Rural Economy

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Thursday 19th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I begin by declaring my interests, which are financial, as set out in the register, and also personal, given my actual involvement in things. I congratulate the right reverend Prelate on calling this debate. It may disappoint him, but it seems to me that rural Britain is not really homogenous, and I am afraid I am not really interested in the Home Counties. Rather, my concern focuses on the shires and beyond—what I like to think of as l’Angleterre profonde. They are particularly important to us in this country as a whole, partly because they are part of our collective sense of Britishness and of a perception, from the outside, of what this country is. In their own way, they are as important as, for example, the building where we are this afternoon, or Canterbury Cathedral, or the National Gallery.

Rural Britain is experiencing two revolutions. The first is in town and country planning. The important thing for the countryside is that the underlying thinking behind the settlement of the post-war planning regime is now under challenge. Rural Britain is not only for farming and forestry. Particularly with the development of connectivity, all kinds of possibilities are opening up that are consistent in land-use terms with what was tried to have been protected. Of course, we all know that connectivity is pretty erratic in the countryside, but I hope the relationship between fibre and mobile, with the two—as I understand it—coming together, means it may be possible to achieve an adequate overall system quicker than perhaps was previously thought possible.

Secondly, now that we have left the common agricultural policy, there is a revolution in that area too. It is worth remembering in this context that agricultural policy has always been a distinct specialist phenomenon in politics, going back to the Middle Ages, for rather obvious reasons. Public money and the public goods that the public are going to receive for it are in a state of flux.

The questions that we need to ask are twofold. First, what is rural Britain for? Secondly, how is that aspiration going to be achieved? In my case, much of my thinking is derived from looking at the Lake District, which the Minister obviously knows well. It is 40 years ago that I became a member of the Lake District special planning board and chaired its development control—that is, its planning committee. Subsequently, I have always watched what is going on very carefully. In many ways, it is completely unrecognisable from what it was then.

The point about the Lake District is that it is England’s premier national park. It is the crucible of the Romantic movement, both here and abroad, and relatively recently has been inscribed as a UNESCO world heritage site, both for its landscape and for cultural reasons, and they are equally important. It is not just any old corner of contemporary Britain or just part of our nation’s family silver; it is part of the world’s patrimony. The point of that is that it is much more significant than simply a bean-counter’s analysis of a profit and loss account.

Despite all that, productivity, as it is now measured in this country, means that the Lake District is below the national average. To a degree, that may be to do with the methodology employed. It has always interested me that water, which in very large quantities is exported into what used to be known as industrial Lancashire, does not play a proper part. It is not only that they cannot spend a penny in that area without our water; industry—and everything in society—would simply grind to a halt.

Equally, as a number of speakers have mentioned, housing policy is seriously flawed. There are plenty of houses in the Lake District, but the problem is that people who want to live there and need to work there cannot do so because housing has become a must-have asset for rich, moneyed southerners and international money. If you think about it, the houses are there. The place is a national park, so the solution is not building more houses; it is finding a way of moving the houses that are there into a category which means they will be restricted to people who live and work there. You have to think out of the box a bit, but it is far from impossible to see relatively easy ways as to how that might be done, given the political will.

The visitor economy has been mentioned. It is important, but it is beginning to cause problems along the very general lines of the problems that it is posing in places such as Venice and Barcelona. It requires considerable thought. I was a bit startled the other day when my son said to me, “You know, dad, I think the Lake District is now more famous for food and fine dining than it is for the landscape and what it’s really all about”.

Our economy is dysfunctional. Despite providing and contributing a lot to UK well-being, it still seems to be unable to generate enough money to look after itself. Its liquidity, taken across the piece, is haemorrhaging. That is why the ideas proposed in the Budget for taxing small businesses and farms are, frankly, cuckoo. You must not take working capital out of a series of activities that are losing money.

I suggest that the Minister looks at the system used for dealing with works of art in a similar context. There are all kinds of pointers that seem to suggest that there are ways of both taxing and collecting the money at the time when the asset’s value is realised. That is a much more sensible way of doing it.

The world is changing. We are not yet in a world where the policies and systemic framework surrounding all this are stable. Until just the other day, I chaired the Cumbria Local Enterprise Partnership, which is 50% industrial and 50% rural. I believe that we managed to achieve a harmonious partnership between local authorities, the voluntary sector and industrialists. In particular, industrialists and businesspeople are important, because they are the people who know how things are done. It is very important that, as we go forward, we find a way of making sure that those who do the business take part in and drive the policy.