“Cancelling direct services to the City on the Maidstone East line has added to congestion at Sevenoaks.  More commuters are now driving from villages between Otford and Maidstone into Sevenoaks, increasing traffic congestion and overcrowding on our trains in peak hours.  Sevenoaks is not a “parkway station”, and it’s wrong that we should have to suffer over-crowded trains because SouthEastern can’t be bothered to run trains from Maidstone East to the City.”

The Minister has undertaken to look again at the cost of the service, and will report back to the MPs later in August.

The figures provided by KCC officials show that in 2009, 91 out of the 253 pupils who passed the 11+ in the Sevenoaks area did not get any of their four preferences on National Offer Day.  As the education authority is duty bound to make an alternative offer, these children were therefore allocated places many miles away from our area – much to their parents’ frustration. Many of these did eventually get their first, or other, preference school but only after weeks or months of waiting and fighting the appeals system.

I have repeatedly asked KCC to find ways of reducing the stress and delay involved in the appeals and waiting-list processes.   But this problem keeps recurring each year, and I do not think it is acceptable that so many of our children find it so difficult each year to get into our schools.

I am also very concerned that the situation will get worse as substantial new housing is added in Dunton Green and later at Fort Halstead.  KCC’s own figures already show an increase of around 8 per cent in pupil numbers in West Kent by 2017.  Our children also suffer from all the time involved in travel up and down to Tonbridge and Tunbridge Wells, for which council taxpayers bear a significant cost.

I am clear, therefore, that the long-term answer is to provide more places.  It is impossible to do this at the existing grammar schools which are full, and it would therefore be logical to provide new places in Sevenoaks itself.  When the new-build Knole Academy opens on the Wildernesses site in 2012, the Bradbourne site becomes vacant.  KCC has agreed that this site can now be considered.

Rather than establish an entirely new grammar school (which presents several legal and political difficulties), it would be easier to provide a co-educational campus at Bradbourne for two of the existing schools.  We have agreed therefore that Kent will now formally explore with the current grammar schools which of them would be interested in expanding with a co-educational campus in Sevenoaks.  Kent will now approach the likely partner schools.

However, it is also the case that simply adding additional places in Sevenoaks will not automatically ensure that our children will then get their first choice.  Over 300 out of county applicants win places at Kent grammars each year.  Providing more places in West Kent could well increase the number of out-of-county pupils without increasing the number of our children getting their first preference.   We could see even stronger flows of pupils from East Sussex and Surrey in particular.

The first step, therefore, is to use the Schools Adjudicator to challenge the selection criteria of those schools that currently “super-select” beyond the 11 plus:  Skinners, Judd and Tonbridge Grammar for Girls.  Last year KCC successfully challenged and changed the selection arrangements of Dartford Grammar School to give priority first to girls living within one mile of the school (almost all of which falls within Kent), and then to girls living in parishes entirely within Kent.  Because the one mile radius includes a small part of another authority, it complied with the Greenwich judgement and subsequent rulings of the Schools Adjudicator.

We have agreed therefore that KCC will now formally challenge the admission arrangements of all three “super-selective” schools before this year’s deadline of 31st July.  KCC will propose alternatives which restrict initial selection to a tightly drawn radius around each school (which will include a very small part of east Sussex), and then to Kent children.

I will be supporting Kent’s submission with my own, and I hope you and other parents will write to the Adjudicator in similar terms.  I will let you have details as soon as the Adjudicator who will examine these challenges is selected.  I will invite the Adjudicator to hold a public hearing in Sevenoaks in order to understand the strength of local opinion on this issue.

There is no guarantee that these challenges will be successful or that we can attract sufficient support for additional places to be provided in Sevenoaks itself.  However, I am convinced, and Kent County Council agrees, that we have to try.  If we do nothing, there is every likelihood that the position could get worse, and that our parents who have chosen to bring up their children in a selective system will continue to lose out to those who have not.

I shall be in touch again with details of the Adjudicator appointed to rule on the West Kent case.

This week’s elections for select committee chairs, which Andrew Tyrie rightly celebrates, should be just the start of the process of strengthening parliament over the executive and making the job of backbenchers more worthwhile.

The Treasury select committee is often described as “highly influential”; that’s flattering and a testament to John McFall’s leadership and the political consensus we built together. But select committees have no legislative or budgetary powers: their influence depends on tough questioning of key witnesses, the authority of their reports and the all-party unanimity behind them.

That’s not unimportant. When it became obvious from the start of the banking crisis, for example, that regulators and bankers alike didn’t have a clue what they were doing, the Treasury committee became a focus for understanding what had gone wrong, and for testing the reforms that were needed. But parliament should be more than a forum, and I am proposing two key reforms that could turn our select committees into watchdogs with real teeth.

First, there’s no proper link between each committee and the departmental budget it is supposed to scrutinise. Yes, we look at forward plans and, afterwards, we review the annual report and accounts. But public spending remains split between three different sets of figures: the departmental budgets announced by the chancellor, the estimates presented to parliament, and the accounts filed after the money is spent. (There’s a long-running Treasury project, quaintly titled the Clear Line of Sight programme, that is currently trying to merge all three into a single set of figures.)

The government must, of course, set each department’s total. But three times a year, each department submits a supplementary estimate to parliament, requesting additional millions for new priorities or to correct overruns. These go through, billions at a time, usually on a quiet Thursday afternoon, without any proper scrutiny at all. On Thursday 10 December last year, for example, after only short debates, some £20bn was voted to the Department of Business Innovation and Skills, and some £17bn to Communities and Local Government.

The answer, therefore, is that no supplementary estimate should be presented to parliament before it has first been approved by the appropriate departmental select committee. At a stroke, this would change the balance of power: ministers would have to persuade their committee of the need for new expenditure, have to justify overruns, have to explain changed priorities.

Ministers would certainly have to take their committees much more seriously, building support for their programmes, keeping all members onside with their policies, and negotiating with each chair the timing and session of each supplementary estimate.

The second answer is to require all major public appointments to be confirmed by the respective departmental committee before being taken up. At present, we hold hearings but we have no sanction. Even though a candidate can be rejected, as the then children’s, schools and families committee turned down Maggie Atkinson for the post of children’s commissioner last autumn, for example, there is no sanction. Ministers can ignore such a vote, and in the event, Ed Balls, the secretary of state, simply brushed the committee aside and made the appointment anyway.

Instead, it should be clear that no major appointment – governor of the Bank of England, or the heads of major bodies like the Office of Fair Trading, the Environment Agency or Ofsted – could proceed without specific committee approval. Precisely because this would be a blocking power, committees would, I think, be careful how often they used it in practice; equally secretaries of state would be much more careful about their nominations.

Here, therefore, is a real agenda beyond this week’s elections. Thanks to Tony Wright’s modernisation committee, we’ve finally got away from the Buggins’s turn principle for committee chairs. Now let’s give the committees some real power over their departments.

Guardian 8th June 2010

Mr Fallon said:  “This has been a long campaign.  Resurfacing the two heaviest used lanes with low-noise asphalt should reduce noise levels for Kemsing residents, especially those living closest to the motorway in Park Lane, Fairfield Close and neighbouring roads.”

I welcome the Queen’s Speech, because it tackles three of the biggest issues that we as a country face. It makes a start on restoring our public finances, on mending our broken society and on modernising our political system, and I shall say a little about each of those issues.

On public finances, we have already welcomed the strong start that the Treasury made on Monday by making immediate savings in public expenditure. A start simply had to be made. If one spends £700 billion a year but raises only £540 billion a year in taxes, something must be done, and I welcome the fact that this Government, unlike their predecessors, did not sit on their hands but made a start. I welcome also the Chief Secretary’s recognition on Monday that that was only a small step: £6.2 billion is well under 1% of total Government expenditure, and more significant savings will have to be made.

I, unlike the right hon. Member for Doncaster North, was pleased by the reference to Greece, because there is a parallel between our deficit situation and the one in Greece. The Greek Government, like our previous Government, were warned successively by the European Commission, the OECD and the International Monetary Fund, but both Governments ignored those warnings and let their deficits continue to accumulate. So there is a warning from Greece: if we do not tackle the fundamental causes of our deficit as rapidly as possible, we are likely to lose the confidence of the markets.

I therefore look forward to the much more difficult task that my right hon. Friends face in the spending review that they will conduct through the summer and autumn. It seems obvious to me, even from Monday’s announcements, that the necessary elimination of waste and the search for efficiency savings, although worth while in themselves, will not be enough. If we are to protect the front-line services that we support and the basic budgets of Departments that are not wholly protected, it seems obvious that, first, some established programmes, however cherished, will have to be revised; and that, secondly, we will have to look at annually managed expenditure-the so-called benefit element of public expenditure. It remains the case that many benefit entitlements go relatively high up the income scale, and, if we are to spread the burden of the painful adjustments that are necessary, it does not seem credible to exempt those who are on middle or higher incomes and currently enjoy a wide range of benefits. Importantly, however, the spending review must be conducted fairly and responsibly, spreading the load that is imposed when either expenditure is withdrawn or taxation increased.

The Queen’s Speech also makes a start on building a stronger society, and just as important as abstractions, such as the big society, are the practical measures that will extend choice throughout our public services, improve the service that our constituents receive when they use public services and promote more responsibility by users and, perhaps, more awareness of the obligations that come with their use.

In education, I particularly welcome the new drive to attract fresh providers into our system. However, important though that is-and it is important, particularly in some of the inner-city areas of our country, where standards need to be much higher-there is also great advantage to be gained from the additional freedoms that are proposed for all schools, existing and new. Those freedoms will give head teachers and their governors the real power, which they have long wanted, to get away from Government targets and to set their own terms, conditions and priorities. I see nothing wrong in encouraging our schools to be different. Since my days in the Department of Education and Science, I have wanted to get away from the homogeneity of council schooling and encourage more schools, which, while following the core curriculum, are different in their outlook, and cater for the different abilities and talents of the children whose parents choose them. That will be a test of the new education legislation.

While I am on the subject of the new academies Bill, perhaps I could put in a plea, notwithstanding my earlier remarks about public expenditure, for the Government to follow through fully the commitment to the new Knole academy in Sevenoaks. The commitment was signed in January and my constituents will expect that to be followed through.

In west Kent, we have a particular problem, to which I would like to draw to my right hon. Friends’ attention-the pressure on grammar school places. We have a grammar school system in Kent, and it has always been made clear that the demand for more places needs to be addressed. There is not only an increasing birth rate and more demand for grammar school places, but some 300 pupils now come across our border from East Sussex, Bromley and Bexley and take places in our grammar schools in Tonbridge and Tunbridge Wells. That issue needs to be tackled.

I want to consider the measures in the Queen’s Speech to reform our politics. I understand the need for a coalition agreement and the compromises that bind it. I must say that when I was campaigning for re-election in Sevenoaks, nobody asked me for a fixed-term Parliament or came to the door and said that we needed the alternative vote plus system. Those issues were not raised with me, but I found that people were crying out for a more proper and fuller connection with their political institutions. I found, as I am sure that my hon. Friends did, a frightening gap between people with problems and the layers of local, country and national politicians who were supposed to deal with them.

Nowhere is that better illustrated that in the St. Mary’s ward of Swanley in my constituency, where in February last year, the British National party won what had hitherto been the safest Labour seat in Swanley and secured its first council seat on Sevenoaks district council. St. Mary’s was not just the safest Labour ward in my constituency, but the poorest. It is striking that that ward, which I visit frequently, despite all the efforts of those who work in it-community workers, schools, including Amanda McGarrigle and her team at St. Mary’s primary school and local councillors-as well as the efforts of Government, has not shared in the increased prosperity and job prospects that the rest of the county enjoyed under the previous two or three Governments. We need to reflect more deeply on the reason for that.

There was a fashionable debate in our party a few years ago about whether Winston Churchill or Polly Toynbee was the better marker to follow. Churchill famously said that a rising tide lifts all boats, whereas I think Ms Toynbee argued for her vision of a caravan proceeding across the desert at the pace of its slowest members. Neither approach has worked in some of our poorest wards in the past 10, 20 or 30 years. If I concede that the benefits of markets alone have not trickled down sufficiently to some of the very poor areas of our country, I hope that the Labour party will concede that a whole raft of Government action, ministerial targets and misdirected public expenditure has not succeeded either.

That means that we must look to another way for those pockets of deprivation that remain. I hesitate to call it a third way, but it is in the Queen’s Speech: it is, of course, localism. It means giving power back through the rafts of politics and politicians to the local community and encouraging people who live in those wards to take much more responsibility. It means giving them the freedom to take responsibility for finding the solutions to their problems. It may well be, having sorted out the public finances and helped rebuild a stronger society, that the Government’s success will ultimately depend on the genuineness of their commitment in practice to delivering localism to our communities.

I welcome the Queen’s Speech.

The General Election result in Sevenoaks was:

Michael Fallon 28,076

Liberal Democrat 10,561

Labour 6,541

UKIP 1,782

BNP 1,384

English Democrat 806

Independent 258

Conservative majority 17,515

My vote increased from 22,437 in 2005 to 28,076 – an  increase of 5,639.  My majority increased from 12,970 in 2005 to 17,515 – an increase of 4,545.  The turnout increased from 66.5% to 71.1%.

Thank you to all those who voted for me.  I promise to continue to working in Parliament for all my constituents.

This was my fifth public meeting, and we have had a good turnout at each one – in Knockholt, Otford, Hextable and Westerham too. Each night there’s been a full range of questions – on Europe, taxes, the public finances, schools, overseas aid and defence, as well as purely local issues.

I organised these meetings to give those who live in the villages throughout the constituency the chance to question me direct, and they’ve been a great success. Next time, we should do even more of them.

Six candidates attended and we had a very civilised debate on most of the big issues.

Special thanks also to Walthamstow Hall School for hosting us and to the Chronicle team for organising the debate.

The next candidates’ Question Times are this Friday evening in Hextable and on Sunday evening in Sevenoaks – full details in my campaign diary on my Home page.

I’ve been out myself – in Brasted, Eynsford, Chevening, Chipstead and Swanley in the first week and more recently in Kemsing, Halstead, Knockholt, Shoreham, Otford, Riverhead and Westerham. Over the next ten days I plan to visit each of the other villages as well as making return visits to Swanley and Sevenoaks.  I look forward to meeting as many constituents as possible.

I was a guest on BBC Radio Kent’s election special at 9 – 10 am on Friday 16th April.

In addition, I am speaking at seven public meetings.  The first two were last week, at Knockholt Village Hall on Tuesday, 20th April and at Otford Village Hall on Wednesday, 21st April.

This week my public meetings are in Hextable (Tuesday 27th April, Five Wents Hall), Westerham (Wednesday 28th April, Westerham Hall) and West Kingsdown (Thursday 29th April, The Old School) – all starting at 8pm.

On Monday 26th April there is a candidates’ debate organised by the Sevenoaks Chronicle at the Ship Theatre, Sevenoaks.

On Friday 30th April the Swanley churches are holding a candidates’ debate at St Peter’s Church, Hextable at 8pm. On Sunday 2nd the Sevenoaks churches are holding a candidates’ debate at the United Reform Church, St John’s, Sevenoaks.