Lingfield Marathon Fun Run

On Sunday I joined 468 keen runners and walkers taking part in the 30th Lingfield Marathon fun run. It was hugely encouraging to see so many people supporting this excellent cause despite of the rain, and I thoroughly enjoyed walking the 6 mile course. Other events on the day were the 10 Mile Fun Run and the 6 Mile Fun Run, both of which recorded some extremely fast times by runners (and somewhat quicker than the 2 hours 41 seconds it took for me to cross the finish line!). All of the courses started and finished at NCYPE in Lingfield.

My thanks to the Committee for organising the event. As yet the amount raised is unknown but a major contribution will be made to the Lingfield Marathon Bus, with hopes to buy a new bus later this year.

Caterham to get superfast broadband!

Absolutely delighted that today Caterham was named by 'Coast to Capital' as 1 of just 5 projects to receive Government funding (Growing Places Fund) for superfast broadband. With connection speeds of above 300Mbits a second this investment will transform internet access and make Caterham a magnet for business. Having worked closely with BT over the past year to encourage faster rollout in East Surrey, this is a fantastic step forward. My thanks to everyone involved in this process, and in particular Chris Windridge who has campaigned tirelessly for superfast broadband. This will be a major boost for stimulating enterprise and commerce in Caterham, as well as providing real benefit for local residents.

UK aid should go to those most in need

Too much EU development aid is going to middle income countries, like Turkey and Serbia, and not enough is reaching the world's poorest people and poorest countries; this is the conclusion that I and fellow MPs on the International Development Committee came to in a report published today.

The UK spends approximately £1.23 billion each year on aid through the European Union, approximately 18% of the UK's total aid budget. Only 46% of this aid, however, goes to low income countries – this is frankly unacceptable.

The reality is that a number of middle income countries bordering Europe are benefiting. Turkey has consistently been in the top five recipients of European Commission aid (€223 million in 2010) as has Serbia (€218 million in 2010).

In order to put an end to this absurd situation, the Government must challenge the definition as to what qualifies as Official Development Assistance.

Yes, the EU might give us more bang-for-our-buck in particular where large scale infrastructure projects are concerned and in terms of our reach ( focusing on 49 of the poorest and most fragile countries in the world, compared to the UK which operates aid programmes in 21 countries), but this should not stop the UK, one of the largest contributors to the EU from working to ensure that the British taxpayers objectives remain paramount - value for money, private sector development, governance conditionality and above all helping poor countries and poor people living on less than £1 a day.

Supporting Young Epilepsy

It is a great privilege to be involved in supporting the work of Young Epilepsy, a fantastic charity that provides help and advice to more than 112,000 young people suffering with epilepsy. It was an honour to officially open the first ever Young Epilepsy Spring Fair in Lingfield, which was an enormous success. Congratulations to all of the organisers and volunteers who made the event possible, whose tireless hard work raised a grand total of £5,126, money which I am sure will be put to excellent use in helping young people cope with epilepsy.

Visit to de Stafford School

On Friday I was at de Stafford School for a thoroughly enjoyable Question and Answer session with pupils. Whilst I am delighted by the excellent progress de Stafford has made in recent years, as demonstrated by the most recent report from Ofsted, it was apparent on my visit that the school is in desperate need of a new canteen. I am committed to working with the school to secure the appropriate funding from Surrey County Council, and I hope to report back positively on this issue in the future.

Horley Tennis Club: celebrating the Olympic legacy

On Friday I had the enormous privilege of presenting Horley Tennis Club with a cheque for £50,000 to kick start their plans for a new clubhouse, car park and two floodlight tennis courts. The £50,000 was secured from Sport England's Inspired Facilities Fund as part of the £135 million Places People Play programme, set up to ensure that the legacy of the Olympic and Paralympic Games benefits communities across the county.

This is an excellent boost for one of the country's oldest tennis clubs, and it's great that Horley residents are able to share in the Olympic legacy in this way. Investment in local sports clubs, which are often at the heart of the community, is key to ensuring that future generations can continue to enjoy and participate in sport.

If you are interested in donating to the Horley Tennis Club, who hope to raise £250,000 in total, please visit their website www.horleyltc.co.uk for more details.

Financing Innovation & Growth: kick-starting British businesses

Securing strong economic growth depends on backing a culture where innovation and the entrepreneurial spirit can thrive. This was an important theme of a recent event, hosted by the Policy Exchange think-tank, in which I discussed some of the problems faced by businesses looking to finance growth, as well as the role of Government in supporting them. The event video is available below (fastforward to the 30-minute mark to view my contribution).

'Bold businesses must be able to grow in Britain'

The following article first appeared in CityAM on 19 March 2012.

FAIRNESS has rightly become central to the Budget debate. Personally I would like to see the income tax threshold raised, to allow lower earners to keep more of their hard-earned cash. But a bigger test of success for this Budget will be what measures the chancellor can introduce to drive economic growth. By the chancellor's own calculations, only one third of the deficit reduction programme will be financed through cuts in public expenditure. The remaining two thirds will be achieved through economic growth.

Yet the crisis in the Eurozone means the threats to our future prosperity are now arguably greater than when the chancellor first laid out his spending plans. As the Office for Budget Responsibility's regular revisions to its economic forecasts keep reminding us, these are no ordinary economic times. This is why growth has to be the focus of the Budget and why we need a Budget for business.

Yet when the government needs to be offering every encouragement to businesses it has become deeply unfashionable to do so. The Labour leader Ed Miliband argues that the state knows best and must intervene to separate business winners from losers, "predators" from "producers". Of course, there is a role for the state to play in supporting our economic growth. The chancellor is right to be bringing forward infrastructure investment and encouraging pension funds to put up the cash. But harking back to a 1960s-style industrial policy cannot restore our economic prosperity.

Instead, the budget has to recognise that we need a step change in our approach to enterprise. We need to encourage a spirit of adventure, where sensible risk-taking can flourish. Otherwise, entrepreneurs will not take the risks that are essential to creating the next Body Shop, the next Dyson, the next White Company and the next lastminute.com. These are all British success stories, and it is fair to say that Dyson's success has come from the hard work, patience and ambition of its founder, not because some state-run bank identified the company as a potential winner.

Admittedly, the chancellor's hands are tied by the need to cut the deficit. But there is still a lot that can be done. In the short term, using the government's balance sheet to lower banks' borrowing rates and hence the rates offered to their business customers (credit easing) could provide a much needed adrenaline shot to the economy. In the longer term, accelerating the pace of our recovery means changing the lending landscape for businesses, allowing non-bank institutions as well as innovative, internet-based providers of finance to all compete to offer firms a lower cost of borrowing. The government must look closely at the recommendations to support alternative providers of finance published last week by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills taskforce chaired by Legal & General chief executive Tim Breedon.

To pay down the deficit and ensure our long term prosperity, re-distribution is not enough. After all, a fair share of nothing is not worth much. We need to be backing innovative and entrepreneurial businesses to grow. This is the real challenge of the Budget.

'Calling All Alumni: get out your wallets - graduates should help the poor to follow them to university'

The following article by Sam Gyimah first appeared in the Sunday Times on 18 March 2012

Five top schools sent more students to Oxbridge over a three-year period than 2,000 comprehensive schools combined.

I agree with Tony Blair. The ambition that 50% of our young people should go to university is right. It is right for aspiration and for the economy. We should aim for as many of our young people as possible to benefit from our world-class higher education sector. But as we move towards a system where money follows the student, "needs-blind" admissions, rather than quotas, could be the best way of ensuring fair access in the long term.

More than a decade on from Blair's lofty ambition, it is clear that the middle classes have benefited most from the expansion of higher education. Many of our elite universities are still out of reach for less privileged students. A recent, devastating report revealed that five top schools (of which only one is in the state sector) sent more students to Oxbridge over a three-year period than 2,000 comprehensive schools combined.

This sort of evidence confirms many of the anecdotes involving excellent state-school pupils rejected by Oxbridge for seemingly incomprehensible reasons. But reinforcing this stereotype is ultimately counterproductive. Fair access is a problem for all our top universities, and existed long before the introduction of tuition fees.

If you want to get the brightest students at the top universities regardless of background, it is too late to look at the problem among 18-year-olds. As the MPs of the Fair Access to University Group, led by Graham Stuart, chairman of the education select committee, have recently highlighted, the root cause of the problem lies in our school system. But as long as universities receive taxpayer funds, legitimate questions will be asked when high-achieving 18-year-olds from less privileged backgrounds are not accepted on courses.

If universities want to continue to admit students solely on the basis of academic and personal merit, without regard to ability to pay tuition fees and other costs, they have a choice: take control of their fair access agenda, or leave it to the state to dictate initiatives such as quotas.

Millions of pounds are already poured into outreach projects each year by our universities. Dealing with entrenched perceptions around our top universities needs bolder action. Persistent fears among the less well-off include the sense that certain universities are not for "someone like me", financial worries about completing a course and a lack of encouragement to aim high from home and school. The current system of fragmented, overlapping and costly outreach programmes has failed to address these issues.

A needs-blind admissions system, in which higher education institutions set up and publicise an endowment fund to subsidise pupils from less privileged backgrounds, could be the bold and transformative step to give the lie to the idea that these institutions are the sole preserve of the wealthy. It could also fire up the imagination of all potential university applicants that they can aim high and aspire to these institutions.

So how could this work? Graduates of elite universities go on to earn at the higher end of the graduate premium, often paying off their student loans quickly. So a system whereby our most fortunate graduates aid our most disadvantaged students makes sense. This is also an untapped resource — as the Browne review of higher education funding made clear, barely 1% of alumni make gifts to their institutions, whereas in America the figure is more than 10%.

A simple way to boost this number would be for the government to encourage each graduate, after paying off their student loan, to carry on paying into an endowment fund hypothecated to help disadvantaged students. The donations should be subject to gift aid tax treatment. The result would be a collaborative approach, involving the university, state and alumni.

Some will decry this suggestion as a call for a more American style of university funding. But speaking from my own undergraduate experience, I know that we cannot overestimate the effect of social and financial barriers as a deterrent to aspiration.

I was educated at a state school in Britain, after attending one in Ghana, and won a place at Somerville College, Oxford. While there I struggled to pay my rent, but the college offered me a long-term loan to help me do so. I'm conscious that, in these circumstances, a lot of students would not even have taken the leap of faith to apply in the first place. Knowing that the institution wants people like you and that the support is there when you need it can make a big difference.

The world is changing, and universities can either accept that politicians will increasingly tell them how to run admissions or they can take the radical step of developing a system of their own that puts fair access and excellence at its heart. Needs-blind admissions could just be the way forward.

Photo taken by Tejvan, courtesy of Oxford Light and used under creative commons licence 3.0.

Visit to Limpsfield Grange School

Delighted to spend time with pupils at Limpsfield Grange School, a unique special school for girls aged 11-16, on Friday. It was wonderful to see so many pupils again after meeting some of them last year when they came to visit Parliament. From the questions fired at me, it is great to see that the appetite of pupils for politics has not diminished. I also thoroughly enjoyed the tour of the excellent facilities the school has to offer its pupils, as well as a hearty lunch!

Photo: Sam at Limpsfield School with Year 7 pupil Millie