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Adjournment (Summer Recess)

I shall obey your command, Madam Deputy Speaker, but it is important for us to discuss one or two more issues before we adjourn. As the Minister now on the Front Bench will know, the House will go into recess today and we will not return until the second week in October. What is mentioned every year at about this time is that the processes of government continue, decisions continue to be made, and Ministers continue to work. Some people confuse recesses with holidays. ““Recess”” means that Ministers are still working in their Departments, and will take just a couple of weeks off, like most other people. As Members of Parliament too, we need an opportunity to table written questions to Ministers during recesses. The summer recess is a very long period. I know that this is mentioned time and again, and the Minister always says, ““We are looking into it,”” or, ““The Modernisation Committee is looking into it,”” but is it not about time that we had a decision? I also want to mention one or two local issues. One is the A59 in my constituency, which I have mentioned in the House before. There is one particularly dangerous junction where we see many accidents—including, sadly, fatalities—every year. The county council has erected some bollards to prevent traffic from turning right at the junction between Sabden and Clitheroe, but accidents still happen there. What is needed is a roundabout, but we are told that the county council has no money with which to provide one. That strikes me as rather odd. We are obsessed with road safety in this country. Nowadays we cannot go anywhere without seeing speed cameras all over the place, and I understand that millions of pounds are raised in fines. Would it not be intelligent not just to plough that money into new cameras, but to spend some of it on road safety measures? One such measure might be the provision of a roundabout on that road in my constituency. The money could also fund projects for which county councils could bid if it could be proved that they would save lives. I hope that the Minister and the Government will think more about that. I shall mention only one other issue—the joint strike fighter aircraft. I am a member of the Western European Union delegation. A number of WEU Members visited Washington recently to look at the aircraft, and we were also proud to see all the work that was going on when we went to the Farnborough air show. Some of the aircraft is manufactured in Samlesbury, in my constituency. The issue with which I have a problem is the lack of technology transfer between the United States of America and the United Kingdom. We are fighting shoulder to shoulder throughout the world, yet when we ask for technology to be transferred to this country we receive a complete blank from the United States. We met the deputy Defence Secretary, who said that there was no problem between Government and Government but there might be a problem between industry and industry. That is clearly a load of rubbish, and indeed other Americans to whom we spoke during our visit completely discredited what he had said. We were expecting an announcement at Farnborough about further technology transfer, but that has not happened. The joint strike fighter is an important military aircraft for the future of manufacturing in the United Kingdom. If we are to engage in future collaboration, there must be a proper understanding between the partners that technology is transferred, and that that should not happen only in one direction. The United Kingdom has transferred technology to the United States on short take-off and vertical landing. We did it in one direction; I simply cannot understand why it is not happening in the other direction. I know that the Government are already looking closely into that, but I hope that they will shortly announce that we are making further progress. We want collaborations to take place in the future, but that will require proper technology transfer—in both directions.