Recent News

This was a year that I shall never forget, for reasons both good and bad. What a bizarre year! Can anyone remember anything like it? I thought it started apocalyptically – with the Australian forest fires – but, now that I look back, the things we thought were bad at the beginning of the year…

The Prime Minister has achieved the impossible Like many a tragic politico, I have spent much of the bank holiday weekend trying to absorb the emerging details of the Anglo-European trade deal, signed just hours after my previous blog, predicting that a deal would not be agreed. That’ll teach me! I jest somewhat. I did…

As time runs out for an Anglo-European trade deal, it is important to recognise that things have changed since the 1970s. Today, Britain is not the ‘Sick Man’ of Europe. The EU is! I avoid commenting too much on national politics on this blog but I was asked about the likelihood of a trade deal…

Council set to decommission 9 local play areas in Billericay Basildon Council has today (Wednesday 16th December) launched a public consultation on a ten-year programme around the future provision of play across the borough. While the strategy being proposed by the current Labour-led Administration includes investment in some of our larger play facilities – including…

Billericay remembers the Mayflower, 400 years on At yesterday’s full meeting of Basildon Council, I was proud to move the following motion. “To be moved by Councillor Schrader – The Council notes that this year marks 400 years since one of the most significant sea journeys in human history – the voyage of the Mayflower…

The title of this blog comes from a quip made by Sir Iain Duncan Smith – a prominent backbench critic of the current Covid strategy – and I could not resist using it, as I think it sums up how a lot of us feel. I am as wearied by this pandemic as anybody. A…

Many of you have written to me about the recent Government White Paper on Planning Reform entitled Planning for the Future, to express your concerns about the sweeping changes being proposed. Without doubt, the Government is considering the most radical reform of the UK planning system since its inception at the end of the Second…

You will doubtless all have seen that the Prime Minister gave a press conference yesterday evening regarding the Coronavirus.  There has been a decision to enter a lockdown for four weeks from Thursday night until the beginning of December. This is obviously a drastic step that nobody wanted to happen. I know that our Member…

So last week was the inaugural meeting of Basildon Council’s new ‘Local Government Reorganisation and Transition Committee’, the presumptuously-named full-blown service committee that the Labour-led Administration have set up to ‘consider’ the issue of Local Government Reform (LGR). To be fair, the Government is preparing a White Paper on what some would argue is a…

Following on from yesterday’s widely-reported decision by Essex County Council to apply to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care to pre-emptively place Essex under the Tier 2 (High alert) Covid-19 restrictions, the Health Secretary has this morning confirmed in the House of Commons that, on reviewing the case presented by the County…