Tag: Julian Huppert

Cambridge letting agents ‘exploiting vulnerable tenants’

08:08 Monday 6th October 2014
BBC Radio Cambridgeshire

DOTTY MCLEOD: People in Cambridgeshire are being ripped off by unscrupulous letting agents charging excessive fees.That’s the fear of the MP for Cambridge, who wants to see a code of practice adopted by the lettings industry to curb excessive charges for reference checks and tenancy agreements. Administrative fees for three people moving into a three bedroomed house in Cambridgeshire vary from £650 at some letting agents in Cambridge Peterborough and St Neots to just £225 at one agent in Fenland. Julian Huppert says with rising house prices and a shortage of affordable homes, more people are now being forced to rent. He joins me on the line now. Morning Julian.
JULIAN HUPPERT: Morning Dotty. How are you?
DOTTY MCLEOD: I’m fine thank you. How do you know that these fees are actually excessive.
JULIAN HUPPERT: Well I think you can just look at how much is being charged. I had a look around in Cambridge at some places charging £250 to change a name on a form, £16 for sending an email or a letter. It doesn’t cost that much for a stamp and an envelope and certainly £16 for an email is pretty steep. But also there’s been work done around the country. So Shelter did a survey, and found that one in seven people who use letting agents have to pay more than £500 just to get started. That’s an exorbitant amount of money for people who often are struggling to get the money together to pay for the deposit and the rent anyway.
DOTTY MCLEOD: And do you think that this is a problem in Cambridge specifically?
JULIAN HUPPERT: It’s particularly bad in places like Cambridge, because you might say there’s a free market. If people think they are paying too much they’ll just go somewhere else. But anybody who has tried to rent a property in Cambridge will know you simply don’t have the opportunity of saying oh no, I don’t like this agent, I won’t look at any of their properties. You have to act very very fast. You have to be open to it. So people don’t really have an opportunity to choose.
DOTTY MCLEOD: Well also on the line is David Cox who is the Managing Director of ARLA, the Association of Residential Lettings Agents. David, something like that, charging more than £100 to change the name on a form, that’s quite hard to defend, isn’t it?
DAVID COX: Good morning Dotty. I think it’s slightly more involved than just changing the name on a form.
DOTTY MCLEOD: Well explain what might be involved with something like that. Because maybe we don’t realise what the letting agents have to deal with.
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Partnership bid retains older people’s services within the NHS in Cambridgeshire

11:08 Wednesday 1st October 2014
BBC Radio Cambridgeshire

PAUL STAINTON: Within the last half an hour it’s been revealed who’s won the contract to run services for the over-65s in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough for the next five years. The preferred bidder is the Cambridgeshire organisation Uniting Care Partnership which was one of the three bidders who made the final shortlist for the £800 million contract. It’s a decision that will be warmly welcomed by unions, and certainly the Cambridge MP Julian Huppert who joins me now. Julian, morning.
JULIAN HUPPERT: Hi Paul. It’s great news, isn’t it?
PAUL STAINTON: Well .. I can’t possibly comment. The contract stays within the NHS. is that the right idea for you? Obviously .. .
JULIAN HUPPERT: I think it’s not only good because it’s within the NHS, Uniting Care is Addenbrookes and the Mental Health Trust, but also because this is the right outcome for patients. By bringing together these bits of the NHS that haven’t always worked very well together, what you’ll see is something that looks after older people better than we’ve had before. Anybody who’s been through the system, or had elderly relatives going through it, will know that there are also silos and difficulties between hospital care, community care, mental health care and all the rest, and this will bring it together. So we get something which is better for patients, and also stays within the NHS, so you don’t have to worry about the profit motive.
PAUL STAINTON: It doesn’t necessarily follow though, does it, that you bring failing bits of this and bits of that together, and then you make one bigger successful thing. It doesn’t always follow, does it?
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Cambridge LibDems Turn on Clegg

07:42 Friday 13th June 2014
BBC Radio Cambridgeshire

[P]AUL STAINTON: The Cambridge Liberal Democrats will vote this evening on whether to support Nick Clegg’s leadership of the party in the run-up to the General Election. So is the “I agree with Nick” era well and truly behind us, and who are the other contenders for thee top job if Nick was to get shoved aside? Well let’s talk to Look East political reporter Andrew Sinclair. Andrew, morning.
ANDREW SINCLAIR: Hi Paul.
PAUL STAINTON: Of course Cambridge can vote any way they like. On their own they’re not going to oust Nick, are they? But it maybe an idea of how the grass roots of the party are thinking? Continue reading “Cambridge LibDems Turn on Clegg”

David Laws on More Money for Cambs Schools

17:07 Thursday 13th March 2014
BBC Radio Cambridgeshire

[C]HRIS MANN: Cambridgeshire’s cash-strapped schools are apparently at the front of the queue for £350 million worth of new funding. The announcement was made in the House of Commons today by the Schools Minister David Laws. He also praised the strong campaigning by the MPs for Cambridge and Huntingdon, Julian Huppert and Jonathan Djanogly. .. That announcement came this morning in the House of Commons from Education Minister David Laws. I spoke to him a short time ago.
(TAPE)
DAVID LAWS: Well we’ve made an important announcement today for Cambridgeshire, which is that we’re going to do what people in the county have been pressing us to do for some time now, which is to move to a fairer system of funding our schools across the country. The system that we inherited from the previous government didn’t really seem to us to be rational. It underfunded areas such as Cambridgeshire. We’ve had lots of complaints from local head teachers, Members of Parliament such as Julian Huppert in Cambridge. So we’ve announced today that we’ve allocated over a third of a billion pounds extra to schools, starting in April 2015, and we’ve announced the areas that are particularly going to benefit from that funding. Because we’ve allocated the money to the areas which we think are underfunded. So for Cambridgeshire the important news is that if we press ahead with this after the consultation, it will mean over £20 million more going into schools within the county. It will mean for every child within Cambridgeshire schools, the school will be getting something like £275 per pupil per year more than they presently get at the moment, a 7% increase. And I think these things will be very welcome in Cambridgeshire, where this has been a hot political issue as you will know for some time.
CHRIS MANN: And it’s been a hot political issue because people felt we were being unfairly treated. Our pupils were getting less money per head than any other pupils in the country. So will that end? And will they now be on the same level with everybody else?
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Cameron Moves To Reassure On Further Immigration

17:07 Wednesday 27th November 2013
BBC Radio Cambridgeshire

[C]HRIS MANN: The big story this evening, David Cameron says he’ll push ahead with plans to restrict access to benefits for EU immigrants, after a European Commissioner warned the UK risked being seen as the nasty country. The Prime Minister wants to restrict housing benefit and JobSeekers Allowance for entrants from Romania and Bulgaria. We’ll get the comments of the Liberal Democrat MP for Cambridge Julian Huppert a little later on, and I’m also going to be debating this live with two people who are very involved locally with Europe. First of all, Labour’s current MEP for Europe, Richard Howitt. Hello Richard.
RICHARD HOWITT: Evening Chris. Good evening everyone.
CHRIS MANN: Live from our studio in Brussels. And also Patrick O’Flynn, who’s recently been chosen as the lead UKIP candidate in the East of England. Patrick, hello to you.
PATRICK O’FLYNN: Good evening Chris.
CHRIS MANN: Also the Chief Political Correspondent of the Daily Express. So we’ll talk to them a little later on, but first of all, let’s hear our report from Westminster on this PM proposal, from Joe Inwood.
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LibDem MP Supports Progressive Council Tax Reforms

08:21 Wednesday 23rd October 2013
BBC Radio Cambridgeshire

[D]OTTY MCLEOD: Cambridge’s MP is calling for an overhaul of the system of council tax. Julian Huppert says he wants to move from a system that was botched together to one that includes more income and wealth taxation. But how feasible is it to change from a tax system that’s based on property values to something that takes into account how much people earn? Julian joins me now. So Julian, first of all I think we just need to explain how council tax works at the moment. Everyone has to pay it of course, and the amount that you pay depends on what local authority you live in, but also how much your house is worth. That’s right, isn’t it?
JULIAN HUPPERT: That’s roughly right, but only roughly. It’s based on different bands of valuation. But it’s actually based on how much your house was worth in the early 1990s, and that’s why, if you ever look at your bill, you’ll see that it lists your house as being worth £60,000 or something like that maybe, which doesn’t fit very well with what you may have paid for it more recently. So it’s very problematic. It’s also not progressive, because the very very largest house pays only three times more than the very tiniest flat in the whole country.
DOTTY MCLEOD: In terms of the valuations being outdated, surely it doesn’t matter in a system where everything is relative,
surely. It’s not really to do with how much your house is worth, it’s how much it’s worth compared to others in the area. So it doesn’t matter that these are outdated valuations.
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Cambridge Population Estimates – A Difference Of Opinion

08:18 Tuesday 15th October 2013
BBC Radio Cambridgeshire

[P]AUL STAINTON: Is Cambridgeshire being short changed by the Government, because the official figures suggest our population is lower than it actually is? That’s the question we’ve been asking all morning on the Bigger Breakfast, and trying to come up with ways of counting people proper – better – whatever. But Cambridge MP Julian Huppert and Peterborough’s Stewart Jackson are concerned that the Office for National Statistics are not giving accurate figures for the number of people who actually live in the county. Johnnie D. can explain what that means, and what effect it might have. First of all Johnnie, who are these people at the ONS, and how do they compile these statistics?
JOHN DEVINE: Good morning Paul. Yes, it’s their job to collect all sorts of information about the population and present that to the public. And they use things like official registrations of births and deaths, as well as information about migration, to try and predict which areas will grow in the coming years, and which areas will see a decrease in the population.
PAUL STAINTON: So are they accurate? That’s the big question, isn’t it?
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Nick Clegg Pragmatic On Electoral Support Kingmaker In Waiting

07:40 Friday 13th September 2013
BBC Radio Cambridgeshire

[P]AUL STAINTON: The Liberal Democrat Conference this weekend in Glasgow, and one of their peers has suggested they should ditch Nick Clegg before the 2015 General Election, warning that the contest could be disastrous for the Party unless it cuts its ties with the Conservatives months before going to the polls. Lord Oakeshott said Mr Clegg’s personal poll ratings were very poor, and the Party would have to think about whether it would do better under another leader. And there are all sorts of headlines in the newspapers this morning. In the Sun, “Clegg’s Gone to The Dogs”. Only 21% think LibDems are trustworthy, down from 24%. The LibDems according to the latest poll in 4th place behind UKIP. Overall support for the Liberals five points behind UKIP now to 8%. And Lord Oakeshott’s remarks as well, saying perhaps we should think about ditching the Party Leader. Well I’m pleased to say the LibDem Party Conference, as I mentioned, beginning in Glasgow, and I’m joined by the Leader Nick Clegg this morning, and Deputy Prime Minister. Morning Nick.
NICK CLEGG: Morning.
PAUL STAINTON: Are you the man to lead the LibDems to the next election?
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