UK consumers use an estimated 13 billion plastic drinks bottles a year. Three billion are incinerated, sent to landfill or left to pollute our streets, countryside and marine environment.

Today the Government has announced that a deposit return scheme to increase recycling rates and reduce the amount of waste pollution will be introduced subject to consultation later this year.

Options for a deposit return scheme will be considered alongside other policies to improve recycling rates. The Government will only take forward options from the consultation which demonstrate that they offer clear benefits and are resistant to fraud, and that costs on businesses, consumers and the taxpayer are proportionate.

The consultation will take into account views from producers, suppliers and consumers to ensure that any system introduced works across the country.

I would be interested to hear from constituents. Is this a good idea? Which scheme would work best?

Van Dyck’s great portraits of Charles I on display at the RA exhibition show how out of touch with political reality the King was in his prime. Just as Inigo Jones’s outstanding Banqueting House was both one of the Stuart triumphs and the stage set for Charles’s death, so the large equestrian portraits of the King fixed for ever an image of a would be autocrat with so little understanding of his people.

Charles wished to part of the privileged and cultured elite of royal Europe. He married a well connected French Princess with good links to the Pope, having failed to marry the daughter of the Spanish Catholic King. This was only some thirty years on from the Spanish attempted invasion of England by an Armada out to enforce conversion to Catholicism on a heretic nation. He spent large sums he could ill afford on a grand collection of great art, and commissioned large paintings from the best painters of contemporary Europe. Rubens was persuaded to portray the Apotheosis of James I on the Banqueting House ceiling. The effect was to remind visitors of the newly found imperial power of the united thrones of Scotland and England, with Charles as the heir to the achievement of his father. Van Dyck became the main court painter, producing many images of the King that make him unforgettable to the generations that have followed.

There are several portraits of Charles in armour sitting on horseback. It is these images that would have been unsettling to his Parliamentary critics. A man who probably rightly ended wars with Spain and France early in his reign, was to turn his armour and his military power against his own people in a prolonged civil war. He may have loved Van Dyck’s flattering portrayal of him as a powerful King and horesman, armed for a fight, but it turned out to represent a power Parliament did not want him to have and a military endeavour planned against the wrong people. Instead of him coming over as a loved father of the nation, feared by our country’s enemies, he increasingly came over as an autocrat who did not understand the growing role of Parliament and the importance of listening to grievances of subjects as voiced by their MPs and peers. His Catholic Queen added to his unpopularity in an age of unpleasant and often violent religious intolerance. England and Scotland were by and large protestant and expected their monarch to represent the majority view.

It is true we see very regal and authoritative images of Henry VIII and Elizabeth, though not usually dressed in armour. Their images come across as representing England. Both of those powerful monarchs allowed Parliament to meet and to argue with them. Henry VIII relied on Parliament to legislate for his religious revolution to give it greater authority. Elizabeth knew she had to appeal to her Parliaments to grant her the money she needed for the conduct of government. Charles thought for a decade he could rule without Parliament, resorting to ever more annoying ways of raising money without consent to meet his extravagant lifestyle. He was a good connoisseur of art, but it came at a heavy price. The costs of his new Palace buildings and the many paintings increased the strains with his spurned Parliament.

Seeing all these paintings together in one exhibition is a feast of great art. I came away with a reinforced understanding of just how worrying the King’s elite lifestyle and sympathy for the authoritarian monarchs on the continent would have been to the Protestant in the street or the puritan in Parliament. It was no wonder he ended his life in such tragedy. Parliament took its dislike of Charles following victory on the battlefield to the extreme and contentious decision to kill the King himself. The painting traditions of the more democratic and commercially successful Netherlands make a stark comparison to Charles’s taste. In the Netherlands still life, cameos of the day to day and portraits of many successful merchants and Councillors stood in contrast to the imposing regal portraits and the extensive allegories of the grand canvasses and tapestries favoured in Whitehall, in Madrid and in Paris.

I am aware that the cost of travel for jobseekers who need to attend interviews, training or meetings at the Jobcentre can be worrying and I was pleased to learn from the Rail Delivery Group about the The Jobcentre Plus Travel Discount Card.

It is available to eligible people in England, Wales and Scotland who have been out of work for 12 weeks or longer and offers jobseekers a 50% discount on train fares as they travel to interviews, to the Jobcentre or to and from training, for up to three months at a time.

The card provides discounts of 50% on Anytime Day tickets, Off Peak Day tickets, and Season tickets up to three months in duration. The card is valid on all British train operator services and can be used to purchase tickets online, including National Rail Enquiries, at ticket machines and ticket offices.

To obtain the Jobcentre Plus Travel Discount Card and further information on eligiblity you will need to apply at your nearest Jobcentre Plus branch.

I do not think there is a simple extra tax we can invent that will meet the future financial needs of the NHS. The UK government has usually avoided hypothecation of revenues for the perfectly good reason that there is no likelihood that a particular tax will always yield exactly the right amount that any particular service might need for its costs. We will need to spend more in future on the NHS, and that will come out of general taxation. The increased spending may exceed the increased yield of a nominated tax. The settlement will be unstable, with the NHS complaining if the hypothecated revenue falls short of what it thinks it needs.

Nor do I think there is a way to have a ten year financial settlement for the NHS. A ten year settlement will span three Parliaments which will have different governments whether of the same party or different parties, with MPs elected on different programmes and spending priorities. It is difficult to know how much health care will be needed in ten years time and what the technology and service delivery will be like. It may look very different from today given the pace of technical change. We could make what we think is a generous settlement today, only for the NHS to discover it has a good need of more money than settled on it at some future date. I doubt the fact of a ten year settlement would act as an constraint on the request for more cash, which might well be justified. There is a lot to be said for making a firm offer of cash for the immediate year ahead, with indicative budgets for the following few years. It is difficult to know today how much we will need to spend in 2028 and on what.

It is likely many people will want to spend more on their healthcare as they earn better real incomes. This will happen automatically as the tax take increases with rising incomes, and more money will be voted for the NHS. Some of this will also be possible from the increasing take up of private healthcare which many opt for. There is a lot of self treatment with the help of the local pharmacy, where over the counter medicines are bought on a large scale. Some of it takes the form of people taking out subscriptions to Health clubs, and paying for a diet and exercise regime they think will keep them healthier. Some people take out private insurance or have employers that provide it. Some pay for private treatment when they need it to get round long waiting times for non urgent NHS treatment or to benefit from the greater flexibility over timing of treatments and standards of supporting care, including private rooms in hospitals.

There will nonetheless remain a major requirement for the state to vote more money for more and better quality healthcare free at the point of use in NHS surgeries and hospitals. Much of the care and cost will be for the elderly as they live longer and develop more conditions related to old age that need treatment. It will require better integration with social care to cater for this growing group of patients.

Today the government has announced an extra £467,317 for West Berkshire to deal with road damage, and £282,055 for Wokingham Borough. This is welcome and I look forward to early use of this money by the Councils, as there are plenty of potholes in need of tarmac. I had raised this with Ministers during the bad weather.