Romsey Advertiser - 13 June 2008

Written by Sandra Gidley on Fri 13th Jun 2008

I had a very frustrating day last Friday. I decided to try and speak in the debate on lowering the voting age to 16. It has long been party policy and one of the theories behind it is that if young people get into the habit of voting early then it may become a more entrenched habit but there is little hard and fast evidence on the subject.

I had been told by the Speaker's assistant that there were few people hoping to speak in the debate and there were few parliamentarians present on the day. Unfortunately the first three speeches were each over an hour long and the somewhat bizarre way that speaking order is decided determined that only the Lib Dem front bench spokesperson got the chance to speak. I left feeling that the day had not been the best use of my time even though I had managed to reduce some of my reading pile.

There was a double frustration in hearing some of the Conservative speakers who had a very patriarchal attitude to the subject. Sadly, this seemed to be the front bench position too and I struggled to see why they had such a problem with the idea that someone could vote at 16.

Sunday was church focussed as there was a service in the United Reformed Church to celebrate volunteers followed by the Southampton Civic service in the afternoon. This was held in St Edmunds which is a Catholic church. I had expected something fairly formal and was pleasantly surprised that a very lively gospel choir featured prominently in the proceedings.

I did manage to speak in Westminster Hall this week. Mark Oaten, the MP for Winchester, managed to secure a debate on Trauma Response Teams. There was a strong Hampshire presence as Sir George Young from North West Hants also turned up.

The issue in question is that in cases of extreme trauma the NHS relies on voluntary doctors (they work for an organisation called BASICS) to provide on the scene emergency care. They stabilise the patient at the scene and their presence can quite dramatically improve patient outcome. The problem is that, because there are only 19 doctors and one consultant nurse offering their services in the whole of Hampshire, BASICS doctors only managed to attend 750 of the 1200 calls they received last year. Surely this life saving service should be publicly funded and not reliant on volunteers?

We also managed to raise the subject of the helipad which is needed at Southampton General Hospital because currently we are faced with the somewhat ludicrous situation of having an air ambulance which has to land some distance away from the hospital and an ambulance team then has to take the patient the last mile or so by road. The Minister tried to claim that there was more than enough money to provide a helipad out of public funds and although I generally have a good opinion of Ben Bradshaw there are times when he, like all Government Ministers, appear to be living in Cloud Cuckoo Land when it comes to financial reality.