Avid readers of this blog (and there must presumably be one of you out there) will recall that I have been pestering the Department for Business Innovation and Skills with Parliamentary Questions designed to find out how serious the Conservative Coalition is about promoting enterprise and entrepreneurship.  The first answer I got back essentially said they didn’t know.  I have now had three more answers which essentially say they still don’t know:

Business: Entrepreneurship

Questions

Asked by Lord Harris of Haringey

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what proportion of the budget of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills was spent on promoting enterprise and entrepreneurship in the United Kingdom in each of the past five years.[HL2879]

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (Baroness Wilcox): We are not able to provide the information requested. Owing to previous structural changes arising from decisions about the machinery of government, we cannot accurately allocate spend to these specific areas. Promotion of enterprise and entrepreneurship covers a wide range of activities and financial information is split between a number of areas of spend and individual databases within the department.

Asked by Lord Harris of Haringey

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they plan to increase or decrease the proportion of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills annual expenditure allocated to promoting and developing enterprise and entrepreneurship. [HL2880]

Baroness Wilcox: The budgets have not yet been allocated following the spending review (SR) settlement of 20 October 2010.

In the SR, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills was allocated £14.7 billion in 2014-15 a reduction to its resource budget of 25 per cent and to capital spending of 44 per cent.

Asked by Lord Harris of Haringey

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to develop the Work for Yourself Programme, as set out in the Coalition Agreement; and how much funding the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills plans to allocate to develop the Work for Yourself Programme in each of the next five years. [HL2881]

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Freud): Your question has been passed to the Department for Work and Pensions as this department has responsibility for the new enterprise allowance formerly known as work for yourself. Following the spending review, funding for the NEA has been secured as part of the department’s budget for the years 2011-12 and 2012-13. The design and delivery of the allowance is currently being finalised and therefore no decision has been taken on the allocation of funding.

I’ve just been in the out-patients department of a North London hospital.
I haven’t seen so many patients parked on trolleys in corridors since – well – the last time there was a Conservative Government.

Listening to all the hype today about David Cameron allegedly persuading other EU leaders to limit the EU budget, I immediately assumed that this was the old LibDem trick of declaring victory over something that was going to happen anyway, and that the Commission and the European Parliament had put forward an inflated budget bid, so that the European Council could cut it back to the increase they wanted in the first place.

So I was gratified to see my web-master, the excellent Jon Worth, who has forgotten more about the minutiae of EU politics than most of us ever knew, confirming my supposition.

So David Cameron HAS been taking lessons in tactics from his LibDem coalition partners.

The question is will the Euro-sceptic wing of his Party fall for it?

At the beginning of last week, I tabled some questions for written answer to try and find out how serious the Conservative Coalition is about enterprise and entrepreneurship.

I’ve now had the answer to the first of these.

My question was:

“To ask her Majesty’s Government what entrepreneurship and enterprise projects they have (a) fully and (b) partially funded; and what plans they have to fund such projects in each of the next five years.”

The answer that came back today was:

“A wide range of enterprise projects have been supported through a number of programmes run by various departments, but a comprehensive list of these is not available.”

So BIS doesn’t know, can’t be bothered to find out and ignored the last part of the question entirely.

I am not impressed.

I have now tabled the following:

“To ask Her Majesty’s Government:

1.  
   1. In the light of the answer given by Baroness Wilcox on 28^th October 2010, does the Department for Business Innovation and Skills keep a record of the external projects they fund and, if so, which of these external projects relate to entrepreneurship and enterprise?
   2. In the light of the answer given by Baroness Wilcox on 28^th October 2010, what plans do the Department for Business Innovation and Skills have for funding external projects relating to entrepreneurship and enterprise over the next five years?
   3. In the light of the answer given by Baroness Wilcox on 28^th October 2010, what arrangements do the Department for Business Innovation and Skills have in place for coordinating the activities of other Government Departments in relation to entrepreneurship and enterprise?”

The Metropolitan Police Authority is in session and the DCiC* and PSPCC**, Deputy Mayor Kit Malthouse AM, is in the Chair.  And the expected row about the future of neighbourhood policing in London has just petered out.

New readers might want to check out Pippa Crerar in the Evening Standard to get the context, but the story is pretty simple: Mayor Boris Johnson and the PSPCC have been very vague for the last two years about whether they were really committed to maintaining the current structure of safer neighbourhood teams created by former Mayor Ken Livingstone; but this week one Borough Commander has written to local councillors telling them that the number of officers in the safer neighbourhood teams in his patch might be reduced and that they would work “more flexibly” rather than remaining dedicated to particular neighbourhoods; and more or less simultaneously and this coincided with a statement from the PSPCC and the real Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, stating that every neighbourhood would continue to have named officers responsible for tackling local crime but adding ominously:

“Currently the teams are dedicated to ward boundaries, which we want to ensure continues to meet your and the public’s local needs. We also want to ensure the structure of the teams, and how they are supervised, makes the best use of skills and resources so that we can meet local demand effectively.”

A cynic (actually, it was me) pointed out that every neighbourhood having named officers is not the same as a neighbourhood team – indeed Sir Paul and his Deputy, Tim Godwin, could arguably be named as the officers responsible for tackling local crime in every ward in London.

The Commissioner assured the meeting that “no decisions have been taken”, despite the letters going out from Borough Commanders implying the opposite.  This prompted Dee Doocey AM to make the accusation “you are trying to con us” (which she then withdrew on being told she was being “unparliamentary” – she is allegedly on a list of possible new LibDem peers).

The Commissioner couldn’t yet give assurances that the total number of officers and PCSOs  engaged in Safer Neighbourhood Teams would remain uncut, but he expressed a personal preference for retaining links to local government ward boundaries.  And he did promise that officers would still be “dedicated” to local areas – without a commitment on how many and what the areas would finally be.   As to fairness between areas (ie every ward receiving the same allocation of Safer Neighbourhood resources), he acknowledged that this had been the basis on which the Safer Neighbourhood Teams had been established but did warn that there was debate on what this might mean in the future.

This debate is not yet over ……

*Dog-Catcher-in-Chief

**Putative Surrogate Policing and Crime Commissioner

One of the lead stories on the BBC News this morning was “Police in training for ‘Mumbai-style’ gun attack in UK“.  This reported that:

“UK security chiefs have ordered an acceleration in police training to prepare for any future “Mumbai-style” gun attack in a public place.

A series of counter-terrorism exercises are being held with police marksmen training alongside units of the SAS.

Police armed response units are also being given more powerful weapons.”

There is no doubt that this issue is one of the current preoccupations of those concerned with security on the British mainland (and indeed elsewhere in Europe).  There is also no doubt about how difficult this would be to cope with given the current style of British policing.

Most police officers here are unarmed.  Even in London, where the Metropolitan Police has a higher proportion of armed officers than elsewhere (mainly because of static protection responsibility around embassies, Government buildings, Heathrow airport etc), only around one in ten officers are authorised ever to carry guns and the areas where there are routine armed patrols are very limited.

In Mumbai, over a three-day period in November 2008, ten terrorists operating in pairs with automatic weapons, improvised explosive devices, equipped with GPS and apparently communicating with a remote controller by mobile telephone, killed 173 people and wounded 308.  They applied hit and run tactics, were opportunistic, took hostages and established defensible positions.

By contrast,earlier this year in Cumbria, a lone individual, Derrick Bird, armed with two non-automatic weapons went on a killing spree which left twelve dead and a similar number seriously wounded before he killed himself.

Gross that tally up with more gunmen, automatic weaponry in a more populous area and the scale of what is possible becomes apparent.  For any Western democracy, planning a strategy to deal with a ruthless heavily armed coordinated attack in a populous city is no easy task.

Current training does not equip the police to deliver the sort of response needed to deal with Mumbai-style insurgents.  And it would be the police that would be likely to be the first on the scene.

For those who think Special Forces are the answer, it is worth remembering that the time for any conventional armed forces to be mobilised would be measured in hours –  and this would inevitably mean a very high casualty rate before any intervention could succeed.

It is no surprise therefore that the BBC reports that “David Cameron has taken a personal interest in the problem ever since his first threat assessment given to him when he took office in May.”

And there are real dilemmas.  Even in London – with more armed police to draw on – dealing with multiple mobile attacks would be extremely difficult and police tactics are focused on containing an incident – usually involving a single gunman.  Exchanging fire with heavily armed ruthless gunmen requires military-style engagement and different weapons and ammunition.  Police officers have not previously been trained in this way and not all of the currently armed officers would be suitable for such a task or willing to engage in it.

Such training will take time.

And even when units of suitably trained officers have been created, having them on continuous standby will be expensive and having such units on regular patrol will mark a massive movement away from the traditional vision of unarmed British bobbies-on-the-beat.

Today’s BBC report will no doubt start a public debate on the implications of all this, but the reality is that the face of British policing is likely to be changed forever as a result – particularly if the public expenditure review means that more conventional “traditional” policing has to be cut back to pay for it.

The Conservative Coalition has just won a vote by a majority of 275 in the House of Lords on an amendment to the Terrorist Asset-Freezing etc Bill.  Yet, they are still insisting that they need to appoint another 30 Conservative life peers and an extra 15 Liberal Democrats to give them more foot-soldiers …..

According to The Observer today, David Cameron has personally vetoed the appearance of the Chairman of the Conservative Party, Baroness Warsi, at the Global Peace and Unity event this weekend.

David Cameron’s decision is apparently a response to the presence at the event of a number of hard-line speakers who have justified suicide bombers and terrorism, promoted al Qaida, and encouraged homophobia.   Warsi, who is of course the first female Muslim Cabinet Minister, was planning to use the appearance to confront those advocating extremism and argue against fundamentalism.

A refusal to engage in this way merely allows unacceptable extremist views to remain unchallenged.  If no alternative is presented, those seeking to persuade people of the validity of that extremism are given a clear run.

The Conservative Coalition’s compromise is to send Andrew Stunnell MP, a junior LibDem Minister at the Communities Department to put the case against extremism, hatred and intolerance.

I don’t want to upset Mr Stunnell’s friends and family, but he is hardly a household name.  Nor is he a Muslim.  And nor is he as senior in the Government as Baroness Warsi.

So the Government is not actually boycotting the event, which might at least have made a point – in absentia – about its distaste for some of the views being expressed.  Instead, it is missing the opportunity to deploy someone who might at least to have been listened to when she put an alternative viewpoint.

Am I surprised?

No, not really.  It is a typically wimpish and ineffectual abdication of political and moral leadership.

The House of Lords has spent much of today debating a motion

“To call attention to the economic and cultural impacts of immigration in the United Kingdom; and to move for papers”.

This led to a serious discussion on the impact of the Government’s “cap” on immigration on the business community and on scientific research.

There was also a wonderful and surreal contribution from Lord James of Blackheath.  It was definitely one of those House of Lords “stream of consciousness” moments.

This is what he said:

“My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, for procuring this debate. I have to say that those who follow me might wish to add a rider to their own congratulations, deploring the fact that she did not stop me speaking, because we had a conversation in advance in which I told her that I had absolutely nothing to contribute to this debate, given that I have no experience of immigration or multiculturalism. To demonstrate that, I told her an anecdote that she thought was good enough to be repeated today, and that is what noble Lords are about to get. You must blame it on her afterwards.

My story starts in the trenches of the Somme in 1916 with a Major Alexander Crombie, who came out alive but deeply scarred from the experience and decided that he wanted to make a contribution to world peace. He took what little fortune he had and created a small academic academy with the express purpose of bringing in boys from European nations whom he could then groom for the common entrance examination and place somewhere in the public school system in Britain. This establishment prospered through even the Second World War and had arrived in 1947 at a point at which it had some 25 boys—all bright and intelligent fellows.

In parallel with that, I had been having my own educational crisis which had resulted in my being classified as mentally defective by the London education authority and sent to a school for mental defectives. My father was unamused at this and decided that I had to be removed immediately from that school and that he had to find somewhere to send me. Someone suggested that he talk to Major Crombie, who was then quite an old man. Major Crombie said, “We can’t have this fellow in; he can’t read and could not even do the 11-plus”. My father said, “Never mind; that proves that he is a refugee from the London County Council, so you’ve got to have him”. Crombie looked at a list and said, “What did you say your name was? James? We have 25 boys here—one for every letter of the alphabet except J. We’ll take him”. So I got in.

We had an amazing roll call every morning. It began with Adybaya, Baptista, Chinchialla and Dukszta, and ended gloriously with Xyrus, Yballa and Zabialski. I used to think that if I could get through life and remember the entire roll call, I would know that Alzheimer’s had not yet reached me. After I had my stroke, I said this to my physician, who said, “No, old boy. You may remember all the other 25, but your trouble is when you cannot remember who the J was”. So far, so good—but not for long, I am sure.

This was a remarkable gathering. We had some really fine brains in the class, but we were all under the control of a former Coldstream Guard padre called the Reverend Wynn, who was one of the great men of my life. He decided that he would have no nonsense with us at all. He was going to have a morning service or gathering. When we said, “Father, we have 17 nationalities and eight religions here, so we cannot possibly have a religious gathering in the morning”, he said, “Of course you can. It does not matter which god you have—you are going to celebrate the glory of this world. Bring your god with you, whoever he is, and we will all celebrate the glory of the world together”. And we did. We could not have any readings from the Bible, the Koran or anything else. He formed a committee of us to find suitable prose or a poem every day which would celebrate something of beauty in the world.

There were to be no hymns sung, so he decided—very unwisely, as it turned out—that we could all, in rotation, sing our national anthems, to which we could write our own words of a non-jingoistic nature. The honour went first to the three British boys. We decided to use “Pomp and Circumstance” and rewrite the words to, “Land of cut the call-up, how do we dodge this nonsense?”. That did not get us any merit points. The situation completely fell to pieces when the two German Jewish refugee boys at the school decided to write their own version of “Deutschland Über Alles” and got their little bit of revenge on Germany in the process. They decided to devote the words to the most obscene account of Hermann Göring having sexual congress with a lady kangaroo, which ultimately proved fatal to him because it would not stop jumping. After that, the Reverend Wynn decided that there should be no more of that.

This extraordinary gathering of boys with huge talent had one great skill that united us. We had a lot of Eastern bloc boys among us with a huge capability at chess. We had one of the strongest chess teams that you could ever put into the field—even at the age of 11 or 12. After we got into the quarter finals of the London schools knock-out competition with a team of 12 year-olds in 1947, we asked the Reverend Wynn to issue a challenge invitation to Eton and Winchester. I do not know whether there are any Wykehamists or Etonians in this assembly, but if there are, I have to say, “Oh, what a bunch of wimps you were—you would not take the challenge”. I hope that you have that to your eternal shame, gentlemen.

The gathering continued very successfully and nearly everyone in the class got into one of the better public schools. We had a wonderful time together. I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, is no longer present, because this is probably the antidote to his comments about multiculturalism. Oh, here he is. This is probably the noble Lord’s nightmare of multiculturalism gone wrong, but it was in fact brilliant. Of the 17 nations from which we came, about half had been trying to exterminate the other half during the previous five or six years, yet everyone got on so well together because we were completely without the preconceptions instilled by too much political correctness and preconditioning as to what we ought to think of each other and how we ought to react. We were the biggest bunch of mutual support people ever gathered together in one place. Today I cannot see what the problem is with the interracial problems of immigration. We did it fine. We were young, we just got on well with each other, and that was a natural instinct. If we stop dictating to and preconditioning people, it works very well.”

I am told that some people are having trouble understanding the logic behind the decisions on aircraft carriers contained in the Strategic Defence and Security Review.

This will help:

Helpfully highlighted by Guido Fawkes.

And it was made three years ago ….