Thank you Mr (Deputy) Speaker, I am grateful to you for calling me to speak for the first time and I am grateful to hon

This is a web page preview of a Microsoft Word document from the Cheltenham Liberal Democrats site. It is generated by a computer and is not manually edited. Formatting and content may be displayed differently to the original document, and should not be regarded as definitive.

Thank you Madam Deputy Speaker, I am grateful to you for calling me to speak for the first time and I am grateful to Honourable Members for the traditional courtesy I hope they are about to show me. And my congratulations to the Honourable Member for Kingston upon Hull North and other new members for the worryingly eloquent examples they have set me. In return I will try to observe tradition by being as uncontroversial as my Liberalism allows.

Through you, Madam Deputy Speaker, I'd also like to thank the House authorities for the advice and support they have given new members this year. I gather it is much improved from previous years and it is much appreciated. Of all the things that have been explained to us newcomers, it is probably the complex web of allowances, final salary pension scheme and expenses that attract most interest outside this House. There are easy political points to be scored in attacking these but I have to say they don't seem particularly outrageous to me compared to those provided in business.

However, and I have to declare a family interest here as my wife is a doctor, I do think they place a responsibility on the secretary of state and her colleagues to treat very carefully the pension arrangements in particular of other public servants, including my own constituents in GCHQ, the NHS and Cheltenham's schools and colleges.

It is appropriate that a Cheltenham maiden speech should be made on a day devoted to debating health and education. Salubritas et eruditio is after all our town motto. The educational tradition is very long - it dates back to the foundation of our grammar school by Richard Pate in 1578 and that tradition of educational excellence continues today, not least in our best comprehensive and special schools, the Gloucestershire College of Arts & Technology and our new university. I'm also proud that it extends to first class education for many disabled students of the National Star College, parts of which are within my constituency. However I'm bound to say that the perception locally is that educational provision is underfunded by central government compared to other counties and pupils' experiences across Cheltenham can be very mixed. These are serious issues to which I am sure I will return another day.

Health has been equally central to Cheltenham life. Today we boast a three star Hospital Foundation Trust, a three star Primary Care Trust and a three star Partnership Trust for mental health. While I share many colleagues' reservations about the accountability of Foundation Trusts, I hope ministers will look kindly on the mental health trust's current application for foundation status which, under the current system, would certainly seem to be the best path forward for them.

Cheltenham's association with good health began in 1716 when our future prosperity was assured by a pigeon whose target was a mineral spring. It was drinking the first Cheltenham waters. The spa soon became a magnet for visitors, including George III, his Prince Regent, Lord Byron and Jane Austen, who took the waters for their health-giving properties. The spa water is, to be perfectly honest, an acquired taste that is unlikely to have mass market appeal in the near future. But I would recommend it to the secretary of state for analysis, especially since water-borne bacteria phages have recently been suggested as possible antidotes to MRSA.

Cheltenham soon developed into the beautiful and friendly town it remains today. This brings its own problems. A high quality of life, relative prosperity and easy access to the beautiful Cotswold countryside attracts people to live and work. So we are told by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister to expect tens of thousands more homes to be built on our green belt, perhaps even merging us with nearby Gloucester. But what is the logic of concentrating development on already prosperous towns that neither want nor need it when smaller rural communities are dying for lack of families and less prosperous parts of the region and the country need and want development more. In the end our quality of life will be compromised, our traffic and services overloaded and outlying estates will become even more of a focus for the anti-social behaviour that blights Cheltenham too and stretches Police resources to the point where people are losing confidence in their ability to respond. Nor will this development of relatively expensive housing do anything to help the people trapped on our housing waiting list who are already beating a path to my surgery door.

There is inequality in Cheltenham. I have been elected not just by Guardian readers living in elegant regency properties - although I think I probably can count on their votes - but by people who have to work hard just to make ends meet on streets and estates that suffer very significantly lower incomes, worse health and fewer educational choices than the more affluent parts of town. They expect me to fight for change in this House and I promise to do so.

But Cheltenham does continue to welcome visitors, especially through a succession of festivals, many of them giving the town an international flavour. During the National Hunt Festival in March, The Queen's Hotel flies the Irish tricolour and our pubs take Euros. The horses actually run in the Honourable Member for Tewkesbury's constituency but I won't embarrass him by suggesting that his pubs take Euros too. Our international festival of music attracts world-class talent every year as befits the birthplace of Gustav Holst. We also offer fantastic festivals of literature, cricket, science, folk and jazz. Visitors to Cheltenham in recent years have also included a succession of Conservative and Labour general election candidates, perhaps ignorant of the fact that for the last thirty years and for much of its earlier electoral history Cheltenham has returned only MPs born and bred in Cheltenham.

Cheltenham has had a great liberal tradition in this House and not just from those wearing my party colours. Our parliamentary representation was born in the Reform Act of 1832 and our first MP, Craven Berkeley, was a staunch supporter of more democratic reform. But I'm afraid he didn't set a very good example for the rest of us to follow in other ways. He went so far as to shoot at an opposing Tory MP on one occasion, in a duel in 1842. Luckily both were equally poor shots. On another occasion, Berkeley allegedly guarded the door of a Regent street bookseller while his brother beat up the proprietor. He was nevertheless very popular with his constituents and re-elected many times, only once being unseated for offering rather too many refreshments to his electors during the campaign. He thereby established a powerful Cheltenham tradition for electing local, liberal and independently-minded MPs with a strong association with food and drink.

In the late nineteenth century, the best example of that tradition was James Agg-Gardiner, a successful Tory brewer. I actually went to school with the smell of hops from what was once his brewery wafting through my classroom. Agg-Gardiner too had liberal ideas. In particular he championed the cause of women's suffrage as early as the 1870s.

Then as now Cheltenham was a Liberal-Tory marginal. Agg-Gardiner lost the seat in the Liberal landslide of 1906 but only by 401 votes. The seat changed hands at both the two subsequent elections with increasingly tiny majorities and was finally regained by Agg-Gardiner with a majority of just four votes, which makes 66 sound like a comfortable majority.

Another colourful and independent-minded Tory was Charles Irving, the first Cheltenham MP that I remember as a constituent. Older members will remember him with affection I'm sure, not least for his skills in reforming and improving House of Commons catering. But as with Agg-Gardiner, food and drink went side by side with more serious fare. Charles' maiden speech was a passionate attack on capital punishment, bravely delivered at the height of the IRA's bombing campaign. It reads as a timely defence against the curtailing of civil liberty in the face of terrorist atrocity. Charles was a genuine social reformer which didn't always endear him to his party but made well-loved in every part of Cheltenham.

His successor was my predecessor Nigel Jones. In good Cheltenham tradition, he became chairman of the all-party parliamentary beer group and was once named parliamentary beer drinker of the year. But he too was a committed political reformer, championing amongst other things the trade union rights at GCHQ which he did see restored while sitting in this House. At times, Nigel served Cheltenham as its MP under more difficult circumstances than any of us would ever want to face and his courage and good humour in the face of injury and later ill health earned him much respect . Honourable Members will I'm sure join me in congratulating him on his imminent ennoblement. I hope that the other House will prove a suitably restful environment in which he will return to the best of health.

My own election result was modest compared to Nigel's but I was pleased to have raised not just important local issues but also critical global issues like the need to make poverty history and the single most important issue of all, the fate of the planet's environment.

But local issues did feature strongly and I cannot sit down without finally referring to a local issue relevant to the subject of today's debate. The previous Secretary of State for Health found himself in an embarrassing situation after he met me and local campaigners concerned at the loss of children's services from Cheltenham General Hospital to Gloucester and specifically the loss of Battledown children's ward as a 24 hour inpatient facility. The petition handed over to him that day apparently ended up in a skip in Oxford and this caused huge offence in Cheltenham. We did get an apology but the best way for the Government to regain a little of its tarnished reputation locally would be for the Secretary of State for Health to say she would look afresh at the case of Battledown ward and support a 24 hour inpatient service. To quote her own department only last year `people have a right to expect… high quality, locally accessible health care'. I'm sure the government will want to prove that this was more than just words.