The latest outpouring of nonsense about how the ports will  cease to work and we will be short of imports is bizarre. Both Calais and Dover have said they are ready for smooth working after October 31, whilst other Belgian and Dutch ports  are applying competitive pressure as  they would love to take more of the business. Calais/Dover have to deal with VAT, Excise and currency changes whilst we are in the EU so adding a few tariffs if some are needed does not create some new problem we haven’t already solved for other taxes. HMRC have said they don’t want to hold imported goods up with lots of new checks.

One of the reasons sone town centres are struggling is the difficulty and cost of parking. People can buy on the internet without stirring from their armchair. They can drive to the out of town retail park and park for free outside the shop door. Shopping in many town centres can require a difficult journey, can pose difficulties sometimes in finding  a car park  space, and results in a charge. It’s an important part of the background to the decline  of many a town shopping centre.

What can be done?

The first thing is to get the most out of the car parks we have. You can get more cars into a piece of land and it is easier to park if the  spaces are marked out at 45 degrees to the access and not  at 90 degrees as most currently are. Private and public car park owners could sort this out and benefit from doing so. Convention should dictate you park front in. A one way access and exit route then minimises loss of parking spaces.

Councils could increase the ratio of parking spaces to shops when authorising new developments or  improving their centres.There is often spare public land near a centre that can be used. In Council car parks they could allow a charge free period to encourage shoppers. Where this represented unfair competition to private car parks the Council could pay the private car park to make free time  available on a similar basis as public car parks from its town centre promotion budget.

You can’t easily go food shopping or shopping for larger items by bus or train as you need to get the goods back to your home. Councils need  to place sufficient spaces near to the shops. They also need to improve the main routes into the  cities  and towns so people can drive to these car parks more easily.

Getting business rates and rents down on more shops will be helpful to assisting town centres, but the thing they  need most is more customers. One of the most  important ways of boosting numbers is to help people get to shops, restaurants and coffee bars in the towns. Shoppers resent time lost in traffic jams  and money spent on car parks.

I visited the Science Centre on Friday at the company’s request. They showed me their excellent analytical and laboratory facilities to support the  food industry. They can assist with new   recipes and product improvements, and can trace impurities or problems when something goes wrong.

They showed me work on sugar reduction and resistance to melting in hot weather for chocolate. We discussed how more students can be persuaded to study food chemistry, given the need for more qualified people, and how business can use the governments encouragement if STEM subjects and apprenticeship schemes to help business.

Interest rates have been cut in the USA, Brazil, India, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Turkey, Russia and elsewhere. The USA , France and others have offered some  tax cuts. Italy is seeking to make the country more attractive to investors and entrepreneurs through tax changes. The Italians are pushing to be allowed some fiscal reflation to ease the pain of their adherence to Euro disciplines against a background of very weak growth and high unemployment.

The UK economy has performed very well considering the severe monetary and fiscal squeeze administered  by the outgoing government. It is good to hear the new Prime Minister make clear his commitment to a prudent relaxation of the squeeze, with planned spending on police, schools, the  NHS, prisons, and infrastructure.  He should ensure tax policy is reviewed to make us internationally competitive and to maximise revenues around rates people are prepared to pay and which continue to attract talent, investment   and business to the UK.

The PM has pledged to accelerate the roll out of fibre to every home and business to increase capacity and line speeds. More and more business, learning and entertainment will be delivered by internet, so we need the capacity to compete and to handle the volumes of data and film, likely to be involved. We also need more to be spent on  roads to bust congestion, improve safety and reduce journey times. Road budgets were badly cut by the last Labour government and kept low  by the Coalition.

The latest German figures show that the world manufacturing downturn in general and the bad hit to the car industry in particular have dragged the German economy into a quarter of  negative growth, with poor prospects for the rest of this year. Italy was in recession last year in the second half, and remains very weak this year. The Eurozone as a whole is likely to avoid a recession but is widely forecast to record very slow growth. The internal logic of the debt and deficit rules and the inability to exploit the dugital revolution unleashed  by the USA will keep the overall Eurozone performance poor. Germany will still worry about the extent to which the whole zone is financed from German deposits of its surplus at the Central Bank for lending on to the deficit countries.

Now is the time for the UK to promote growth, more jobs and better incomes. New freeports, more development of the internet economy, and stronger global trading links with the faster growing parts of the world are all possible after October 31.The UK is better at  tec and services and well placed to be an important  global player.

I was greatly saddened to learn of the death of Andrew Harper while on duty in West Berkshire. I send my condolences to his family. The whole local community is shocked by the tragedy.

It reminds us to thank  all those in the police and our other uniformed services who put themselves at risk to help the rest of us to live in safety.