This week we heard some good news about Wiltshire’s Fire and Rescue Authority. The government announced the outcome of a bidding process by which £75 million will be distributed to authorities across the country. The good news is that Wiltshire’s bid was successful; the even better news is that we’re getting the second biggest grant of any authority – more than £5.5 million.

Our funding will pay for a project to support the merger between Dorset and Wiltshire Fire and Rescue Authorities. In particular, it will see the building of a Streetwise Safety Centre in Wiltshire. This will mean delivering an additional 20,000 educational visits for children and vulnerable people each year.

This news gives me the opportunity to pay tribute to the excellence and dedication of all our emergency services in Swindon and Wiltshire.

We sometimes take them for granted, but they do an incredible job in often very difficult circumstances, and they deserve our thanks and praise.

On another matter, yesterday in Parliament we discussed an idea which many people quite like – giving the public the power to sack their MP! The process is called ‘recall’, because it involves the MP being recalled from Westminster back to their constituency to face a by-election. Many people think the current system doesn’t give the public sufficient powers to get rid of their MP if he or she has done something wrong but chooses not to resign.

So the government has put forward a Recall Bill to address this. The proposal relates to MPs who might be convicted of a criminal offence but whose sentence is not long enough to trigger automatic dismissal. The government bill proposes that the Commons Standards Committee, which I served on for 18 months, would make a decision about the MP’s conduct that could then trigger a recall election.

However, not everyone thinks this goes far enough. The Conservative backbench MP Zac Goldsmith is proposing to take the power of recall away from the Committee and give it to constituents instead. You may remember it’s the same system that led to the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor of California. It’s known as ‘real recall’, but given the Arnie connection, the media has inevitably dubbed it ‘Total Recall’!

I was a member of a Committee of MPs that prepared a draft Bill that is the source of the amendments, so am very pleased to see that MPs will have an opportunity to debate and vote upon them in the weeks ahead. The government is expected to say this will be a free vote, and I will be supporting real recall. It should hopefully go some way to winning back the voters’ trust in politicians.