What does the public expect of the Government? - Yorkshire Post Letters

What do we expect of the government? A lot of hot air and fine words but no action? Or putting all its effort into looking after the interests of the people who live in the UK?

Businesses don’t want an absence of regulations - they need a fair playing field where they can compete and succeed, and where good ideas and good engineering design are the basis of good products, rather than hype and overwhelming amounts of marketing spend. With so much global change there is also an urgent need to keep all our regulations up to date.

You don’t have to agree with the current administration, but don’t look at what they say, look at what they do. They have got more legislation moving through Parliament and being debated than the last government. Whether it’s housing, energy, health, education or defence, the pace of change has suddenly accelerated.

As we now have consensus in the UK that climate change is real and will affect energy security, increase flooding and make farming more unreliable, we do need a government that is trying to steer a path through the changes. One that is working for all of us, not just a few non-doms and the top 1 per cent.

That’s why it’s good news that the Labour government has responded to the increased interest in heat pumps by increasing the grant fund; and to the difficulties of the car manufacturers by allowing a later date for the end of plug-in hybrid car sales.

They are making sure we have UK-based energy generation by getting critical infrastructure built. And they are starting to address a housing crisis that was 30 years in the making.

Compare that to the previous approach: millions of pounds spent on ‘consultations’ about everything from reforming our sadly out of date Energy Performance Certificate system (in 2020), to the three sets of consultations on water and the environment commissioned by Therese Coffey; plus the work done to improve the nation’s diet by the food tsar which was ignored, leading him to resign.

Nearly all these consultations were just a ruse to kick the can down the road and the expensive reports are now languishing in the parliamentary archives. Nothing actually got done.

The cherry on the cake was the planning constraints on onshore wind that David Cameron brought in, destroying our onshore wind industry and blocking community energy that would have provided cheaper bills for millions of people.

The challenges are big and there are a lot of choices about how we meet them, so we need to debate the options.

There may be a few wrong turns, like the failed pilots to put hydrogen boilers in homes. But climate change is a real problem for the UK, and we need real policy to keep the country safe and prosperous while we weather it.

Doing nothing, making fine speeches and sitting on their hands is thankfully a thing of the past.