The Conservative Party’s Yorkshire Conference for 2009 has take place at Wetherby Racecourse.

Hundreds of Party members, activists and candidates heard from Shadow Health Secretary Andrew Lansley, Party Chairman Eric Pickles and Shadow Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt on the first day of the event.

There was also a chance to hear from Graham Stuart MP and several of our Parliamentary candidates in a Question Time session chaired by Matthew Warman from The Daily Telegraph.

On Saturday, the morning session was taken up with discussion and information about the General Election campaign to come including a profile of some of our Parliamentary Candidates and how they’re working to win.

Saturday afternoon began with the Regional Report from the Regional Chairman Robert Semple.

Rob said:

“The real battle for us all in Yorkshire lies ahead in making next year’s General Election campaign just as successful as the local and European elections were for us this year.

“Tremendous work has been put in over the past four years getting our infrastructure in key target areas to be ‘fit for purpose’. We have opened campaign centres in Leeds, Bradford, Brighouse and Tadcaster, have trebled the number of professional staff in Yorkshire and done much to engage with our volunteers, activists and Party members across the region.

“We have come a long way in a short space of time but, because of the importance of Yorkshire, we cannot allow complacency to set in.

“With one last determined push over the next year we can ensure that the Conservative Party stands proud once again in the North of England.”

The event concluded with Shadow Foreign Secretary, and MP for Richmond, William Hague giving a speech about the battle ahead and his priorities for a Conservative Government.

Conservatives in Barnsley have selected two candidates for the town’s Parliamentary constituencies of Barnsley Central and Barnsley East at the next General Election. 

• James Hockney (pictured right) has been selected to be the Conservative Parliamentary Candidate for Barnsley East.
• Piers Tempest has been selected to be the Conservative Parliamentary Candidate for Barnsley Central.

Both candidates will now work closely with the Conservative Parliamentary Candidate for Penistone and Stocksbridge Spencer Pitfield.

Commenting on their selection, Spencer Pitfield said:

“I am delighted to be able to welcome James and Piers to the Conservative team here in Barnsley.

“They are both excellent candidates and I know that together we will offer the people of Barnsley strong and unified change to this failing Labour Government”.

James Buckley has been presented with a Princess Diana Award at a ceremony in Halifax this week.

The event, arranged by Conservative Parliamentary Candidate Philip Allott (pictured above with James), was hosted by the Vice Lieutenant of West Yorkshire, Mr John Brennan in the Mayor’s Parlour at Halifax Town Hall.

Shadow Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has delivered a keynote speech in Leeds on the 15th anniversary of the National Lottery.

He explained how Conservatives will reform the National Lottery to ensure more money goes to good causes by:

•         Abolishing the National Lottery Commission and moving regulation of the lottery to the Gambling Commission.
•         Banning lottery distributors from spending lottery money on press, pr, and public affairs activities. Instead this will be done by the existing National Lottery Promotions Unit.
•         Returning the lottery to its original four purposes of supporting the arts, heritage, sport and charities.

Lottery as a success story

“It has created hundreds of millionaires, including last week’s lucky syndicate from Liverpool and even luckier couple from Wales.
 
But it isn’t just about millionaires. Because of the money it has put into good causes, every single one of us has been given a lucky ticket.
 
Here in Yorkshire it has funded the Leeds City Museum and Resource centre to the tune of £19 million – the largest ever Heritage Lottery Fund grant.
 
Further afield, the Lottery has brought us the wonders of the Eden Project, saved art works for the nation, and made viable great British films like Notes on a Scandal, The Last King of Scotland and The Constant Gardener.   At last year’s Olympics we thrashed the Aussies in the medals table – helped by Lottery funds.  It has restored many of our fabulous Victorian parks -  such as the park in Birkenhead  that acted as the blueprint for New York’s Central Park.
 
The Lottery has safeguarded our past – but anchored our heritage firmly in the future. Brunel’s ss Great Britain, for example, is restored and stunning in dry dock, winning prizes and boosting the regeneration of Bristol’s docklands around a modern tourism and leisure economy.
 
By funding grands projets like the Tate Modern the Lottery has allowed us to think big. But it has allowed us to be local as well, breathing life into countless smaller dreams that have transformed communities.
 
It has even united political opponents, with Tessa Jowell publicly praising the Lottery’s founder John Major. In politics we call that a jackpot rollover.

Well, I’m sorry if I seem less generous to Tessa and her colleagues today.  But the truth is that the Lottery is still a teenager that is yet to come of age.  And it is yet to come of age because we have had 12 years of a government that has never understood what the fundamental purpose of the Lottery is: namely to support the efforts of citizens, not ministers; to back voluntary organisations who are not entitled to our taxes rather than the government which is; in short to strengthen society and not the state.
 
Labour failings: from Major to Mandelson
 
When John Major conceived the Lottery with the Act of 1993, he did so with, in his own phrase, ‘high ambitions’.  He wanted to ensure that funds were available for good causes that inevitably come low on Treasury spending priorities.
The first Lottery draw took place on 19th November 1994 – and by 25th September 1995 the first £1bn had been raised for good causes.  Sadly when Labour won the election in 1997 they clearly thought they’d won the Lottery with it. As the “political arm of the British people” they proceeded to divert more than a billion pounds to statutory bodies. In the run up to the 2005 election the Big Lottery Fund had become so politicised it was able to rustle up around £60 million pounds at very short notice to support a government school food initiative to extract the government from a problem created by Jamie. Far from being “additional” funding at arms length, the Lottery was being used to further political objectives, namely gathering votes and headlines for the government of the day.
 
Labour failings: problems at the Birthday Party
 
Unfortunately, then, birthday parties are not necessarily happy occasions. 
 
Up until 1997, Labour had agreed with us that Lottery funding should be an addition to, not a replacement for, government spending.  But in their own National Lottery Act of 1998 they carefully added a new 6th “good cause” under the reassuringly vague name of the “New Opportunities Fund” – a distributor of, and I quote, “grants to health, education and environment projects, UK wide, under initiatives to be specified… by the Government”.
 
Since 1998, Labour has diverted almost £3.5bn away from the original good causes and into its own pet projects. Of course much of this was for worthwhile initiatives. But as political initiatives they should have been funded by central government spending, not the lottery. 
Harold Pinter once said that “as important as what is said, is that which is left unsaid”.  So when Labour tells us what the Lottery has spent, it should more candidly tell us what has not been spent as a result of its policies: the £240m less that is going into the arts than in 1997, the £252m that is no longer going into sport, and the £255m that should have been funding our national heritage.
On top of this has been a mushrooming of administration costs. Last year, the 7 main distributors spent £120m on admin costs – a staggering 11.4% of the £1.05bn they distributed.  In 2002 the Heritage Lottery Fund spent 6% on operational costs.  Last year, that figure was 13%. That is grotesque when charities, community groups and voluntary organisations are under such intense scrutiny from those very same lottery distributors to get every penny possible out of administration and into delivery. 
 
Times are tough right now.  We are in – still in – the deepest and longest recession since the war. That puts incredible pressure on Government spending.  So it is more vital than ever that every penny of lottery money is spent on good causes and not political outreach programmes, self-publicity and unnecessary bureaucracy.
Our policies
 
So one of the first things a Conservative Government will do will be to restore the Lottery to its original four good causes.  The Big Lottery Fund will – explicitly – only fund projects in the voluntary and community sectors.
We will also tackle bureaucracy. As a start, we will abolish the National Lottery Commission and transfer their functions to the Gambling Commission. The Lottery only has one operator, so it does not need a separate regulator – not least one that spent £219,000 in a year on “media relations support, strategic communications advice, planning and stakeholder engagement support.”
The distributors are there to help good causes, not to be good causes themselves. So we insist that admin costs should be no more than 5% of grants distributed. We accept that administration costs have been reduced recently, but with Sport England spending 12.6% and the Arts Council spending 11% there is still a long way to go. Camelot itself manages to keep its costs at just 4% of revenue – if distributors were as efficient that could generate up to £528m of additional funding for arts, heritage, sports and charity projects over 10 years.
 
Self-publicity by the distributors will also be banned. As will lottery money being spent on lobbying and public affairs. Instead, we will support the National Lottery Promotions Unit as a single body to promote and highlight the social good that the Lottery delivers across the all sectors.  This will leverage money from the operator, and work under the State-owned Lottery icon of the cross-fingered logo. 
 
We will also explore how to harness rapid developments in information technology to increase public participation in the awards process.
 
We’ve seen a start with such projects as the popular Restoration programme, or the public vote for the BIG Lottery award to Sustrans.  But we all know those programmes weren’t perfect – the Manchester Baths, for example, still lie closed.  But public participation is a crucial way of democratising lottery grant giving. So we will ask all distributors to allow the public to decide on at least one major funding project every year.
 
We will also explore, therefore, whether moving from a Lottery Duty on each ticket to a Gross Profits Tax on sales overall will provide greater flexibility for Camelot to stimulate sales and stimulate income for the good causes.  You will not be surprised, in the current climate, that we would have to be convinced that revenue to the Exchequer would be safeguarded by this, or even increased. But Camelot are confident that this could bring in an extra £270m for the good causes over the next ten years which is clearly an opportunity that needs to be taken very seriously indeed.
 
Conclusion   
 
Where Labour has raided the Lottery, we will restore it to the original good causes meaning more money for the arts, heritage, sports and charities.
Where Labour has politicised the Lottery, we will restore the independence of the National Lottery boards over good cause grants. Less say from ministers and more say from the public.
Where Lottery distributors have expanded budgets for their own administration, lobbying and self-publicity we will insist they maximise expenditure on the good causes they are there to serve.
There will be a restoration of high ambition over low politics; a restoration of arm’s length over the Government’s foot in it; a restoration of additionality instead of Labour’s political bonus balls.
 
A very different Restoration three hundred years ago saw our country enter a great period of artistic excellence, vibrancy and free expression.  It saw us move on and advance as a society, united though increasingly diverse in an explosion of culture.  That is what I mean by high ambitions.  And that is what I mean when I say a Conservative government will be determined to ensure that the Lottery is more than restored.”

Conservative MP and Shadow Treasury Minister Greg Hands visited two schools in the Morley and Outwood constituency to hear from staff and students.

Top of the agenda will be hearing the views of Sixth Form students on the economy and the experiences of young people looking to win a university place or employment during the recession. 

The MP was joined at the Rodillian School in Lofthouse and Silcoates School in Wrenthorpe by Antony Calvert, the Conservative Parliamentary Candidate in Morley and Outwood. 

After meeting students, Mr Hands and Mr Calvert discussed education policy with the Headmaster of the schools, Mr Andrew Goulty at Rodillian and Mr Daryl Wideman at Silcoates. 

Greg Hands MP said:

“I have very much enjoyed hearing what students in both schools think about the issues facing Britain and their ideas on how their future employment and educational aspirations can be fulfilled.”

“Listening to school students and their head teachers is especially important at a time where many people are concerned with the state of the economy and a government that is unceasingly meddling in the workings of schools.”

Antony Calvert, Conservative Parliamentary Candidate for Morley and Outwood, continued:

“This has been an extremely valuable opportunity to hear first hand the experiences of students during the longest recession this country has ever seen. I will be feeding back their thoughts to senior Conservative figures on a range of areas, in particularly areas covering higher education, further education and training.”

“I am determined that as many senior Conservatives can visit Morley and Outwood to give a potential new government a good idea of the very real issues and concerns local people have.”

The Rt Hon William Hague MP visited Penistone & Stocksbridge to meet with South Yorkshire business leaders.

His visit was hosted by Spencer Pitfield, Parliamentary Candidate for Penistone & Stocksbridge.

Representatives from business within Barnsley, Sheffield, Doncaster and Rotherham were able to meet with Mr Hague informally over tea. The visit was used as another opportunity for business leaders in the region to meet with the Conservative Shadow Cabinet, following on from the very successful visit of Baroness Warsi to the Sheffield Chamber of Commerce and Industry the week before last.

William Hague MP said:

“I am very pleased to be here in Penistone & Stocksbridge supporting Spencer’s campaign and meeting local business leaders. At the General Election people in this constituency will have a clear choice. To vote for the Conservative Party who are offering positive change and policies which address the serious problems our country faces, or to stay with this tired and discredited Labour Party”.

Spencer said:

“I am very grateful to William for coming to meet with local business leaders here in Penistone & Stocksbridge to hear about the problems they are facing. We were able to highlight our policies to address the jobs crisis, get credit flowing again with our national loan guarantee scheme, and to reduce red-tape across the board”.

On the day that official statistics reveal that UK has been in recession for six months longer than France, Germany and Japan, the Conservatives are setting out plans to get Britain working by creating 25,000 new training places or jobs in West Yorkshire, opening up new opportunities for people across the region.

We will create:

10,000 new apprenticeships in West Yorkshire

5,000 extra training places in West Yorkshire

4,000 new work pairings in West Yorkshire

2,000 new jobs in start-up businesses in West Yorkshire by abolishing the national insurance they pay on new employees.

1,500 new young apprenticeships in West Yorkshire

1,500 new opportunities for self-employment in West Yorkshire

450 new university places in West Yorkshire

These new jobs and training places will be funded by refocusing the Government’s employment and training programmes, including Train to Gain and the various New Deals, and reducing the benefits of Incapacity Benefit claimants found to be fit to work.

Our Approach

A Conservative government will launch a national Work Programme which:

Simplifies Labour’s numerous and piecemeal programmes into one single back-to-work programme for everyone who is unemployed.

• Includes the 2.6 million people claiming Incapacity Benefits currently excluded by Labour’s plans.
• Pays welfare-to-work providers according to whether they get jobseekers into sustainable employment of a year or more.

Recession Support. To provide extra opportunities to those looking for work, we have also announced:

Youth Action for Work – 100,000 additional apprenticeships and training places, 50,000 additional training places at FE colleges, and 50,000 work pairing places each year for two years.

• Work for Yourself – offering business mentors and loans to support self-employment and franchising as a route back into work.
• Work Together – a programme to connect people to volunteering opportunities in their area.
• Work Clubs – places where people can receive mentoring, skills training and help to find local job opportunities.
• 10,000 additional university places next year.
• New technical schools in England’s largest cities, as part of our plans for radical school reform.

Abolishing tax on new jobs.  As part of our plan to Get Britain Working, we will abolish tax on the jobs created by new businesses in the first two years of a Conservative Government.  Any new business started in the first two years of a Conservative Government will pay no Employer National Insurance on the first ten employees it hires during its first year.

The tax break will encourage new entrepreneurs and is predicted to generate around 60,000 additional jobs over two years.  Clear and simple rules will ensure that the jobs created are genuinely new. 

West Yorkshire’s Jobs Crisis under Labour

• Unemployment doubled. There are 68,275 people claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance in West Yorkshire, this has risen by 92 per cent since the start of the recession.
• Unemployment higher than 1997. The number of people claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance is almost 10,000 higher than in 1997 when Labour came to power, up by 16 per cent.
• Youth Unemployment.  There are 21,110 young people aged 18-24 claiming JSA in West Yorkshire, up by 87 per cent since the start of the recession. Youth unemployment is 35 per cent higher than in 1997.
• Long-term Unemployment. One in ten people claiming JSA have been on benefits for over a year.
• 7 people chasing every job. There are 7 people on JSA in for every vacancy advertised at Jobcentre Plus in West Yorkshire compared to 2 people per vacancy at the start of the recession.
• Almost 200,000 have no qualifications. 190,600 people in West Yorkshire have no qualifications.  
• 100,000 on Incapacity Benefits. There are 99,700 people claiming Incapacity Benefits or the new Employment and Support Allowance in West Yorkshire.
• Economic Inactivity. 305,200 people in West Yorkshire are economically inactive, 83,600 would like to work but don’t appear in the unemployment figures.

(All figures from www.nomisweb.co.uk)

Shadow Work and Pensions Minister James Clappison has met with business leaders from across Calderdale on a visit to the area.

He attended the monthly meeting of the Calder Valley Business Forum, hosted by Calder Valley Conservative Parliamentary Candidate Craig Whittaker.

During the meeting he heard about the problems they have faced during the recession and the challenges that continue now and in the future.

Shadow Work and Pensions Minister James Clappison said:

“I was delighted to be able to come to Calderdale and hear directly from businessmen and women. It is only by listening to those on the frontline of our economy that we can discover what is really happening.

“A year ago when I visited Calderdale I heard how the area was being badly hit by the recession and, with the continued fear over the future of HBOS jobs in the area, those worries don’t look like easing anytime soon.”

Craig Whittaker, Conservative Parliamentary Candidate for Calder Valley, added:

“The aim of my business forum is to bring together businessmen and women from across Calderdale to discuss the issues and challenges they face in their firms.

“They all welcomed the chance to question James Clappison about Conservative policies on work and business and had their say about what they thought needed to be done to improve things in the future.”

Spencer Pitfield, Prospective MP for Penistone & Stocksbridge, together with local Conservatives recently hosted a Charity Fashion Show for the Barnsley Sexual Abuse and Rape Crisis Helpline (BSARCH). The fashion show, which was held at the Brooklands Hotel in Dodworth, raised over £800 to support BSARCH.

BSARCH exists to provide support services to any woman who has experienced sexual violence or abuse. The charity offers a number of services to its clients including a telephone helpline and face to face counselling. It also employs an Independent Sexual Advisor who is on hand to offer specialist advice.

Theresa May MP, Shadow Minister for Women, visited the centre last year and talked about its own personal plight in the House of Commons.

Spencer Pitfield said:

“It was a fantastic fashion show and I would like to publicly thank all the many sponsors, helpers and volunteers. Over 140 people attended the event and we were able to raise in excess of £600 for the charity.

“We also used the event as an opportunity to raise awareness about the wonderful work that BSARCH offers supporting women at risk in our community. My only sadness is that the charity continues to struggle for funding and so I am working hard to make sure that Government will provide core funding in the future. Such state support will mean that the charity doesn’t need to have to live hand to mouth each month waiting for emergency funds to materialise.”

The Conservative Party’s Yorkshire Conference 2009 takes place on Friday 27 and Saturday 28 November.

Find out more and download an application form at www.yorkshireconservatives.com/conference