Priority Investments for Britain - Nigel Rock

6.15.13pm GMT Tue 16th Dec 2008

Nigel Rock PPC

Nigel Rock PPC has written to the Observer newspaper in response to an article by Andrew Rawnsley in last Sunday's newspaper:-

"Andrew Rawnsley was absolutely right with his three priorities in his item last week. Any transport minister should be obliged to travel around Switzerland by rail to see how it should be done. Here in central England, we cannot practically travel by train to Brussels and Paris or even make good use of existing airports as our rail links to Heathrow and Stanstead are dire. Direct trains that used to run to Gatwick have just been withdrawn. (The perceived solution to making better use of our airports seems to be to build more runways.) An important town like Kenilworth has a passenger railway but no station.

The high speed broadband of up to 50Mbits proposed this week is a distant pipe dream for rural areas of Warwickshire - mine checks at one hundredth of that - apparently worse than Northern Ireland which was reported by the BBC to be the slowest.

The Government's approach to renewable energy seems locked into discredited and complex corporate arrangements through large energy companies and the Warmfront fiasco where suppliers of new domestic boilers are invited to charge well over the odds without checks. A grant scheme for small scale energy generation which doesn't get cut when people take it up and fair feed in-tariffs to sell energy back would transform the micro-generation market overnight, as it has in Germany.

One thing that Andrew didn't mention is help to bring forward local construction projects - - our local Council has just cancelled one in Wellesbourne where there are no such facilities for 6000 people - citing the credit crunch. This project was canned by the local Tories who won't even talk to the Labour Government to bring it forward. Clearly this is the opposite of what is required for the local economy."