Rural Communities

Lord Roberts of Llandudno Excerpts

Thursday 15th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno]

My Lords, I will follow the thinking and questioning of those who have already spoken this afternoon. I come from a very beautiful seaside resort: Llandudno in north Wales. I get no commission whatever from any tourist authority for mentioning that. When I go home, I see such a change. Shops on the very attractive main street and on secondary streets are often boarded up. The reason is out-of-town shopping centres, which have a great attraction because they have easy parking and a wide variety of goods for sale—far more than high street shops used to have. You now see the change and the problem of what to do with those empty shops, apart from putting postcards in the window to show what they might be like.

This is happening not only in the towns. This earthquake of change has also hit the valleys, because naturally young people want more life than they will get in a rather sleepy village, and they will travel to the town. Rarely is there any trouble when they come on a Friday and a Saturday to the more youthful areas. I live very much on the edge of the youthful areas, by the way. There is no real problem. For older people—I include myself, of course—bus passes have been wonderful, because they take you to the shopping centre and the town and away from the sleepy village. My folk were shopkeepers in the Conwy valley. There were things on the shelves, but nothing like what you will get in your major supermarkets. We can see the change.

This is not only changing the towns but emptying the villages. After the war, there were 39 shops in one village that will be nameless. Some of them were small. There were bakeries, two chip shops, two pubs and a number of chapels and churches. Now what do you see there? There is not one shop. The post office has gone and one pub lies derelict. You look around and see that the church has closed, most of the chapels have closed and people have gone. The hub that used to be no longer exists. Some of the villages become suburbs to the larger town and are no longer individual, independent entities. That is fine because you can travel—for entertainment and for work—but it leaves a countryside that is empty of people. You wonder how on earth we can reinvigorate that countryside.

I have some strange ideas that I doubt anyone will ever pick up. Could not the big stores that have emptied and closed the village shops commit to some sort of franchise arrangement in local villages? Could we not ask the Government to instigate conversations with these large supermarkets, with their multimillion-pound chains, to see what could be done to bring some of their sales, their retail outlets, to the villages that have been emptied by them? That might at least bring some hope.

The Plunkett Foundation is a national organisation that helps rural communities, through community ownership, to set up retail outlets in village churches, pubs and halls. That is something that we could do. Let us also put a halt to the closure of small post offices. Some 2,500 post offices were closed when the previous Government were in power. We, as a coalition, must look to keeping villages unique and with some sort of hub. The post office is one. It has sales; it is a small shop. I heard of one this morning that does bed and breakfast as well. It serves the community in many different ways. Let us ask the post office to do one other thing. When a postmistress or postmaster retires, there should be a review of the situation in that locality. Retirement often means an erosion of the hours and the services that are provided. Let us have a real look at that situation.

Indicative of the decline in villages is the reduction in the number of whole-time agricultural workers. Some are family farms but some used to employ workers. In 1950, there were nearly 38,000 agricultural workers in Wales. By 1970 that was down to 13,500, and in 1990 to 5,881. The latest figures indicate that there are 2,779 agricultural workers. They are no longer in the countryside. In my part of Wales, local quarries used to be part of the community. Where they used to have thousands of workers, they now have very small workforces. Young people have left to work elsewhere.

I have looked at local baptismal registers. One hundred years ago, the people who were baptising their children there were from that parish or community. There is still some of that, but in the registers now one sees a person from Australia, another from Milan, Italy, and even some from England who have brought their children to be baptised in those areas. The community has scattered, so some of the young people have been lost. But new people are coming in. On Monday, the local Daily Post quoted a report from a Bangor University survey which stated:

“Rural villages are dying out across North Wales as the young quit a region which is failing to provide them with decent jobs … Meanwhile hundreds of older people … are pouring in, seeking”—

some sort of paradise—

“and hastening the decline”.

It is not a new story, but it is a story that continues.

How are we to tackle this? If only I knew, and if only we had a magic wand. Could we not think of local action areas? Perhaps we could ask the community council or the parish council if they would be willing to lead a local action area scheme for special support for regeneration.

We also have to look at what the future holds. The local bus service has been saved by passes for older people. The routes have been saved and people’s lives have been enhanced. How will that continue in a time when there are serious cuts in local government and in Welsh Assembly subsidies? Where will the money come from? I hope that the Minister will listen. How will we tackle these problems in a time of difficulty?