In the UK, strict road laws and unsympathetic local police forces have significantly hampered organisers of grassroots road races. This in turn has led to a decline in local cycling clubs.
The Government had previously been unwilling to help. This was despite cycling's popularity as a leisure activity, the success of UK elite riders internationally, and the importance of encouraging more people to take up sport in the run up to the Olympics.
In response, Liberal Democrat Don Foster MP brought together a cross-party group of MPs who challenged the Government to encourage riding on the roads.
The Liberal Democrat Transport minister, Norman Baker, has now outlined the steps he will take to empower local race organisers to hold more competitions and revitalise their sport.
Commenting, Don Foster, Lib Dem sport spokesman, said:
"Excellent work has been done promoting cycling as an alternative to driving, so why competitive cycling was not supported as well is beyond me.
"I am delighted that we are now removing significant burdens to taking up competitive cycling. Such a move makes it more likely that we'll find our next Chris Hoy.
"It is good to see a Lib Dem Minister taking common sense steps to encourage a healthier country and help ordinary people enjoy the sport they love."
Speaking on the Andrew Marr Show on BBC1 (watch here) Vince said:
"I think there will have to be change and it will have to be radical. The precise mechanics of it are being looked at by the Banking Commission and I don't want to pre-judge what they will say.
"Ultimately, these problems are only going to be dealt with when we have the big structural reforms which the Banking Commission is dealing with. In other words, the whole question of getting more competition, dealing with this issue about the link between the retail banks and investment banks. These big structural questions, the fundamental surgery, that's to come.
"The banks are ultimately underwritten by the state. They effectively have a state guarantee. And that's what makes the enormous (bonus) payments so offensive. In order to deal with this problem of the underlying state guarantee, the banks being too big to fail, we've got to look at their structure because that's where the Banking Commission, which George Osborne and I jointly set up, that's where it's absolutely crucial."
Mr Carman has extensive experience of creating jobs around the world, and would use those skills to bring jobs and investment to Barnsley.
A journalist and author and son of the late George Carman QC, fought the Barking constituency for the Liberal Democrats in the 2010 General Election, where he stood against BNP leader Nick Griffin.
Commenting, Dominic Carman said:
"I am honoured to be selected to fight this election for the Liberal Democrats.
"I want to be an ambitious ambassador for Barnsley. If elected, you won't find me with my feet up in Westminster, I'll be out there fighting to bring jobs to the area.
"Labour take places like Barnsley for granted, and parties like the BNP would only make things worse. I've spent the last seven years fighting the BNP and I will fight just as hard for the people of Barnsley."
Liberal Democrat leader and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg today welcomed the publication of the Protection of Freedoms Bill.
The Bill steps up the coalition government's commitment to restore hard-won British liberties.
An array of sweeping reforms will put an end to unwarranted local authority snooping and unnecessary scrutiny of individuals. It will see:
• an end to the routine monitoring of 9.3 million people under the radically reformed vetting and barring scheme
• millions of householders protected from town hall snoopers checking their bins or school catchment area
• the scrapping of Section 44 powers, which have been used to stop and search hundreds of thousands of innocent people
• the permanent reduction of the maximum period of pre-charge detention for terrorist suspects to 14 days
• DNA samples and fingerprints of hundreds of thousands of innocent people deleted from police databases
• thousands of gay men able to clear their name with the removal of out-of-date convictions for consensual acts
• thousands of motorists protected from rogue wheel clamping firms.
The Protection of Freedoms Bill follows the review of counter-terrorism and security powers and the scrapping of ID cards as the coalition government delivers on its agreement to put traditional British freedoms at the heart of the Whitehall agenda.
It also drew on views put forward by the public through the radical Your Freedom website set up after the coalition government came to power.
Nick Clegg said: 'This is a landmark Bill which will result in an unprecedented rolling back of the power of the state. The Protection of Freedoms Bill brings together a huge range of measures to restore the hard-won British liberties that have been lost in recent years.
'Freedom is back in fashion - 2011 will be the year that the coalition government hands people their liberty back. I have campaigned for this for many years and I am delighted that we have been able to deliver the Freedoms Bill in government.'
Other elements of the Protection of Freedoms Bill include:
• an end to the fingerprinting of children in schools without parental consent
• the introduction of a code of practice for CCTV and Automatic Number Plate Recognition systems (overseen by a new Surveillance Camera Commissioner) to make them more proportionate and effective
• restrictions on the powers of government departments, local authorities and other public bodies to enter private homes and other premises for investigations and a requirement for all to examine and slim down remaining powers
• the repeal of powers to hold serious and complex fraud trials without a jury
• the liberalisation of marriage laws to allow people to marry outside the hours of 8am-6pm
• the extension of the scope of the Freedom of Information Act and strengthening the public rights to data
Alongside the Bill, draft emergency legislation on pre-charge detention of terrorist suspects was also laid. The draft, which is in line with the commitment given in the review of counter-terrorism and security powers, will allow for parliamentary scrutiny should pre-charge detention need to be increased in an emergency.
The Protection of Freedoms Bill is being introduced with the aim of gaining Royal Assent by late 2011 or early 2012.
"Today the Government is publishing a Freedom Bill. A piece of legislation that brings together a raft of measures to restore hard-won British liberties that have been lost in recent years. Like ending the indefinite storage of innocent people's DNA. Reining in stop-and-search powers too easily misused by the police. Properly regulating CCTV to put the breaks on the surveillance state and making sure that local people have a say on CCTV in their area, telling us what they want and don't want. Preventing schools from fingerprinting children without their parents' consent.
These steps, along with a host of others, will help deliver on a promise I made last month: that 2011 will be the year the Coalition Government gives people their freedom back. It follows action already taken to halt ID cards. And to turn off ContactPoint - the central government database containing the personal details of every child in England.
...
So today's Freedom Bill is an unprecedented piece of legislation to roll back the power of the state. Its sheer breadth should demonstrate that we will leave no stone unturned - from protecting trial by jury; to tackling rogue wheel clampers; to restoring a sense of proportion to vetting and barring, freeing up millions of people working or volunteering with children or vulnerable adults from onerous state checks.
We are looking at liberty across the board, at both the controversial and the seemingly mundane. Freedom is back in fashion. While our predecessors took it away, we will give it back."
Commenting on today's letter to the Office for Fair Access, the Government's Advocate for Access to Education and Liberal Democrat Deputy Leader, Simon Hughes said:
"I welcome today's letter from the Secretary of State to the Director of the Office for Fair Access.
"The guidance set out in the letter gives him the strongest mandate he has ever had to enforce real and meaningful requirements on universities to open their doors to all."
The questions that confronted me, when I came into government, were these:
How can we reinvent and strengthen our public services at a time of anxiety and stretched resources?
And how can we preserve the public sector ethos as we move to a more plural, diverse and personalised way of running our public services?
There will no doubt be some sceptics in this room about whether those things are possible.
It is a Guardian event, after all, and I think scepticism is in the drinking water over there.
Many of you have been through reconfigurations, redesigns and redeployments so many times you're probably sick to the back teeth of them.
And you probably groan at the prospect of further reform. But change in the circumstances of today is not a luxury its essential if we want to ensure the best days for our public services are ahead of us. In fact pressure on spending in public services without change would produce the worst out come of all.
We can't just wait and hope for the best when children are still being let down, and when the poorest are being let down the most.
We can't just wait and hope for the best when health inequalities are rising
And we can't just wait and hope the best when, because of the deficit, there simply isn't the money to paper over cracks and inefficiencies any longer.
We have to modernise our public services.
And we can make them better if we do.
We are coming out of a phase in our history when commitment to public services was measured solely by annual increases in expenditure.
But I believe that completely misunderstands what our public services are for;
It misunderstands the ethos that underpins them…
The ethos of those - and I am proud that so many of them were liberals - who laid the foundation stones of our welfare state.
People like William Beveridge, who set out the idea of a National Health Service.
Beveridge's report said the Department of Health should, and I quote, "supervise" the new health service, not run it.
I dread to think what he would have thought of Labour's attempts to coordinate everything from 10 Downing Street down to the books children read. Beveridge said the whole of the welfare state "must be achieved by co-operation between the State and the individual"…
Imagine how he would have celebrated the concept of personal budgets and co-production - services designed and run by those who use them.
And Beveridge urged the reformers of his age - and us, through the still powerful words of his report - not to be limited, for a second, by what he called "sectional interests".
What would he have said about a teachers' union that tried to stop charities and parents and teachers themselves from opening new schools for our children?
Liberals have always argued for diverse provision in our public services.
Gladstone's Education Act 1870 which introduced free primary education established the new schools needed independently of government, with their own school boards.
Government paid; the people provided:
A system which persisted until 1902 when the Conservatives forced the standardisation of schools under local authority control.
And Liberals argued for local government to have a role in the NHS right from its founding, for fear that a fully centralised system would put too much power in the hands of central government instead of the professionals and the patients.
The logic of Andrew Lansley's reforms is precisely to reverse this imbalance: to put power within the NHS in the hands of those who understand patients, the GPs, in those who are accountable to patients, the local authority.
Permitting and encouraging flexibility and diversity rather than trying to micromanage the whole system from an office in Whitehall.
I believe history has borne out the judgements made by Liberals in the past about diversity, decentralisation and flexibility
An event like this summit rightly celebrates what is great about our public services.
But we must also be honest about their shortcomings.
of equity.
of standards.
Failure to be properly responsive to the individual citizens they serve.
And, let's be honest, a failure of affordability.
Equity, first.
I am passionate about social mobility and equal opportunities.
And I will never accept the idea that it's ok for children from poorer backgrounds to do worse at school than their wealthier classmates.
I will never accept the idea that it's ok for a child born in the poorest part of my city, Sheffield, to die more than a decade before a child born just across town.
Public services are the key to unlocking the potential of every child and yet too often they have entrenched or even worsened inequalities.
Health inequalities and the gap in achievement between poor children in different parts of the country actually worsened under Labour.
So we have to build incentives into the way we pay for or set tariffs for public services to ensure the neediest are given extra help.
That's the philosophy behind the Pupil Premium which will put more money into the schools which take on children from disadvantaged background.
It's a philosophy built into our NHS reforms which will give incentives to GPs and to Local Authorities that improve the health of the people they serve.
And it's built into policies from the New Homes Bonus which will offer more money for councils which build affordable homes than those which build private sector homes…
To the work programme which will offer bigger payments and earlier referral for those who are the hardest to help.
The next failing is standards.
We are a wealthy nation; why do we allow our public services to fall behind?
British people deserve world-standard public services - and I mean all British people, not just those who can afford to opt out.
The UK has one of the worst mortality rates amenable to healthcare among rich nations
If we can change that - change the way public services operate so they are under constant challenge to innovate and improve…
Then not only will we be able to narrow the gap between rich and poor, we will be able to raise standards for all.
Third: unresponsiveness.
Whether it's the benefits system, trying to negotiate with the council over social care or trying to get into a good local school…
I have lost count of the constituents I've met who have torn their hair out trying to get an answer or to speak to a human being.
We are so empowered in our day to day lives…
And yet the day you need to deal with the government you come up against a brick wall of uncomprehending bureaucracy.
The computer says no approach is there for a reason of course.
To help you meet targets, to help you ration costs that national rules prevent you from getting under control, to ensure you fit with criteria and standards imposed from above.
But to the people you serve they make no sense at all.
Why can't I register with any GP I want?
Why can't the school down the road that everyone wants to go to expand so there's space for my children?
Why do I have to give the same pieces of information to five different agencies just to get the help I'm entitled to?
Huge strides have been made, of course - individual budgets in social care, one-stop shops for council services, more chances to choose your school, your hospital or your place to live.
But we can and must do more, harnessing choice and flexibility as the catalyst for better services.
The final failure in our public services is the hardest to talk about, but I do believe we need to be honest about it:
Affordability.
You probably agree with me that the challenges of equity, standards and responsiveness pre-date the credit crunch and the deficit.
But I believe affordability was a problem too.
Not because I don't believe in public spending: far from it.
My party supported the increased investment in our NHS from 2002.
We stand by those decisions.
No: affordability was a problem because whether you believe in the deficit reduction package or not, the truth is we cannot have an NHS which only works when it gets 6% extra every year as it did under Labour.
Labour doubled public spending; you can do that once when the coffers are full but the solution of throwing money at a problem isn't a solution for long.
We have to have public services that thrive in the bad times as well as the good.
Changing our public services means opening them up, as Beveridge, Gladstone and Lloyd George would have wanted.
Power should be decentralised.
Government should pay for services, not always seek to run them.
People and professionals should be in the driving seat.
I set out these principles in my first big speech as leader of the Liberal Democrats, back in 2008.
There's usually nothing worse than quoting oneself, but if you'll forgive me, I think what I said then captures a lot of the spirit of what we're trying to achieve now, in government.
"The state must intervene to allocate money on a fair basis, to guarantee equality of access in our schools and hospitals and to oversee core standards and entitlements. But once those building blocks are in place, the state must back off and allow the genius of grassroots innovation, diversity and experimentation to take off. Whitehall should get out of the business of the day to day running of public services in Britain. There is no liberal reason why those who deliver public services must always work directly for the government - so long as we are absolutely clear about the principles under which those services operate."
These principles aren't plucked out of thin air.
They're based on a liberal distaste for the idea that officials in Whitehall always know better than the people on the ground.
And they're based on the evidence, from Europe and beyond, of what really works - from the decentralised health system in Denmark to the per pupil funding system in the Netherlands.
Don't believe the cardboard cut-out versions of what the public sector ethos is, or that it is the sole preserve of those who are directly employed by the government.
The government doesn't have to issue your pay cheque for you to be a public servant.
What matters is that public services are delivered by people who understand the needs of the people they serve…
And are free at the point of use.
You must be freed from the dead hand of Whitehall to innovate, to use your judgement, and to deliver in the way you know best.
Many of the people I've spoken to in the public sector are positive about the opportunities ahead, the freedom from targets and bureaucracy, the chance to run your own department and design your own ways of working, the chance to do what you trained for and make a difference.
But you're also anxious about the cuts that are coming.
And anxious about the claims that what the govt is doing is privatising for ideological reasons.
I recognise that we need to be better at explaining what we're all about.
Because I am not just committed but devoted to our public services, as is this government.
Yes, we have to deal with the deficit, but this is not an assault on the size of the state.
By the end of this Parliament we will still be employing 200,000 more people in the public sector than in 1997.
We will still be spending as much as Labour spent in 2006, and rightly so.
My philosophy is simple:
Unlike the Conservative governments of the past, I believe you have to fund public services well.
But unlike the Labour governments of the past, I believe public sector monopolies almost never spend that money best.
In our public services, we need diversity of provision…
Because no one person and no one organisation has all the right answers.
So, as we modernise public services in the years to come, I will take a hard line against monopolies because they stifle innovation…
New and alternative providers - from the private, community and voluntary sectors - have a vital role to play in our public services.
But I will also take a hard line against the kind of blanket privatisation which was pursued by governments in the past...
Because replacing a public monopoly with a private monopoly achieves nothing but reduced accountability.
And I will take a hard line, too, against any attempts to replicate Labour's mistake of skewing the market against public sector providers…
Effectively bribing private companies by offering them more money to do exactly the same job as you.
That was wrong.
We will not repeat Labour's rigged market in the NHS with higher tariffs for private providers.
I categorically do not believe that private providers are inherently better than public sector providers, and I would not support an approach to reform that implied that they were.
So while we are opening up diversity of provision there will be no for-profit providers in our publicly funded schools system.
That is why we will publish all the big contracts government signs with business to make sure there are no secret soft deals.
That is why we have designed a "Community Right to Challenge" to allow communities and charities to trigger a procurement exercise for local public services…
But we will not extend that right to challenge to businesses.
And let's be clear - moving from a monopoly to diverse providers doesn't mean closing you down and bringing in someone new to do your job at half the salary with half the training as it did sometimes in the past…
It means putting you in the driving seat.
Under our Right to Provide, tens of thousands of public sector workers will be able to turn your department, your ward, your team into an employee-run coop, with a contract to your parent public service.
And run things the way you know best.
I believe, if we open public services in this way, we will secure the biggest prize of all for all those who work in public services: Freedom.
No more targets: just accountability direct to the people you serve.
The opportunity to innovate, to do things differently, to experiment with the ideas you've had instead of being told by civil servants in Whitehall that it isn't the way things are done.
The right to run your own department, control your budget and do your job in the way you want, following your understanding of what people need and your skills and professional training.
The chance to do what you got involved in public services for: to serve the people and to make their lives better in the way only you can.
Britain will take years to recover from the near-collapse of the banking system and its rescue by the state. This government acted swiftly - setting up the banking commission; imposing a bank levy; cracking down on banks' tax avoidance; and signing up to tougher international rules on capital, liquidity and remuneration. But some policy issues have yet to be confronted, especially the structural questions being addressed by the banking commission and its chairman, Sir John Vickers: how to deal with banks that are "too big to fail".
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There will be complaints that the government's failure to put leading bankers before a firing squad, let alone tolerate bonuses, is an abject surrender. On the other side there will be sniping from the City at the banking commission: complaints that tougher disclosure rules and tax will drive bankers from our shores.
I shall keep fighting for British business and British taxpayers. But now we have a ceasefire, and I have decided to decommission my stockpile of banker jokes and hide them in a hole in the country. We still have plenty of weapons to deploy. And in less than nine months the government has done more to put banking right than 13 years of failed laissez faire under Labour. And our work is not yet done.
In the agreement announced today, the major UK banks committed to investing an additional £1bn in small businesses through the Business Growth Fund over the next three years. Targeted mainly at SMEs outside of London, this fund will work alongside the Government's Regional Growth Fund.
Commenting, Secretary of State for Business Vince Cable said:
"This is great news for small businesses throughout the country who have been struggling to get the credit they need to grow.
"The Government's Regional Growth Fund has already proved extremely popular, so it is very welcome news that the Banks have now committed £1bn in equity funding to work along side the RGF.
"As we work to create a more balanced economy it is entirely right that the banks should play their part in helping small businesses throughout the country."
Following reports that Cambridge University intends to charge the full £9,000 tuition fees, Liberal Democrat Deputy Leader and Advocate for Access to Education, Simon Hughes said:
"Of course Oxford and Cambridge will want to continue as beacons of excellence, as the country would wish.
"But they understand that they are in the same position as every other university in England and will only be able allowed to charge fees above £6,000 if they make firm and measurable commitments to widening participation from all groups in society."
