As a professional engineer I take great joy from the occasional opportunities I get to encourage young people to explore, or even take up, engineering. Last month it was a great pleasure to judge the entries and attend the award ceremony for our region’s Primary Engineer competition: a national science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) initiative to encourage primary school age children to think like an engineer, trying to solve problems and improve other peoples’ lives. My fellow judges and I read through, discussed, smiled at and were humbled by the fantastic ideas drawn and described in the 250 best submissions from hundreds of children across our region.

I was very pleased to note that Sixpenny Handley First School was well represented in the best submissions! Our children were thinking up and setting out their ideas for a better future: I hope the families and friends were as inspired as I was. I left feeling uplifted and confident that the future will be better in these young hands as they mature.
Much of the conversation between the judges was about the challenges of skills training, the availability of good apprenticeships and the sharp reductions we have seen in vocational training places over the last ten years. All the judges were drawn from major engineering companies, all with substantial early careers programmes: yet there is clearly a big gap between supply and demand.
Last month’s government spending review announcement, and subsequent industrial strategy, set out spending plans for skills training and apprenticeships, but little specific detail.
Total apprenticeships fell 40 per cent over the decade, from a high in 2011. The new spending plan will only take investment back to 2014 levels.
The details are promised in the post-16 education and skills strategy before parliament disappears for the summer on 22 July. Given the government’s frustrating foot-shooting as it flounders desperately to dig out of the winter fuel and personal independence payment hole of its own making, I am not sure we will see this important piece of growth-related policy before next term starts.
The reason I get so excited about skills and training is that every pound spent in the early years is well spent for the long term.
Sure Start, childcare, education, skills are all investments in long-term growth, good health and happiness in later life. Skimping on these in the past has been penny-wise-and-pound-foolish. Just before Covid struck, the skills budget reached its lowest point. We know the damage Covid did to education and young people’s mental health, yet the previous government refused to take its own experts’ advice on how much it would take to recover educational lost ground after the crisis.
If the current government is serious about sustainable growth, it needs to look harder at the areas where it will make the greatest difference. Skills, knowledge and our young people’s future is one of those no-regrets choices.
Gary Jackson
North Dorset Liberal Democrats

Whenever you hear someone in government say that ‘difficult decisions have to be made’ inevitably the question inevitably arises, difficult for whom? Those making the decisions, or those affected by them? The Labour government’s plan for welfare ‘reforms’ (ie cuts) included making it harder for people to access Personal Independence Payments (PIPs), and cutting the rate of incapacity payments for those unable to work for health reasons.
The true measure of a civilised society surely lies in how it treats its poorer and most vulnerable citizens. PIP is designed to support people who have a long-term physical or mental health disability. Around 20 per cent of them are in work, but are simply unable to earn enough to cover their basic needs. This is yet another legacy of the decades-long failures of previous governments. And while levels of poverty have risen in the UK, the income of the rich has soared as the gap between the wealthy and the poor has widened. Hence the Green Party’s call for a fair tax system.
A backbench rebellion obliged the Government to first offer some concessions, but they still proposed to reduce benefits paid to new claimants – so people with identical needs would have ended up being treated differently. Unacceptably unfair. We await the outcome of the review of the PIP assessment.
On another crucial topic, the UK is one of the most nature depleted countries in the world. Almost half our wildlife has gone, and another 10,000 species of plants, animals and birds are threatened with extinction.
In January the Government cut short the first reading of the Climate & Nature (CAN) Bill before it could be put to a vote, and rescheduled it for 11th July … perhaps hoping there would not be enough time for it to be debated again?
There is a campaign for each of the 650 constituencies in England to send the Prime Minister a personal letter, urging him to give emergency debate time to the Bill and ensure that we have greater action on the climate and nature crisis. I’m pleased to have been asked to post the letter on behalf of North Dorset: the Government’s decision will affect rich and poor alike.
Ken Huggins
North Dorset Green Party

Simon Hoare sets out the enduring tenets which anchor Conservatism, a vision rooted in responsibility, pragmatism and national confidence

We are marking the anniversary of the 2024 General Election – the worst defeat for my party in our long history. A question which often arose was: ‘What does your party stand for?’ In other words – “Tell me the relevance of Conservatism for the 2020s/30s”. As a Conservative, sometimes that can be hard. We are a broad church of popular centre-right appeal. We have had no Little Red Book or Marxian jottings to constrain our path. Open. Pragmatic. Common sense. Common ground. These have been our lodestars. Robert Peel, the founding father of the modern Tory Party perhaps best summarised Conservatism as ‘retaining the best of what we have got and reforming only when necessary.’ So I thought it might be helpful (though it might not!) if I set out what I think the core and foundation principles of contemporary Conservatism should be.

• We believe in responsibilities as well as rights, seeing them as two sides of the same coin. We can have legitimate expectations of the State but so too can the State of us. Think Kennedy: ‘ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country’. We have responsibilities to play our part in society, to pay our way, support our families and communities.
• The State should not be defined as being either small or big but, rather, smart. We must always see the State as servant, and not master. The challenges of demographic and changing tax takes means that every penny needs to be watched. The State needs to be fleet of foot, responsive … but above all know its own limits. There is such a thing as society, but it is different from the State and the State will always err when it believes that only it can be the author of every solution.
• We need to instil faith in our institutions: the armed forces, legal system, police, church and crown. Not forelock-tugging deference but respect through understanding and confidence.
• We must have a sense of Britain’s role in the world and, springing from our democracy, free speech etc, be a beacon on the hill for those striving for the same. Soft power and influence needs to be maximised for the national and international good. This is different from Jingoistic blind patriotism, it is about national pride and self-confidence in our ability to be a force for good.
• Conservative public services need to be modern and responsive to fast-changing demand. Our Welfare State should be a safety net through which no one can fall. However, it cannot be a straightjacketing cocoon from which no-one can escape.
• We need to be wedded to social mobility, sound money and having a property-owning democracy. Education and training should be the public service version of Timpson’s keycutting services – you need them to open life’s doors.
• We have to be collaborative and internationalist in our outlook, while maximising the opportunities of Commonwealth and our wider global reach.
• We need a civic pride in conserving our environment while building for the future.
• We must be a unifying force for all parts of our United Kingdom – championing our common ground of shared values and hopes rather than seeking dividing fault lines.
  Over the coming months, as our policies start to take shape, if they are founded on, inter alia, the above key tenets, centre right voters and all who cherish our country and commonsense will, once again, find their political mooring.