David Ottewell's Politics

The list of bills in the Queen’s speech has a solid but unspectacular look to it.
Obviously – and rightly – the reforms to the banking and economic systems are a priority for the government. The Banking Bill (which has already started its path through parliament) will give ministers greater control of the banking system and contains measures to ensure financial stability in the future.
There are a couple of other meaty measures – pushing more people on incapacity benefits back towards work, giving teachers more powers to root out drugs and weapons, and enshrining in law a commitment to eradicating child poverty will play well in various quarters.
The ‘headline’ aspects of other bills seem more marginal in their appeal. Cracking down on lapdancing clubs has always seemed an odd priority to me, and has ensuring the right to walk around the English coast.
One bill not mentioned directly in the speech, but which may become a major talking point, is the Business Rates Supplement Bill. Essentially, this will allow councils to levy up to 2p in the pound on business rates to pay for economic development schemes. The move got short shrift in Greater Manchester when it was suggested the money could go towards funding the Metrolink big bang.
Opposition parties are claiming Gordon Brown has failed to show vision, and has not addressed some key issues facing the British people (Nick Clegg pointed towards housing). I think that’s an overstatement. But it does feel a bit like a pre-MOT engine-tune rather than a completely new car.

Vernon Coaker, the home office minister, announced funding for 2009-10 for our police forces the other day.
From a Greater Manchester perspective, it could have been worse but could have been better. Key info below…

I’m back in Manchester after a two-day trip to Edinburgh to find out what life is like in a city that rejected congestion charging back in 2005.
There are important differences between the scheme proposed here and the one that died a death north of the border. For a start there is far more money attached to the Greater Manchester proposals; there are far more plans, too, for better public transport across the whole conurbation. But there are similarities, too – mainly in the two-ring, peak-hour only nature of the charging scheme, which many in Edinburgh found far too complex a prospect.
Summary findings:
*No regrets about the 2005 referendum result
*Broad concerns about congestion, but a sense that it is by no means a critical issue
*A belief, however, that public transport needs to be better
*Concerns that the proposed scheme would have penalised commuters in areas that would not have benefited from better public transport
*Widespread scepticism about the likely impact of the tram system that is currently being built (this would have been a bigger scheme had charging gone ahead)
*An overall sense that the referendum is very much in the past, and charging very much off the agenda
In short, we’d have liked the money for public transport, but we didn’t want the charge. The eternal dilemma…