Last week a minor but significant reorganisation of the Army was announced. This follows the commitment of £24 billion over the coming years, but a small reduction in headcount. The investment in kit is very welcome but I regret the loss of men, which will make a slightly smaller garrison at Tidworth-Bulford. Our ‘posture’, as the Defence Secretary explained in a call I joined ahead of the announcement, will be ‘more ready, more forward’, with greater battlefield punch as well as capability in cyber and ‘sub-threshold’ warfare. But Russia currently has more soldiers massed on its border with Ukraine than the entire British army.
This week we got the outlines of the proposed social care system. I was pleased to see a major focus on support for family and community care, which needs at least as much attention and resources as care homes do - and a commitment to pay care workers properly. We have a profound crisis in social care in Wiltshire, which is causing big problems for the NHS, as I heard in my fortnightly call with the council leadership last week. The county is losing 100 social care workers a month as the pressure of the job and better wages in retail and hospitality lure them away; staff shortages mean that social care ‘packages’ - the individualised, council-funded support that people are entitled to - cannot be fulfilled; the result is dozens of people who should be cared for at home or in a care home taking up hospital beds that are needed for other patients; and finally, the crammed hospitals mean that ambulances can’t discharge sick people into A+E - 750 ambulance crew man-hours are being lost each day across the South West as ambulances idle outside, unable to offload their patients.
In happier news, I was pleased to join the line-up at the Wiltshire Museum in Devizes to welcome the Duchess of Cornwall this week. She had a look around the marvellous Eric Ravilious exhibition, the wartime painter who captured the bare beauty of the plain and downs of Wiltshire while he was supposed to be painting the defences and mapping tank routes.
HRH didn’t get to see the incomparable neolithic collection of the Wiltshire Museum, which is rightly situated not near Stonehenge but in Devizes, near the real heart of Wiltshire - and indeed southern Britain - the north Marlborough downs. Here are the West Woods, whence the big stones of the henge were dragged; here are Silbury Hill, Europe’s own pyramid, and barrows aplenty; and here is Avebury, the oldest, biggest and most mysterious of all the stone circles in the world. I spent a chilly morning in the library at Avebury Manor with local residents and councillors concerned about the speedway that the A4 resembles - but also energised by the opportunity to improve the area and make it a properly accessible tourist destination, linking the different parts of the World Heritage Site.
I finished the week with drinks for the Aldbourne and Ramsbury branch of the local Conservative Association, which was highly enjoyable if not completely tranquil. Aldbourne and Ramsbury were on opposite sides of the civil war. These days the dispute is more between the local party and the centre. We in Parliament have some restoring of trust to do.
