The mechanism exists for rail franchises to be handed back if franchisees fail to deliver the promised service.  FCC seems to have had a charmed life in hanging on to its lucrative monopoly, it is time that passengers had their say.

So we are calling a public meeting for next Tuesday 16 March to discuss whether FCC should now lose their franchise.  The main speaker will be my friend Norman Baker MP, Liberal Democrat Transport Spokesman in the House of Commons.  The meeting will take place at Marlborough Road Methodist Church in the centre of the city (see directions here) and starts at 7.00 pm with doors opening at 6.30 pm – so do put the date in your diary!

When I successfully proposed my motion on rail franchises at last autumn’s Liberal Democrat conference, Norman summed up the debate.  The Daily Mail has described him as having ‘consistently been a thorn in the Government’s side’. In 2001 he was named “Inquisitor of the Year” in the Zurich/Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year Awards and, in February 2002, he won the Channel 4 Opposition MP of the Year Award.

It’s going to be a lively meeting, I hope to see you there.

St Albans is special in so many ways, and the longstanding interfaith group (which predates 9/11) is evidence of that.  The initiative came from the Rev Tony Hurle of St Paul’s Church, who wanted to create a regular dialogue between the local religious communities.

On Saturday we had speeches from Kevin Walton, the Canon Chancellor at the Abbey, who made the point that our city’s origin stemmed from Alban, then a non-Christian, reaching out to protect a persecuted Christian; a luminous talk from Dr Khalid of the Islamic Centre, St Pauls’ close neighbour in Hatfield Road; speeches from the United Synagogue in Oswald road and the Masorti congregation; the Bahai; and the Society of Friends, who are currently hosting the Masorti congregation at the Friends Meeting House in Upper Lattimore Road.  Also spotted were friends from Marlborough Road Methodist Church, as well as other Anglican churches in town.

My apologies if I have omitted anyone.  They are all Abrahamic faiths, and there is far more that unites than divides us.  I found this event an uplifting and moving experience.

Hick Hollinghurst spoke first on the local picture, positive and negative. Then Norman spoke passionately about the need to improve particularly in mental health provision, about reducing some of the more rigid NHS targets (negative) and replacing them with guarantees of standards (positive), about the need to streamline the multitude of supervisory bodies all doing similar jobs and to bring greater efficiency into the NHS by re-designing processes and service delivery.

As chairman for the night, I found the Q&A session particularly interesting from an audience which was a mixture of general public and healthcare professionals.

•    The first question picked up on the appalling case where a German doctor with no GP experience came over to work in an out of hours on-call service and killed a patient through a massive overdose of the wrong drug.  Current freedom of movement rules in the EU meant he faced no requirement to pass language and competency tests.  As it happened Norman Lamb has been working closely with the family of the deceased man and he was robust in his approach to this issue – the prime responsibility is to ensure patient safety and that means there must be confidence in the language and medical skills of people coming over to work as doctors, period.  Not all EU member states’ medical regulatory bodies are of the same standard.  It’s not like someone coming to drive a crane.  Patient safety must be paramount.

•    A member of the audience spoke movingly of her mentally handicapped son – now grown-up – and how he is given little or no dignity or respect when it comes to NHS treatment.  There is clearly a particular issue which I will be following up with her but Norman spoke with feeling of how mental health is generally the poor relation in the NHS.

•    A local pharmacist asked about competition versus collaboration in the NHS.  At the moment NHS workers are often forced to compete against other branches for finance/equipment etc.  Would it not be better to focus on collaboration between the different branches instead.  Norman Lamb said that competition had introduced fresh thinking and improved NHS services in certain areas but it could not be the be-all-and-end-all.  It was important to ensure that there is integrated care – he instanced a very interesting healthcare provider on the west coast of the USA – so there is a need for both competition and collaboration.

•    Another question was about the effect of the European Working Time Directive on doctors’ training.  Norman Lamb said that currently only 9-18% of specialists are complying with the 48 hours rule, all the others were working beyond these hours (mainly without reporting it).  The new rules also mean that there need to be more handovers between doctors which could compromise patient care.  There should be greater flexibility to these rules, and the ability to work up to 56 hours a week.

•    NICE was raised – whether it is effective, whether it makes good judgements, whether it is fair.  Norman Lamb said that the principle of NICE was good, however the criteria with which it judges value for money should be known in the public domain – currently they aren’t.  Also there is the problem that NICE doesn’t take into account the impact of particular drugs on the lives of carers, or the economic impact if a particular drug would enable someone to continue to work and pay taxes.  It also doesn’t measure what is lost by paying for new drugs – what services have to be cut to enable the funds for the new drug to be available.

•    There was a very interesting question about whether the National Dementia Strategy is viable in the current economic climate.  Norman Lamb said that the strategy was welcomed as an aspiration but there wasn’t enough money at the moment to make it work.  However the issue of the funding of social care is of vital importance.  Many people fail to qualify for means tested free care, but do not have much money and so are spending everything they have on care.  There is a need to get all 3 parties to work together to find a solution to this.  We need to accept that more money is urgently required in social care, the parties should commit, before the general election, to work together to find a solution to this, since it will have to be paid for.

•   Finally there was a question about Link and how well current systems of public involvement in the health service are working.  Norman was very critical of the chopping and changing since the abolition of community health councils, and also of the way that over-bureaucratic demands for CRB checks and similar work to put people off getting involved.

I wish there had been time for more questions but Norman had to get away for a train to get him home to Norfolk at a reasonable hour travelling from Chelmsford so not risking FCC!).  From the e-mails I have received following the meeting, it is clear that people find events like these really informative.  When I was a young candidate, public meetings were much more common.  I have a hunch they may make a comeback  as people look for more than soundbite politics.

And giving his reaction to the meeting, Nick Hollinghurst sent me a most insightful note yesterday:

The big prob with all this stuff is to balance out the
(a) anecdotes (nearly always negative),
(b) NHS improvement plans (nearly always over-optimistic),
(c) excuses (always self-serving),
(d) BMA propaganda,
(e) local politics (often simplistic, populist and willfully ill-informed),
(f)  national politics (often simplistic and populist),
(g) drug company promotion (often venal and self-serving),
(h) pressure group campaigns (sometimes populist, often ill-informed, occasionally obsessive, but also sometimes quite excellent)

And to do so while finding one’s way around the NHS structures (getting simpler, but still somewhat Byzantine) and understanding the science (often challenging and often, especially the statistics, downright challenging).

Apart from that, it’s easy!

There have been many disappointments for St Albans over the last few years.  The city expresses the ambition to be Hertfordshire’s premier community.  Yet our City Hospital was down-sized against the promise of a new super hospital at Hatfield, and then the Government reneged on the deal.

We have been promised a great new Urgent Care Centre, but the omens do not look good for its delivery given the state of public finances.

Maternity services have long since left St Albans, but how happy are local mothers that they will soon only have home birth, Watford or Stevenage to choose from within the county?

Just how easy is it to get to Watford General in Vicarage Road on a match day?  For people visiting in-patient loved ones, are the car park charges fair (assuming you can even find somewhere to park)?  How do the bus routes work for non-drivers?

But of course there are good news stories too with the Minor Injuries Unit and the elective surgery unit.  There are some interesting innovations with the new county council and NHS Joint Commissioning Partnership Board.  So can Hertfordshire teach things to the rest of the country?  And most importantly how can we reconnect local people with their NHS?

These are all matters which are likely to be raised at the public meeting we are organising this Thursday.  The meeting takes place at the Marlborough Road Methodist Church at 7 pm and the main speakers are Norman Lamb MP, Lib Dem Shadow Secretary of State for Health, and Nick Hollinghurst, Vice Chairman of the Hertfordshire County Council Health Scrutiny Committee.

We will hear what is happening locally from Nick and then hear from Norman Lamb on LibDem thinking on the NHS overall – not least within the context of a new age of public spending austerity.  And I hope there will be a lively question and answer session to follow.

Everyone is welcome to attend the meeting.  It will help us plan for numbers if you register your interest via the health survey link at the top of this page.  Hope to see you there!

We were slightly worried that the Thursday before Bank Holiday would not be the ideal time to attract a crowd to a political meeting. We should not have been concerned. Three hundred people packed into the Marlborough Road Methodist Church to hear Nick take questions from all comers.

He uses no intermediary to pick the questioners. My role was simply to introduce the meeting and then close it, and in the interim try to look graceful. Nick chooses the questioners in batches of three and of course he does not know who anyone is – so he really is putting himself on the line.

He has done nearly 50 meetings like this round the country, and told me this was one of the best ever. The audience was nicely mixed and the questions came fast and furious from a forest of hands – MP expenses, getting young people interested in politics, the future of the health service, drugs, Trident, parliamentary reform, restoring power to local government, Afghanistan, Europe, the euro, what makes a good MP, and many more.

People were hugely impressed with his relaxed approach and his willingness to give straight answers. Nick was hugely impressed with St Albans (no surprise there) and by the quality and depth of the questions. I am sure he will be back soon.

PS My thanks to Gary Shore for the excellent photographs – he is a St Albans based professional photographer and can be contacted at gaslights@googlemail.com