Richard Spring MP
Member of Parliament for West Suffolk

On Friday I visited the Good Neighbourhood Scheme in my constituency in Barrow, which is overseen by a voluntary organisation called Suffolk ACRE, to help people in their community. As a local MP, I have always taken a very keen interest in voluntary projects as I believe they play a key role in helping vulnerable people in our society.

I particularly want to highlight the Good Neighbourhood Scheme because I believe it encapsulates the community spirit and voluntary ethos that I would like to see recognised and encouraged. In the atomised society which we live in, people in rural villages can feel very isolated. So many facilities in our rural villages have vanished.

Like many of the best ideas, the actual scheme is very simple and efficient. A team of volunteers in a village come together to set up a Good Neighbourhood Scheme, which centres around a mobile phone which is held on a rota basis by a member of the group, usually for a week or two.

The mobile number is published in the local paper and advertised across the village. Anyone living in the village is entitled to use the service.

The volunteers offer help and assistance, for example, visiting an elderly person to help with household tasks, driving someone to a doctors appointment if they do not have their own transport or simply dropping by to see someone who may have no friends or relations to provide them with some companionship.

I was so impressed by the warmth, generosity and dedication of the volunteers I met in Barrow on Friday. I would like to pay tribute to the valuable work they do and encourage others to consider setting up a similar group in their own towns and villages.

You can find out more information about the scheme and how to establish a similar scheme by following the link below:

http://www.suffolkacre.org.uk/good_neighbour.php

When the National Lottery was established in Britain in 1995, its underlying principle was that money from the sale of tickets would be given to good causes. When people bought a ticket, they not only had a chance to become a millionaire, but, if they didn’t win, could take comfort that they were also helping causes which were inevitably at the back of the Government’s spending queue.

Since then the original aims and aspirations have become distorted under this Government.

Last year, when the National Lottery Bill was being debated in the House of Commons, the National Council of Voluntary Organisations again highlighted their concerns about maintaining a clear dividing line between lottery expenditure and core Government expenditure. It must not be  abused as a substitute for general taxation. Sadly the lines have become blurred in recent years.

I recently attended a meeting in Stanton in my constituency to discuss the plans for redeveloping the village hall. Village halls play such an important role in rural life, bringing communities together, with a wide range of clubs, events and activities. The plans for modernisation are very impressive, but are dependent on securing funding for the project. I shall be supporting the village hall in their application to the National Lottery through the Big Lottery Community Building Fund. They richly deserve this financial assistance.

However, due to the mishandling of the London Olympics project by Gordon Brown and Tessa Jowell, we could eventually see costs quadruple to an eye-watering £9billion by 2009—and perhaps even more. It does not need a huge leap of the imagination to see that the National Lottery pot may be raided yet again to try to cover these spiralling costs, crowding out worthy local projects such as Stanton Village Hall. This would go against the very ethos of what the National Lottery is supposedly all about. 

In our modern, fast-paced world, there can sometimes be a feeling that everything needs to be done yesterday. Consumers of all types of products and services understandably demand high levels of prompt, efficient service at all times. The internet has been the driving force behind this. It is now possible to get information quickly, at the click of a mouse, and then move on to the next task. If one company cannot provide a satisfactory service, you can switch to another.

What can often be forgotten amongst this constant flurry of activity is that, at the grassroots level, there is also a thriving voluntary sector where people give up much of their valuable time to help charitable organisations in their community.

As a local Member of Parliament, I try to support and publicise the voluntary sector in West Suffolk as best I can, because I know they do excellent work helping many of the most vulnerable people in our society. On a recent visit to the Haverhill Volunteer Centre, one of the dedicated organisers, Gaby, showed me a new initiative they were participating in called “caring cards”.

The 29 brightly coloured and humorous cards come in a special pack and cover a range of issues including disability, relationships, young people, substance abuse and many others. On the back of each one is a list of voluntary organisations which help deal with that particular area, complete with the contact number for the group.

I was so impressed by this new and innovative way of highlighting these services that I have made a short web video to help publicise this first class idea.

I hope it will encourage more people to help volunteer with their local group and also guide those who need help to find the best organisation to help them.

Volunteers are often the unsung heroes in our society and their work deserves to be applauded by us all. They fill the inevitable gaps in our welfare structures and without them, support services would crumble.

The video can be viewed on my website at www.richardspringmp.com

When the National Lottery was launched it was designed to fund those areas of our national life, like sport, which had been under-resourced. Yes, it did good things like help to pay for the beautiful tower at St Edmundsbury Cathedral, and bad things like the ridiculous Dome.

Today childhood obesity is a huge talking point. Over the years, we have seen less sport in schools, school swimming pools have been closed, as well as a shortage of PE teachers.

Whilst I am delighted that we got the Olympic bid for 2012, the spiralling costs threaten local sports projects. Ken Livingstone is having a blazing public row with the Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell. The Treasury failed to budget for the VAT bill accurately.

It is appalling incompetence, entirely typical and predictable. Regrettably as the Government scuttles around trying to find the money it failed to budget for, it will be those vital and valuable less grandiose sports projects that will suffer.