Mr David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)

I am proud to be a new Member of the House of Commons and to follow the thoughtful speeches of the hon. Members for Walsall, North (David Winnick) and for Banbury (Tony Baldry).

I am only the seventh Member of Parliament for the Yeovil constituency since 1892, so it seems that my constituency has a good record in holding on to its Members of Parliament. I hope that I can convince my constituents to maintain that in future.

I suppose that one of the main duties of any new Member in his or her maiden speech is to make some polite and complimentary comments about his or her predecessor. When one has overturned somebody from another party to gain one's seat, that can be a testing process. For me, however, it is more straightforward because I have taken over from Sir Paddy Ashdown--soon to be Lord Ashdown, I believe. Sir Paddy has played a leading role in United Kingdom politics, both in this place and outside it. He was an effective leader of the Liberal Democrats for a decade and was a leading national politician who stood up for many issues. Some of them were unpopular at the time, but they were great issues of principle.

In spite of Sir Paddy's high profile nationally, he is particularly remembered in Yeovil for his contribution as a constituency MP--for 18 years as MP and for some 25 years as MP and prospective parliamentary candidate. I have had the pleasure of shadowing Sir Paddy over the past couple of years and have seen what an incredibly hard-working and effective constituency MP he is. His basic values of honesty, integrity and hard work are an example to all of us in this place. During the election campaign, I was provided with an answer to those sceptical individuals on the doorstep who are inclined to ask whether politicians are simply in politics for themselves. Sir Paddy has never been in politics for himself, and many thousands of people in the Yeovil constituency have benefited from his hard work over the years. To that extent, it will be extremely difficult to take over from him.

While shadowing Sir Paddy over the past couple of years, I learned to my cost of the high standards and hands-on work that he has done in the constituency. Last year, when we had severe flooding problems throughout the south-west and other parts of the country, I recollect receiving the usual early-morning telephone call from him and the suggestion that I actively involve myself as soon as possible. I assumed that that meant going to the areas that had been flooded, identifying the problems and firing off some letters to the relevant authorities to make sure that the issues were dealt with in the future. It turned out that Sir Paddy had something far more practical in mind and that the usual Ashdown approach to such matters was to put on his wellington boots and a chunky jumper and to help those in such a dire predicament to remove the furniture from their homes. He has been a hands-on constituency MP in every sense. While nobody can be a blueprint of their predecessor--some sort of carbon copy--I hope that I can maintain the high standard of service to my constituents in the years ahead.

I wish to mention three aspects of the Gracious Speech. The first relates to the reason I entered politics in the first place. I became interested in politics some 20 years ago, when we had severe economic problems and high unemployment in the late 1970s and early 1980s. When Sir Paddy was making his maiden speech in 1983, he described a situation in which unemployment in his constituency stood at 7.6 per cent., which was quite low at that time, but youth unemployment was closer to 30 per cent. That horrendous figure reflected the many problems throughout the country. They were not only economic problems but extended to every area of social life and our ability to raise money for public services such as education, health and public transport.

It is a great pleasure to arrive here some 20 years later to discover the progress that recent Governments have been able to make in reducing unemployment. That has been done to such an extent that Yeovil has a current unemployment rate of around 1.5 per cent., one of the lowest in the country. Although there is clearly much more to do in many constituencies in black spots to bring unemployment down, that is a great achievement and the Government are right to ensure that the highest priority throughout this Parliament is to keep the stable economic conditions that are in place and that will allow the economy to grow and, we hope, provide moneys that can be put into public services to improve them.

Secondly, on the state of such public services as health and education, pensions and public transport, I must be somewhat gloomier than Mr. Kaufman who earlier defended the Government's record and, to some extent, their reputation on those matters. My experience from the Yeovil constituency is that there is still dissatisfaction with the progress that the Government have been able to make so far. Although we may be able to detect some slight upturn when we study the minutiae of the figures available, our constituents cannot as yet identify improvements in policing, the national health service, schools, pensions and public transport.

I can recollect individuals, even today in a country such as ours, having to wait more than two years for a hip replacement operation, as the hon. Member for Banbury also said. One individual in Chard came to me recently with precisely such a problem, having waited two and a quarter years for a hip replacement, ending up in a wheelchair having to take large amounts of pain killers each day. That ruined her quality of life and it must be extremely expensive and inefficient for the health service.

Although there has been some progress on schools and education, we still have higher secondary class sizes in my constituency than we had in 1997 and we still have pensioners on pensions that are far too low. There is a great deal to be done in those respects and I fear that the measures in today's Gracious Speech do not necessarily live up to the challenge of the next four years.

Labour Members have recognised that by the time of the next election they will have been expected to have made great progress in those areas. Given the cash that is going to some areas and the reforms that the Government are contemplating, I am not convinced that the Government have today put in place the measures that will be necessary to bring about the sea change in public services that people are expecting. Given their record in the previous Parliament of acting too slowly, the Government should be extremely cautious about leaving those matters too late.

A grander issue, and one that we have all no doubt faced on the doorstep at some stage during the election, is the euro. Obviously, a great deal of attention will be paid in this Parliament to whether we have a referendum on the euro. I was pleased to hear the comments of the hon. Member for Banbury from the Conservative Benches, which seemed to show a slightly more mature and sophisticated approach to the European issue than that advanced from those on the Conservative Front Bench in the past few years.

However, I detect concern among many of our constituents, not so much on the economic issues but on the political issues that surround the euro. That is why the Liberal Democrats have been so keen to advance the notion of a constitution for Europe that would both define and limit its powers. It would ensure that it involved itself in the big issues that many people in this country understand it should be involved in, such as the environment, trade and even foreign and defence issues, but it would keep it out of others, such as taxation and even much of social policy, about which the House should be free to decide. I hope that the Government will play their part in Europe in the next few years by putting such reforms centre stage. I suspect that they are the reforms that will be necessary before the Government can win a referendum on the euro.

Finally, the motto of the town that gives its name to my constituency seems particularly relevant to the work that Sir Paddy Ashdown has done in the past few years. If hon. Members will excuse my Latin, it is "Industria, virtute et labore", which has been translated for me as meaning, "By diligence, courage and hard work." That is a good tribute to Sir Paddy Ashdown. That motto very much characterises the work that he has done in the Yeovil constituency in the past quarter of a century. I will try to live up to those standards in the years to come. 7.34 pm

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