Now we are back in London MPs are faced with a barrage of legislation and Gordon Brown’s measures to attempt to restore confidence in his leadership.
Today we have a topical debate on preventative health services as this is one of the PM’s “new” initiatives. Topical debates themselves are an innovation.
To make the house better at involving backbenchers in holding the Government to account, topical debates and topical questions have been instituted.
The debates are only 90 minutes long but there are limits on the length of speeches even from front benchers. There is no division but these debates allow backbenchers to tell the Government their views on immediately relevant issues.
Tuesday was a day for the main opposition party’s debates.
The first was to condemn the performance of Network Rail during the holiday period that led to so many train cancellations.
Naturally the opposition motion included a dig at the Government for creating Network Rail and so the Government amendment unsurprisingly removed this but agreed that the engineering overruns were unacceptable.
The Government amendment was carried with a majority of 70.
The second subject was more controversial on the subject of higher education and adult learners.
The Government is about to withdraw funding from institutions for equivalent or lower qualification (ELQ) students and the opposition motion allowed the Government to defend its decision and opponents to criticise it and appeal for a change.
One critic was Frank Dobson from the Government benches who said that the Secretary of State John Denham was wrong.
There were a number of Labour abstentions but no real rebellion, although the Government majority was reduced to 53.
The bed crisis in the county has been covered in newspaper reports.
I hope that this experience will lead to reinforcement throughout the county of the teams of nurses, social workers and others who work so hard to keep people at home and in the community to avoid hospital admission.
It should also lead to a review of intermediate care beds which should be the safety net to enable rapid discharge from acute beds of patients who are on the mend.
Although I welcome increased use of Kidderminster Hospital, it was not appropriate that treatment centre beds were used as an emergency overflow from Worcester as these beds should be protected for elective operations to avoid cancellations.
Although in the long term I still hope for the return of acute medical beds to Kidderminster, in the short term the establishment of intermediate care beds there in addition to the current GP and rehabilitation beds would be a relatively easy solution.