are treated so shabbily and discourteously. Take Labour MP Matt Western, who has been asking questions about provision of laptops to schools since June. He’s still waiting for Education Secretary Gavin Williamson to reply and set out his latest frustrations in the House of Commons this week.

“I followed this up with his Department on November 2. It failed to reply. I followed this up again with his Department on November 19. I received a holding email, but I have yet to receive a substantive response,” he said.

Even Dame Eleanor Laing, the Deputy Speaker, sympathised. “The saga that he has just described is not acceptable,” she told Western.

I agree. Either Williamson does not care – and it’s further reason to relieve him of his duties after his mishandling of the exams shambles – or his office is so badly run that he should be out of the door for mismanagement.

At least help is at hand locally after Yorkshire entrepreneur David Richards launched his Laptops for Kids scheme
in Sheffield that recycles computers so they can be used by underprivileged children.

But not all areas are in such a position – a lesson that Williamson still appears unable to grasp despite his department claiming that the DfE can get sufficient laptops to schools within 48 hours of requests being made. It can’t.

And while some may say Whitehall deserves leniency due to the pandemic, I’d agree apart from the fact that the record of some departments is getting worse, not better, and the issue at stake is the education of children whose learning has already been severely disrupted through no fault of their own.

IF the cost of HS2 is to be justified in these extraordinary economic times, the Government is going to have to make a far more convincing case.

Even though Boris Johnson and the Cabinet backed the £100bn-plus scheme after undertaking a detailed review, Tory MPs are getting restless – again.

As Chancellor Rishi Sunak prepared to deliver his Spending Review, his former Cabinet colleague Esther McVey was launching an attack on HS2 in a Westminster Hall debate on infrastructure.

“I say stop HS2 with its runaway expenses – it should have hit the buffers a long time ago – and put that money into digital infrastructure to benefit the whole country, and into local transport,” she concluded.

My view remains that a new North-South rail line is needed to increase capacity and improve reliability. However, it will only withstand political and economic pressures if the Department for Transport, and others, set out the benefits that it will bring to local areas.

PLEASE can someone explain the purpose of Stuart Andrew, the deputy chief whip who is omnipresent at most Parliamentary proceedings.

TV footage always shows the Pudsey MP pootling around rather aimlessly – appearing to be busy doing nothing or playing political games – when his voters want him to roll up his sleeves and get on with representing them.

This man of mystery’s effectiveness came to mind in the aforementioned infrastructure debate saw Elmet and Rothwell MP Alec Shelbrooke intervene and say Andrew would like to have taken part in the debate, duties permitting, but is “equally involved in the infrastructure of the North”.

Really? Either Shelbrooke is desperate for a Ministerial job that he’ll say anything until he gets one – or he’d fallen victim to a wind-up because his dear colleague is certainly not renowned for his advocacy for the North.

NEARLY five years since the Boxing Day floods across Yorkshire embarrassed David Cameron – remember him? – there’s little evidence of the Government learning lessons. Its promise to hold a Yorkshire-wide flood summit in the wake of last November’s flooding in South Yorkshire, and ensure a more co-ordinated response to incidents, proved to be a lie.

And Boris Johnson, who made the original summit pledge, was all at sea when a Home Counties MP tackled him on the issue at PMQs.

Asked to “beef up the way flood risk is assessed and treated as part of the planning process”, Johnson replied by telling local councils to follow the planning rules.

He doesn’t get it. If new homes and properties are being built in areas prone to flooding, the fault is the rules laid down by Defra and the Environment Agency. And if they were more clear, it might stop new homes being built on flood plains in the first place. Simple.

FINALLY Chancellor Rishi Sunak – who appears to be a politician acutely aware of his public persona and image – is guilty of one fashion faux pax.

According to Michael Ashcroft’s biography Going For Broke, Sunak sported a pair of blue-coloured wellington boots shortly after being selected as the Tory candidate for Richmond. Evidently Sunak was unaware that he’d put his foot in it – Ashcroft reports that the choice of colour marked the eager politician down “as a ‘townie’ in the farming community where the standard colour is green”. “It did not go unnoticed, but nobody judged too harshly,” he added. If only the same was true of this week’s Spending Review...

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