Rural Areas: Public Services

Earl of Caithness Excerpts

Monday 9th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great privilege to be the first to congratulate my noble friend Lord Haselhurst on his maiden speech. In his non-parliamentary parlance, he was batting at number three today and he played some beautiful shots that my noble friend will have to field. He is obviously going to test my noble friend on a number of occasions.

It was quite right that my noble friend quoted from Lord Butler of Saffron Walden’s speech, because my noble friend served that constituency very carefully and well for 40 years. But that was not his first experience in Parliament, as he mentioned: he had the happy experience of being defeated at a general election and having to start again outside before coming back to Parliament. What he did not tell your Lordships was that he spent 13 years as Deputy Speaker and Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, serving under three Speakers. We will not ask him to put them in batting order, but I am sure that at some time, in the bar, he may tell us a few stories about them. There is another thing that my noble friend did, before I move on to the debate: he was the first British parliamentary Member to hold the position of chairman of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association since Colin Shepherd in 1996. He will be a great benefit to the House, and I congratulate him on his speech.

I thank my noble friend Lady McIntosh for introducing this debate. It is the second Monday in a row that we are cantering around this course—we discussed the NERC report a week ago, which touched quite heavily on rural policies. All the points that she mentioned will be covered by the Rural Economy Committee, on which I have the pleasure to sit. Its chairman is the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, who I am pleased to see in his place paying great attention to what has been said.

As my noble friend said, rural policy is a diverse problem, and I shall break it down into three little areas. One is rural proofing, which my noble friend mentioned. This is different from rural policy: rural proofing is about getting government to think about rural policies in advance. It is hugely important, and every department is involved. For instance, why has the Department of Health stopped GPs getting payment for holidaymakers in their area? That seems to me to be something that will affect GPs in rural communities, and it should have been tackled. Then we come to the courts, which are being revised. What about access? How are people going to get there when they live in the country? The noble Baroness, Lady Harris, mentioned schools, so I shall not say anything more about that.

We were told at a meeting of the Rural Economy Committee last week that Defra’s permanent secretary, Clare Moriarty, had written to all permanent secretaries. Can my noble friend tell me when she did that? It was given to us as an example of good government policy. Noble Lords might look at it the other way: it was actually an indictment that the permanent secretary had to write to all the other permanent secretaries in 2018. It should not be necessary. As a result of this letter, can my noble friend tell me how many specialists in all the other departments are looking at rural proofing, now that they have been told that a senior official needs to be in charge of it?

I move on to rural policy, a lot of which has been covered. The key to rural policy is inevitably money. Unless one has the necessary finances, services suffer. We all get used to services when times are good; when times are not so good and services have to be cut, we all pay the price. However, that is a cyclical event; it has happened before, and I remember when rural policies were very badly funded. They have got better badly funded, but it seems to be getting worse again. In the 2018-19 provisional settlement, urban areas received from central government some £123 per head more than their rural counterparts in settlement funding assessment grant. Can my noble friend explain why that has happened and why rural residents pay, on average, 20% more per head in council tax than their urban counterparts, while receiving less in government grants? It seems there is a lack of equality here that we on the committee will certainly want to look into, but perhaps my noble friend could help to start that ball rolling today.

There is also what is called the additional unit cost, because of the sparsity of population and the longer time taken commuting as rural roads get busier and urban roads get less busy. It is the delivery times: people have to take time off work to receive a parcel that is going to be delivered either am or pm, if you can get that slot rather than the whole day. There is also the older population problem. The population in the countryside is getting older: the proportion has moved up from about 24% in 2001 to 29% now. That is going to add considerable costs to local authorities and put extra strain on old people’s services and on GPs. These are issues that have to be tackled at an early stage if they are going to be handled successfully.

My noble friend Lady McIntosh said she is the sister of a GP. I thought she produced a slightly gloomy picture of the countryside. When I lived in Caithness not so long ago, our GP was an Englishman who had come up to the north coast of Caithness for a better quality of life in the true countryside, not the urban areas of north Yorkshire. There is a huge benefit in the countryside. Bus services have been cut: Cumbria does not support any bus services now, and that is a problem. Rural broadband has been touched upon. Last year, 17% of rural premises could not access a 10 megabits per second connection, which is the minimum necessary for efficient online activities. As ever more public services require everything to be done on the internet, this is an area on which we have to continually push. I know that my noble friend is fully seized of the point, but we have to be relentless to make certain that those in the most remote areas get connected, and connected quickly.

My third point concerns research and statistics. It is something that I mentioned last week. The noble Baroness, Lady Harris, mentioned the State of Rural Services report from Rural England. She will know that at the end of that, Brian Wilson, who was its author and is an adviser to the Rural Economy Committee, says how difficult it was to get accurate figures, because of lack of research. This is an area that needs looking at. Since all the changes in the way that Defra handles country policies, one of the most common complaints is about the lack of research. It needs to be tackled because one of the great things that the Countryside Agency and its successor did was to provide a database independent of outside bodies. I hope that my noble friend will agree that something like that needs to happen again.