Speech made at Rotary District conference in Baguio

If you are wondering what I said in my speech at the Rotary District Conference in Baguio, then the following is an exact transcript :

"Good afternoon, I am Richard Silvester from the town of Bolton. My full time job in Bolton is working for The Department for Work and Pensions which is part of the British government and deals with social security claims. I am also an elected Councillor on Bolton Council and am in my 8^th year as a Councillor. I am also a former Rotaractor.

Through this group study exchange, I have been able to visit both Quezon City Council and shadowed a Quezon City Councillor and also visited the Social Security System (SSS) and Government Social Insurance System (GSIS) so I have been given the opportunity to see both aspects of my two vocations.

Whilst shadowing Councillor Alex Herrera of Quezon City Council, I visited the Paaralang Elementary Congressman Calalay School and was invited to present graduation certificates to the students at the graduation ceremony.

In the UK and my town of Bolton, we do not do this at a school level and when I return to England, I will be suggesting that we do the same as I saw that the students were really motivated and the students looked beautiful in their white robes.

I was also able to take part in the flag ceremony at Quezon City Hall on a Monday morning at 7am. Again we do not do this in Bolton so it was great to see a band playing and workers from each Council department standing in line whilst the ceremony took place to start the working week. I will suggest to the Mayor of Bolton that we do the same and will see what the answer is.

I was also able to visit the Senate of The Philippines whilst in Manila and as a politician, I was struck that in The Philippines, there are only 24 members of the Senate and in your Congress, you have about 250 members. In the UK, the upper House of Parliament, The House of Lords has over 800 members whilst the lower House of Commons has over 650 members. Perhaps in the UK we need to reduce the numbers of our representatives and in fact in the British Parliament, they cannot all fit into the chamber.

Councillors in The Philippines are also full time positions, whilst in the UK as Councillors, we do our work in our own time and it is voluntary. I completely agree that Councillors should be full time positions and it was good to shadow a Councillor here to see the work involved.

From my visits to the SSS and GSIS government departments to see the work of social security, I was encouraged to see that the work done was almost exactly the same to that of which I do at home. If anything, the computer systems here are much better than the department which I work for as all claim forms are scanned into the computer system. The GSIS also had its own museum and art gallery which was interesting to see.

On the whole, social security in The Philippines faces the same challenges as my own department in the UK in that it runs at a deficit – it does not collect the amount of contributions to that which it pays out so it will be interesting to see how The Philippines government addresses this problem.

Which leads me to introduce my colleague Amy who also works in my town of Bolton and deals with many of the problems in the housing sector."