Take an evening stroll through any residential area and it won’t be long before you catch the unmistakable smell of a barbeque wafting through the air. A clear sign that people are making the most of the few sunny days we are having during this temperamental summer. Parliament itself is getting in on the act with several of the canteens and restaurants boasting of barbeque days. Weeks of eating chargrilled treats are eagerly anticipated by those for whom cholesterol isn’t an issue. The only thing nobody seems to worry about is how many of the sausages and burgers being woofed down by MPs and their staff will be made from meat from these shores?

If a new report by the British Pig Executive and National Pig Association is anything to go by then it will be not nearly enough. The Government’s procurement of British produce is woefully inadequate. Ever since the high grain prices hit, British pig farmers have been in trouble and have been losing money on every animal they sell. Foreign competition means that the price of pork is kept low but at a terrible cost to the industry and there is a real possibility we could lose virtually all of our pig farmers. This would mean an end to buying pork that we know has come from farms with high standards of animal welfare. More importantly the environmental costs will soar as the move towards locally-produced and sustainable food is replaced with increased food miles and intensive and damaging foreign farming methods.

One way this could change would be for taxpayer-funded bodies to commit to buying British food. Council employees could have crackers and local cheese; our soldiers could fill-up on British beef and Yorkshire pudding; and our doctors, nurses and patients in hospital could munch on nutritious Kentish cherries and Somerset apples.

But instead of a country in which teachers and children in schools tuck into British bangers we have one where Ed Balls’ Department for Children, Schools and Families gets absolutely none of its bacon from UK sources. It’s simply not good enough.

Apparently a ‘battle of the beaches’ has been sparked between David Cameron and Gordon Brown, both eager to show their thriftiness at a time when many are feeling the pinch of the credit crunch by taking their summer holiday in Britain. While David Cameron is off to Cornwall, Gordon Brown is looking for a bucket-and-spade holiday in East Anglia. As the elected representative for Suffolk Coastal I can commend Gordon for his discerning taste – Southwold in my constituency has been voted Britain’s ‘quintessential seaside town’ and it’s only really rivalled, in my opinion, by Aldeburgh, a bit further south. I wish Gordon well and hope he and his family enjoy the delights of a traditional seaside holiday – building sand castles, eating fish and chips and braving the cold North Sea.

While he’s resting in a deck chair, soaking up some sun and admiring the beautiful coast line he might want to think about the threat that is posed to it by climate change and his Government’s own behaviour. East Anglia has always been vulnerable to the ravages of the North Sea – it is very flat and is gradually tilting further and further into the water. The threat will only grow as climate change leads to rising sea levels and more violent and unpredictable weather.

This makes the news that the Government’s own departments have utterly failed to reduce their carbon emissions by anything like what they need to all the more astounding. They promised that they’d be completely carbon neutral by 2012 but last year they barely managed a four percent reduction. The new report on making government operations more sustainable suggests that government departments need to invest more in microgeneration and find ways of cutting energy usage. This comes as no surprise to those of us involved with the Quality of Life policy group which reported last year the lamentable record of government procurement and called for urgent change.

Ministerial confusion and lack of control should be shocking, but Gordon Brown’s floundering premiership has so far has been characterised by a lack of direction, grubby political deals and reheated policies. If he can’t get his own house in order how can he possibly hope to lead the country to an environmentally sound future? Let’s hope that his holiday gives him a chance to think about the long-term objectives his Government should be focusing on – for our country’s sake. Otherwise us Conservatives will have an even harder job to do when we take over in 2010.

Governments on the slide always start flailing about. Instead of regrouping in order to advance in better formation, they feel they must DO things – almost irrespective of what those things are. This is the only explanation of John Healy’s refusal to re-think the Planning Bill.

There’s an all-party consensus that major infrastructure projects should be decided by Governments in Parliament. The safety and need for nuclear power stations ought not to be subject to argument every time a particular proposal is put forward. However, every project has a particular site and impinges upon a particular community. It is absolutely necessary that those local issues should be aired in a way that local people think is fair, reasonable, and liable to influence decisions.

A judge, listening to people from the community and advising elected Ministers openly and independently, won’t satisfy everyone but it is seen as fair. A quango ‘consulting’ and deciding behind closed doors will satisfy no-one. Why the Government sticks to its unnecessary, expensive, and time consuming proposal when no-one supports it, is a mystery. We need to strangle the quango before it is born and have a local inquiry that will deal only with local issues. That will cut the time involved by 90% which is what the Government wants. Let’s hope Mr Healy sees sense this week and the Planning Bill could then gain all-party support. In the meantime he has taken it off the parliamentary timetable because he knows that, in its present form, he won’t get it through.

Why on earth should the Coal Authority be the only organisation that can provide information about coal workings? 

Or the Environment Agency, busy protecting its information so there can be no alternative environment assessment to rival its view? We need competition right across the board. It’s good for the environment and it’s good for the pockets of the people. 

A future Conservative Government should ensure that information is available very widely for the private sector so they can package it in the most convenient way, for commercial and individual use. 

Of course I don’t mean personal information. I mean details of contamination, of previous flood incidents, of coal mining activities, of collapses and utilities lines. This is public information that should be available to the public, not through the filter of public authorities.

From Cheshire to Southampton and South Wales to the West Midlands, we have won control of councils that Labour thought were theirs by right. The electorate showed otherwise and voted Blue.

Now the challenge is to help these councils to go Green. Quality of Life (QoL) is taking on that challenge. The whole team is offering our help to the councils we have won. If anyone would like to join in, we welcome offers.

Week by week we shall be keeping you in touch and giving project details and ideas. Even before that, we are keen to get input from people across the political spectrum. Green is a universal language. What do you most want to see happen to the environment in Basingstoke and Deane; Bury; Cheshire East and West; Elmbridge; Harlow; London; Maidstone; Nuneaton and Bedworth; Redditch; Rossendale; Solihull; Southampton; Vale of Glamorgan; West Lindsay; Wyre Forest?

Tell us and help us to help them make the change. They’ll have a tough time getting everything in place and we want to be at their service.