Rural Communities

Lord Taylor of Goss Moor Excerpts

Thursday 16th July 2015 Grand Committee

[Lord Taylor of Goss Moor (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the right reverend Prelate very warmly for raising this important subject. I should declare some interests. In particular, I chair the National Housing Federation, representing non-profit housing associations. I have also had a lot of interest in this whole area over some years: I led the Living Working Countryside review for Labour; I worked with Conservative Ministers in the last Government on planning guidance; as the noble Lord, Lord Best, mentioned, I was a member of the Rural Housing Policy Review; indeed, I was the founder chair of the Rural Coalition. The one interest, however, that may be most relevant to declare is that I am also from Cornwall, which is represented unduly highly in this debate.

I want to touch briefly on several issues. The first is that rural communities are not sustainable unless there are homes for those who work in the countryside and, across all rural communities, tend to earn in excess of 20% less than the national average. However, they live in areas where house prices are much higher and where rented accommodation is extremely hard to come by. This is particularly true in the more attractive areas, where what rented accommodation is available is typically in the holiday sector and not for full-time workers. That means that for the people who work on the farm, in the pub or the shop, or who look after the elderly in the community, the only accommodation that they are likely to be able to afford is either formal affordable housing or in the back of a camper van. I promise noble Lords that there are many who live in the back of a camper van: they may get a winter let in holiday accommodation, but in the summer months they live in the camper van. As communities and villages have become aware of that, they have started to make sites available for affordable housing. It is small-scale, but where there was resistance only a few years ago, increasingly there is support for it.

However, it is still the case that many fewer affordable homes are built in rural villages than their share of the population—less than half of them, as the noble Lord, Lord Best, touched on. The policy of not requiring affordable homes on sites of under 10 homes particularly impacts on rural communities, where generally that number would be typical of the sites. The right-to-buy policy—I know that this concerns the Conservative side as much as any other—could put a complete stop to people bringing forward exception sites for affordable homes, if they think that that decision will lead to those homes being sold off just a few years later at a massive discount. It is the permanence of the affordability of those homes that villages buy into when they take the decision to allow them.

Secondly, even if you have the homes, that is no good unless you have the work for those who live in the countryside. I did a lot of work to encourage the changes that have taken place in planning, to make planning policy and guidance much more amenable to businesses in the countryside being able to grow—not huge businesses that are inappropriate in the countryside but small-scale businesses of all sorts, not just those sorts typically thought of as rural. In the internet age, things have changed. There is an opportunity for new wealth in the countryside but not if old-school planning still directs businesses to the industrial estate in the town. I am afraid that that still happens. It is about a change of mind more than a change of policy but the Government have a role of leadership in it.

The third element is that rural communities are not sustainable without access to services. We all understand the need for value for money and the financial imperatives that sit on the Government in present times. But if value for money is costed per person, services are stripped out of the rural and into the urban because the same service provided to a large number of people is cheaper than that service in the rural area. Too often, we see the centralisation of services on value-for-money grounds: the bigger school is more cost-effective than the smaller school; the bigger hospital is more cost-effective than the cottage hospital; the rural post office serving a small community does not have the throughput which maintains the full service provided in the town, yet in the town there may be multiple outlets and multiple opportunities to get those services. There needs to be an understanding that what applies in one may not apply in the other.

Rural communities are not sustainable if we do not also have policies to help them be sustainable environmentally. Half the homes in rural areas have the worst SAP ratings of 30, which means extremely energy-inefficient. I chair a ground-sourced energy company—I should declare that interest. I do it because I am worried about this issue and want to make something happen. Too often, policy, which is all about value for money, the pennies at the edge and the numbers you can deliver, does not address the fact that in rural areas some of those biggest problems exist. In the past, policies to increase energy efficiency and reduce fuel poverty have been most cost-effective in towns and have ignored the fact that the greatest number of properties using night storage or oil, creating the greatest problems while being the most expensive to run, are in the rural areas. We need to understand peculiarities of rural communities.