Gordon Birtwistle’s Westminster Week - January 25th 2013

Matt has previously undertaken work experience in my Westminster office and is involved in the Scouts. Last Monday he had taken responsibility for hosting a large group of Scouts, girls and boys, from all over Australia so he brought them for a tour of Parliament. They were really keen to know more about the history of the building and the workings of British politics, and interestingly I learned quite a lot about Australian politics. Did you know their parliament building is covered with grass so the people can literally walk over the politicians?

A lot of the Lib-Dem ministers make time each week to catch up with backbenchers and last week I went to chat to our Energy Secretary Ed Davey. Ed is doing a great job in a difficult department and I wanted to pass onto him some great green ideas from Burnley residents, which he has promised his team will look into.

On Tuesday I chaired a really interesting forum on skills and employment which was hosted by the Westminster Employment Forum. They are hosting a number of these events with different speakers and my session was on school-commissioning of careers advice and guidance: implementation and impact. It was a really interesting debate with many good contributions. As many of you will be aware I am committed to improving careers advice in schools and have taken it on as one of my major projects this year. In fact, I have just applied to the Backbench Business Committee for a debate on the issue so fingers crossed it gets picked.

I met up with a key figure from the UK Border Agency in the North-West. My team in Burnley deals with a huge amount of asylum and immigration cases, working closely with UKBA. It was a really informative meeting and I am hoping to go and meet the North-West UKBA team in Liverpool to find out more about how the agency works.

Readers of this column may remember that I am taking an apprenticeship of sorts with the Industry and Parliament Trust. I have been working with Statoil and Total to learn more about offshore oil and gas and horizontal deep sea digging. I have had a number of exciting days with the two companies so far and I met with Statoil last week to discuss what areas I would be working on with them during my fellowship this year.

Last week I was particularly busy in the constituency office. On Friday I had 15 separate casework meetings with residents about a variety of issues including education, child support, welfare benefits, rubbish and recycling, housing and dangerous dogs. I am working through these issues now.

As always do not hesitate to get in touch. I have weekly drop-in and appointment advice surgeries all day on Friday. I also have my weekly street stall outside M&S in the town centre on Saturdays between 10-30 am and 12-30pm, weather permitting.