07/04/10 "I'm the only MP who has built a real green home "
It was the birth of my older children that originally propelled me to want to change the world from inside Parliament. Now it is the birth of my youngest that convinces me that change has to come from elsewhere.
28/03/10 - "House Magazine - Eco House"
I no longer know whether my attempt to turn a derelict shell into a house that generates 50% more energy than it consumes is a folly, a vision, an obsession…or all three. I may now more when it is finished in the summer.
16/03/10 - "The Meadows of hope and inspiration"
I no longer know whether my attempt to turn a derelict shell into a house that generates 50% more energy than it consumes is a folly, a vision, an obsession…or all three. I may now more when it is finished in the summer. To make sense of it may require a different....
Council housing always used to be one of the great divides between Labour and the Tories. Even as the ideological hostility that New Labour had towards council housing began to bite, the mythology remained. New Labour may have been forcing local authorities......
Council housing always used to be one of the great divides between Labour and the Tories. Even as the ideological hostility that New Labour had towards council housing began to bite, the mythology remained. New Labour may have been forcing local authorities......
At the moment, serious politics in Britain has imploded. The outrageous abuse, by some MP's, of the Parliamentary allowances system has lead to a general denunciation of everyone. Newspapers have discovered that they no longer need....
June 2009 "Taking the poor into a low energy future"
During our time in office, the Labour Government has made some genuinely radical commitments on both the eradication of fuel poverty and our response to climate change. This makes it all the more frustrating to be confronted by two.......
The installation of insulation work through the CERT programme is very efficient with a time line of 25 working days after the doorstep assessment. This is well inside the current DECC time line of 40 days from the technical survey for insulation.....
With far less credit than she deserves, Housing Minister Margaret Beckett, has carried out a quiet rescue of the Labour Party. With a bit more of a push she might even rescue the Labour government.
When a relationship breaks down there are two things you can say about it with a degree of certainty. The first is that the most ferocious arguments will take place around the most marginal issues; how someone eats their cornflakes, who gets the CDs.....
Delegates at the Labour Party conference in Manchester should be gentle with Gordon Brown. It will be his last as Labour leader and Prime Minister. Gordon is like a Damien Hirst sheep. Trapped in formaldehyde, he lacks the qualities needed for a bold.....
When the weather stops soaking the British public the energy companies will take over. Already during 2008 average energy charges have risen by 38%. Wages, benefits and pensions have not. By the end of the year 6 million British households will officially......
Gordon Brown’s declaration that he is about to review New Labour’s policies sent a flutter of excitement through the parliamentary press lobby. Was this to be the distinctive political lead everyone has been waiting for? Is it to be the genuine break with the Blairite.....
05/03/08 - "Shock - New housing revelations"
On the 2nd March 2008, the Mail on Sunday ran a nonsense piece about Alan. They sent a journalist, Nick Pisa (sic) and a photographer out to get details of the family apartment in Italy. Having come back with the wrong photo and the wrong info, the Mail....
22/01/08 - Energy Bill
Alan Simpson (Nottingham, South) (Lab): The Secretary of State will know that the Prime Minister has committed the UK to meeting the EU target of obtaining 20 per cent. of our energy needs from renewable sources by 2020.....
Alan Simpson (Nottingham, South) (Lab): I hope that it does not damage the standing or career of the Secretary of State or the Minister for Pensions Reform if I, too, congratulate them on making tonight’s debate worth having.
I am really pleased to have the opportunity of contributing to the Committee’s enquiry into the role we can play, as individuals and local communities, in tackling climate change. I will try to do so within the sequence of headings set out by the Committee.
Interregnums are strange events. You never quite know where you are. If they follow a death, people at least know that they are entitled to mourn. Handovers of political power bring no such certainties. Labour MP's hover in clusters, uncertain about which.....
07/06/07 - "DTI - Fuel Poverty"
Mrs. Linda Riordan (Halifax) (Lab/Coop): What progress has been made in achieving the Government’s target of an end to fuel poverty for vulnerable
households by 2010.
The Minister for Science and Innovation (Malcolm Wicks): Projections indicate that about 2..
13/03/07 - "Climate cheating"
Political leaders of all parties may not yet understand the urgency of responding to climate change, but at least they understand that at the next general election there will be
a race to turn carbon credits into electoral credits. Bless them.
07/02/07 - "Tony in Wonderland"
There can’t be too many occasions ahead when Tony Blair presents himself before the Parliamentary Liaison Committee. These are parliament’s big hitters; the Chairs of all the major Select Committees. They are supposed to be the MP's who.....
2007 "A Really Green Budget"
A) New Golden Rules
Henceforth HM government should ensure that in line with the Stern Report recommendations, the government will seek to direct a minimum of 1% of....
There is a crisis in social housing that is spiraling out of control. It is easy to point this as a conflict between council tenants and their local council, or as a conflict between Labour MPs and their Labour councils. But the real issue
(and crisis) has to....
25/03/05 - Future Energy Markets
Alan Simpson (Nottingham, South) (Lab): I am extremely grateful to you for choosing this subject for debate this afternoon, Mr. Deputy Speaker, particularly as it follows the Chancellor's announcements in his Budget speech about the
intention......
Our whole understanding of fuel poverty is being squeezed in 3 ways. Weather patterns are becoming increasingly erratic. We have to deal with health risks both from the cold in winter and heat in summer. Fuel poverty will become as much to do with staying......
10/02/05 - "Greenhouse Gas emission targets"
Alan Simpson (Nottingham, South) (Lab): What plans she has to make greenhouse gas emission targets statutory and binding.
The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs......
08/02/05 - Climate Change
Alan Simpson (Nottingham, South) (Lab): I shall try to be as brisk as possible, partly to allow other Members into the debate, but also because I want to make several points that I hope will upset the applecart in relation to the consensus of......
08/11/04 - Carbon Emissions
Alan Simpson: We need to put the debate in the context of the best aspects of the Government's record. For the first time in history, the Labour Government gave a statutory undertaking to eradicate fuel poverty in this country by 2016.
What will you make of the strike and rally by thousands of civil servants in Nottingham today? When the miners strike filled the Market Square with protestors in the 1980's, everyone knew it was about the future and survival of the pits.
18/06/04 "Party games"
Downing Street 's response to last week's election results come as a surprise to all but he most bullish of New Labour acolytes. An important sea change is taking place in society, with tides that will pull us all into uncertain waters.
How lovely to see my Minister, Keith Hill MP, engaging in a debate about ALMO's through the letters column of the Evening Post (29 May). He and I take quite different views on this and it would be good if he Post invited him to debate......
11/05/04 - Housing Bill
Alan Simpson (Nottingham, South) (Lab): I rise to support
amendment No. 87, which I intend to press to a vote. I begin by thanking the Opposition spokesman, the hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr. Hayes), for his kind and.....
For once a national newspaper caught the issue perfectly. The right wing think tank “Civitas” were holding a conference on migrant workers in Britain . Reluctantly, they had conceded a case for highly skilled workers being recruited for jobs in the UK.....
Much of the recent ‘paper talk' about Tony Blair's leadership of the Labour Party has lurched between the surreal and the silly. Would he survive the Loch Fyne conspiracy? Is he more vulnerable to a flour attack from Fathers for Justice.
In the last week the government has given Nottingham a clip round the ear and a poison chalice. The clip round the ear was the announcement that the City was to have its council tax capped. It came as something of a last minute shock.
11/03/04 - "Animal farm"
Osman doesn't think much about how he is connected to cockle pickers or to the issues of EU enlargement that will take place on 1 st May. He is too busy trying to keep warm
and survive. Osman is an asylum seeker in Nottingham, one of the many.....
October 2003 - "Labour Party Conference"
It says a lot about the state of British politics that just when you get a Labour conference hungry for policy change, the
press become obsessed with leadership change. This is the politics of Pop Idol – adore the winner, abuse the rest....
June 2003 "Labour Party reshuffle"
For a moment Ian Duncan Smith huffed and puffed about the Cabinet reshuffle and the planned demise of the Lord Chancellor's office as though he had found a real political issue. Some Labour members joined in the disquiet about not knowing where.....
May 2002 "Energy Conservation"
Friday is 'D' day. Des Turner's Energy Conservation Bill comes back to the Commons for its Report Stage with overwhelming parliamentary support, but only a 50‐50
chance of getting through.
AS A CHILD I sometimes thought that Prince Charles and I would have had a lot to talk about. We were, after all, kids born at the same time, though not quite at the same place. Bootle was slightly different from Balmoral, and Gordonstoun......
