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I certainly don't miss being public property for seven days a week 24 hours a day
David Kidney
Former energy minister David Kidney speaks to ePolitix.com about his new role as head of policy at the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health and the possibility of a return to Parliament.
Ejected from his Stafford seat at the election by his Conservative challenger Jeremy Lefroy, Kidney admits losing the constituency he held since Labour's 1997 landslide was "very, very sad".
"I love Parliament”, he says, sat in the Southwark offices of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health (CIEH). "To be a MP was a dream come true as a job. Not for any sense of personal ego and vanity but because of the ability to help people."
"I was able to help individuals, I could help whole streets and communities, I could help the whole constituency and as a member of a national parliament I could help the whole country. Even in terms of climate change, the world to some extent.
"I always felt I was doing something positive that helped other individuals. So to lose the job was very, very sad and disappointing."
Yet the former energy minister, a position he held from June 2009 up until Labour lost power in May this year, is keen to put his experience in government and Parliament to use in his new role.
"What's brilliant about the job I've got now is some of the things I spoke about in Parliament in terms of the principle of 'this should happen', here we are actually a deliverer of those principles.”
“In my last year as a minister at DECC I produced a green paper on green skills on the low carbon economy,” he continues.
“Here we deliver half a million training qualifications a year, and we can turn our hand to delivering green skills.
“We can actually make happen what I said in principle should happen.”
The CIEH is a registered charity which exists to promote better environmental and public health, as well as being the professional body for environmental health practitioners with over 10,500 members.
Out of Parliament and with his party in opposition, Kidney is faced with a government both instinctively hostile to regulation and engaged in bonfire of the quangos – many of which the CIEH views as critical to maintaining public health.
"In the first 100 days the most dramatic work that has been done that affects us is the cull of quangos," Kidney says.
"Obviously we'd be concerned if some quangos were to disappear and their functions that we thought were valuable weren't picked up.”
Kidney highlights the plight of the recently abolished Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution and the soon to be de-funded Sustainable Development Commission as prime examples.
"The government's been much quicker to announce what they are slashing than what's taking their place," he warns. "That does give a concern that in the transition from one to another we mustn't let standards fall.
"The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution has been abolished, which does incredibly valuable work about the pollution issues of air, land, and water that we are very concerned for.
"We would expect that research and expert advice function to be picked up somewhere else."
And he argues the Sustainable Development Commission which will not be funded beyond March "added value" to government decisions on fighting climate change and helped save public money.
"We would willingly work with the government to make sure we design something that is at least as good if not better," he says.
"This government says it wants to be the greenest ever, something like the critical friend that the Sustainable Development Commission has been is necessary, in my view, for them to be the greenest government ever."
He adds: "We genuinely want to help them reach their ambition."
The CIEH is also backing Labour MP Joan Walley's Public Bodies (Sustainable Food) Bill which aims to encourage schools, hospitals and other public sector to use sustainable and home grown food.
While Kidney acknowledges the government is unlikely to welcome new regulations, he is keen that they recognise the public health benefits of the bill.
"I think the government will be very interested in the public health argument about people becoming more and more overweight, about sustainable food chains and promoting British industry," he says.
"What they won't like is being over proscriptive, they won't like new regulations.”
The coalition has indicated that for every new regulation brought in an existing one would have to be scrapped.
"It's a matter of trying to finesse their distrust of regulation at the root to get to an objective which they will be completely behind," he explains.
Reflecting on his time down the river in Westminster, he insists he is enjoying the privacy that comes with being out of the corridors of power.
"I certainly don't miss being public property for seven days a week 24 hours a day," he says. "My life is back under my control."
But what of a return to the Palace of Westminster someday? "You know what they say in Parliament, 'never say never'. And certainly there are a lot of constituents and [people] in my constituency party who, if there was a snap election tomorrow, would like me to stand again, and I guess I probably would.
“But as far as I'm concerned I had a great career when I left university as a lawyer for twenty years, I had a great career as a MP for thirteen years and now I see that I'm on the third career and it's here, it is a great job and I love it I and I want to be successful at it."
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