Rural Communities

Alec Shelbrooke Excerpts

Wednesday 7th January 2026 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

My right hon. Friend and county neighbour of course understands all the challenges facing our rural communities, and I think we are all wondering why, in the midst of a cost of living crisis, when very worrying events are happening overseas, food prices for all our constituents are continuing to rise, and jobs are being lost in all our constituencies because of the policies of this Government, they appear to be prioritising a lawful hobby, but I will come on to that in a minute.

In the midst of all this socialist misery, Labour is killing off pubs with their business rate hikes of up to 78%. [Laughter.] Labour Members may laugh, but they are not getting a drink out of this, are they? Two pubs and restaurants are closing every single day under this Government, so Members should support our pubs and pop into their local for a drink. The good news is that they will not meet a Labour MP there, as they have all been barred. [Interruption.] They don’t like it up ’em!

In contrast, the Conservatives have fully costed plans to scrap business rates entirely for a quarter of a million high-street businesses and pubs, paid for by welfare reforms that the Prime Minister is too weak to push through. We Conservatives care, we get it, and we have people’s backs.

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke (Wetherby and Easingwold) (Con)]

Does that not speak to a wider point? I am sure that my right hon. Friend agrees that the shocking statistics out this week on just how few young people are able to get Saturday jobs show that if we cut business rates and allow businesses to employ people, we stand a much better chance of keeping them off welfare in the first place.

[Victoria Atkins]

That is exactly right, and the difference is that Conservative Members are used to running businesses and working in the private sector, whereas Labour Members have no idea and no clue.

It is not just our market towns and villages that are being hurt by this Government; our public services are, too. Labour has scrapped the rural services delivery grant. They have imposed a local government finance settlement that delivers a three-year punishment beating to shire districts, while their urban counterparts do better, and they have made cynical changes to funding formulas so that rural areas lose out. These choices will have a real impact on the delivery of public services—from health and social care to schools, vital infrastructure and transport. Scrapping the £2 bus fare has increased the cost of living for rural residents, and increased fuel duty will take even more money from our pockets later this year.

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[Wendy Morton (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)]

rose—

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke]

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[Sir John Hayes]

rose—

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[Sir Alec Shelbrooke (Wetherby and Easingwold) (Con)]

I think we need to get down to some basic facts today. For all this Government’s propositions, the reality is that people are feeling this on the ground. My constituency crosses the two counties of West Yorkshire and North Yorkshire. North Yorkshire, which is Conservative-run, has seen millions of pounds of grant reductions, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Sir Julian Smith) touched on. A reduction in the services grant has knocked £14 million off the budget, and the fairer funding grant has knocked £20 million off it.

The reality is that people are starting to wonder whether the Government understand rural communities and rural counties at all. Within North Yorkshire there are huge areas of deprivation, but they have now seen their money cut because the overall situation of the county knocks them out of the picture. A county like North Yorkshire can also be very sparsely populated and have unique challenges that mean that funding needs to be in place.

That is against the backdrop of the attacks on farming. Ninety-two per cent of my constituency is rural or rural-related agricultural business. Through agriculture my constituency supplies £2.2 billion to the Exchequer and to GDP, and there has been huge concern and widespread disbelief at the policies that the Government have introduced. Even with the U-turns they knocked out just before Christmas, there is still huge uncertainty and, crucially—even with those U-turns—a lack of faith about investing in the future.

We are talking not just about farms; there is the whole ecosystem of rural economies. I have been to businesses in my constituency who hire out plant machinery not just to farmers during the harvest but to help ensure that the countryside and landscapes are managed. North Yorkshire and parts of West Yorkshire, including where I live, have huge historic areas that people visit for tourism. If the countryside is not maintained, there will be less income from people coming to visit. People trying to make a living in these rural communities—as they have done for decades and centuries—have seen a huge attack from every angle.

[Wendy Morton]

My right hon. Friend makes a really important point. Whether in rural North Yorkshire or on the edge of the west midlands where we have some fantastic rural landscapes, surely the fact of the matter is that we have a Labour Government who really do not understand the countryside or the countryside way of life. They are intent on covering it in concrete.

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke]

My right hon. Friend makes an important point. That is the view of a lot of people we speak to in and around rural constituencies: they say that the Government either do not understand these communities or, worse, they do not care. People feel there is this constant attitude of, “You don’t need the money. We’re going to take it to the urban areas.”

At Prime Minister’s questions, we saw the Prime Minister trying to say, “We have got this bit of the economy and that bit of the economy.” That is all very well, but it does not feel like that for people sitting at home when the weather is freezing cold, wondering where they can make cuts to heat their homes. That happens in areas of deprivation in and around my constituency, which is deemed to be affluent—because of that people do not get the money they need.

I want to touch briefly on how good agricultural land is being taken over by solar farms. I am fed up to the back teeth of listening to Ministers say, “We must no longer be reliant on petrochemical dictators to control our energy.” China is a dictatorship, and it controls 90% of the processed materials for renewable energy. I would have a huge amount of respect for the Minister if, in her summing up, she admitted that the dictatorship of China is no better than some of the dictatorships of the petrochemical states. We are just transferring the problem from one region to another. Ministers should not pretend that they are any different.

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[Stuart Anderson (South Shropshire) (Con)]

Living in a rural community is a brilliant way of life. It is beautiful, but it comes with remoteness and other issues. I have lived in an urban area and a rural area, and they are different, although there are things that connect them. I want to point out a few really important things that I have found in rural communities.

I have spoken before about hospitality and farming—they will always be up there—which are struggling and facing issues at the moment, but I want to speak about the upcoming consultation on changes to shotgun licensing, which my hon. Friend the Member for North Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) just spoke about eloquently. That will have a serious impact on shotgun holders who require the use of a shotgun not just for their job, but for pastimes. If a third of shotgun users do not renew their licences, it will cost the UK economy over £1 billion. I have one of the constituencies with the most shotgun licences. I would like the Minister to take this issue seriously. Any changes to the licensing rules for shotguns will have a huge knock-on impact.

The other area I want to touch on, which a few people have spoken about, is trail hunting. The proposed ban on trail hunting will have a big impact on rural communities. I get that not everybody thinks the same way as me. I grew up hunting, shooting and fishing, although I have never been on a horse in my life. What trail hunting communities do to support their local areas is great—there are some great people. I have just launched a survey of my constituents, which has been filled in by almost 2,000 people, and 63% of South Shropshire constituents want trail hunting to continue. It is a rural way of life that gives £78 million to £100 million back to the rural economy.

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke]

Does my hon. Friend share my concern that such a controversial piece of legislation is being wrapped up with other things that people would find it hard to disagree with, such as the puppy farming ban, and that this is just a cheap trick by the Government so that they can say, “You voted against the puppy farming ban,” rather than having a vote on this particular issue?

[Stuart Anderson]

My right hon. Friend raises a brilliant point. There are so many good things that can be done on animal welfare, but a trail hunting ban is not one of them.

Let us look at the facts that support trail hunting and at the incidents over the years. From 2004 to 2023, there were 44 convictions involving trail hunting, and there were 250,000 organised hunt days in that time. That is one conviction for every 5,680 trail hunting days. If there was one hunt a day, it would take 15 years to get a conviction. That is a serious statistic. The Government do not like trail hunting and they do not like the people who participate in trail hunting, so they want to ban it. Based on those statistics, they should not ban anything, because the stats do not support the idea that there is widespread criminality in trail hunting. There is no evidence of that at all. I am clear: if anybody breaks the law, they should be prosecuted.

There will be a huge impact on farriers, vets and other people. Can the Minister let me know who is going to pick up the bill for fallen stock? That is a massive impact that will fall on farmers. Trail hunting is supported in South Shropshire, but I get that some constituents will not support it—that is fine. If anybody wants to see what people are doing about animal welfare, they should go to my Facebook page and look at my post about it issue this morning. What people are saying in defending animal welfare is absolutely brutal, and I do not support that. Trail hunting is a key part of life in South Shropshire. I will stand up for it, and for shotgun licence holders, and it should continue. These rural pursuits are part of my community.

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[Robbie Moore]

I agree with the hon. Member, and I will come back to that, because it is ridiculous. My hon. Friends the Members for Beaconsfield (Joy Morrissey), for South Shropshire (Stuart Anderson) and for North Dorset (Simon Hoare) made the critical point that this Government should stop playing cat and mouse with our rural businesses. My hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight East (Joe Robertson) referenced the fact that rural Britain and our rural fishing communities have lost trust as a result of this Government’s choices. My hon. Friend the Member for Gordon and Buchan (Harriet Cross) rightly highlighted the challenges being faced in her constituency and the north of Scotland right now as a result of the bad weather, and the fact that it is our farmers who are doing the hard work to support our rural communities.

Throughout the debate, we have heard about the immense pressure that our entire hospitality sector is being put under. I heard it from my own constituents Michael, Kath and Jodie at the Dog and Gun pub in the Worth valley just before Christmas. We now know that since the autumn Budget alone, more than 1,100 pubs and restaurants have closed, and more than 89,000 hospitality workers have lost their job. The rise in employer national insurance, the rise in the minimum wage, the Unemployment Rights Bill—these measures are making doing business nearly impossible. The Government are robbing many young people of their first job opportunity and are tearing the heart out of our rural economies.

All that is in addition to the skyrocketing business rates being foisted on our pubs by this Government. Many are looking at 30% increases in their valuation rates, a staggering amount that they will simply not be able to afford. The Conservatives would scrap business rates in full, so why on earth will the Labour Government not do it? Is it any wonder that, up and down the country, it is harder and harder for Labour MPs to find a pub that will serve them? However, if they thought the situation was bad for pubs, it is just as bad for our farmers.

Let us look at what rural Britain has been hit by in the last 18 months alone through the choices of this Labour Government. De-linked payments have been dramatically reduced. Capital grants have been closed overnight. The sustainable farming incentive has been stopped with no warning—and how embarrassing was it when Ministers were forced to admit that they had wrongly refused SFI funding to about 3,000 farmers when they shut the scheme? That was pure ignorance and incompetence. The farming budget has been slashed, and is now referred to as the farming and nature budget, a combined term to create the false impression that the Government actually care and that funding has increased.

There are new taxes on fertilisers, and on double-cab pick-up trucks. There are plans to reclassify shotgun licences, making it harder and more expensive to renew and apply for a licence. Country pursuits and sports that drive the rural economy are to be banned, and a land use framework threatens to take 18% of our land out of UK food production. We have a US trade deal that totally destroys the UK bioethanol industry, and robs our farmers of a sixth of the domestic wheat market. Prime agricultural land is being covered in solar panels by the Energy Secretary, regardless of local opinion or food security concerns.

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke]

Does my hon. Friend share my concern about a matter that I raised in another Opposition day debate before the summer? Not only are solar farms taking over agricultural land, but no research has been done on thermal runaway and what would result from the evaporation of heavy metal output on to that agricultural land.

[Robbie Moore]

My right hon. Friend’s excellent point feeds into the narrative that this Government are not making the sound decisions that we want for our rural economy; they are industrialising much of our prime agricultural land with heavy metals that will damage soil nutrients.

Closer to home for me in Keighley are the plans to roll out England’s biggest wind farm on our protected peatland. It is a disgrace that the moratorium on onshore wind has been removed by this Labour Government. The young farmers grant has been cancelled for the first time. Our rural councils have been hit hard too: the £110 million rural service delivery grant, which supported many rural communities, has been axed. Fairer funding for rural councils has been scrapped, and the £2 bus fare cap has gone, which makes it more expensive for people to travel around our rural areas.

To top it all off, there are the 14 months of anxiety over the disastrous family farm and family business tax—14 months in which families who have worked hard all their lives have been completely terrified about their future. Parents and grandparents of young farmers have been in tears, and yes, lives have been lost, only for the Government to finally admit what was obvious to everyone else from the start. It is disgraceful to see some Labour MPs treating this as a victory lap, and seeing others now come out of the woodwork to say that, actually, they supported these changes all along is even worse. The reality is that right up until Christmas, Ministers were adamant that there would be no changes in APR and BPR. Labour Members voted against this policy four times, and only one of them had the backbone to vote against the Chancellor.

Time and again, this Labour Government have failed to understand and, worse, have ignored rural Britain. As a result, family businesses’ confidence is now at a 15-year low. The Government’s own farmer opinion tracker shows that only one in three farmers in England feel positive about their future. A third of farmers are planning to scale back investment because of this Government’s policies, a record number of farms have closed since Labour came to office, and the Government’s own profitability review is being rolled out at the slowest of speeds.

I urge every hon. Member who has sought to defend the Government’s record in this debate to get real and recognise the dire situation that rural Britain is in. This Government have chosen to ignore warnings, dismiss experience and gamble with the livelihoods of the people who feed this country and care for its countryside. Farmers and rural communities see exactly what is happening, and our pubs and hospitality sector are struggling. They feel it, and they are paying the price for it. Rural communities will not forget who stood with them and who turned their back.

Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Bill

Alec Shelbrooke Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 16th October 2025 Commons Chamber

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke (Wetherby and Easingwold) (Con)]

This has been a wide-ranging and important debate on a vital Bill. There have been many valuable and informed contributions, not least from the hon. Members for Glasgow North (Martin Rhodes), for Calder Valley (Josh Fenton-Glynn), for North East Hertfordshire (Chris Hinchliff), for Cannock Chase (Josh Newbury), for Derbyshire Dales (John Whitby) and for Chatham and Aylesford (Tristan Osborne). The hon. Member for Exeter (Steve Race) is rightly proud of the great academic institutions in his constituency, highlighting the important role that UK research plays in the world.

It was a pleasure to see the hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) making one of the first Back-Bench contributions. She reinforced the points that my hon. Friend the Member for Romford (Andrew Rosindell) made about the destruction of the marine environment. I know that she speaks from a position not just of expertise but of passion, and she has shown that over so many years, with a commitment to our oceans and with the work that she has led on.

May I say to the Liberal Democrat spokesman, the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Pippa Heylings), that she shows why it is so important that we have people in this House with such wide-ranging experience, who have had lives outside this place? She has brought expertise to the debate and I am sure that many of us envy her in what she has been able to do, the intellect that she has applied to the argument and the fact that we can all listen carefully to what she has said.

The hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) said something important when she talked about marine deforestation and some of the mainstream media shows that had footage that she had heard had been too shocking to show. That represents a real problem in this debate. Are we wrapping this up in cotton wool for some people, to not show exactly what we are trying to deal with? She made the important point that we should not hide from what is going on in the world.

[Kerry McCarthy]

I agree with the right hon. Gentleman to an extent. It was reported in The Guardian that some of the footage was deemed too shocking to be shown. I do not know whether he has seen it, but what remains in the film is incredibly powerful. I have read about bottom trawling in the newspapers for a long time, so I knew about it from a factual perspective, but it was only when I saw those images that it was brought home to me how terrible it is.

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for that important intervention.

The hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) raised the importance of mainstream media. We are grateful for her apology to my hon. Friend the Member for Romford for misinterpreting his drive about the importance of the Chagos islands.

It is disappointing that the hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins), who is no longer in his place, felt that not enough of my colleagues were in attendance, but those of us who were here have stayed here—Mr Speaker has commented on many an occasion that I can often be more than enough. The hon. Member for South Cotswolds (Dr Savage) pointed out how little we know about the oceans. That is an important point. It has often been said that space exploration gets lots of coverage and we talk about it very much—indeed, we are talking about manning the moon again, and maybe using it as a launch pad to go to Mars—yet so much of our own planet is completely unknown and unexplored.

That brings me to the hon. Member for Brent West (Barry Gardiner), who has a genuine interest and expertise. He gave a wide ranging and important speech and made an important point about the ocean being one of the biggest solutions to climate change. He is indeed right that the European economic zones are a legacy from the days when we owned half the world. One of the great achievements of the last Conservative Government is the work we did on the blue belt and on ensuring that we protected important marine environments. I do not know whether he will expand on this in later debates, but I noticed that he did not appear to be fully supportive of giving up on the fisheries from the EU with the EU reset. I wonder whether he may have things to add to that debate at another time, but perhaps now is not the time and place. However, he does make an important point that we can only do what we have to do as a country if we have the ability to do it in those waters.

The way that the hon. Member for Ely and East Cambridgeshire (Charlotte Cane) approached the subject of the Conservative party’s record in this area was a real pity. I am proud of some of the work we did on the blue belt, including working on this Bill, and as we have seen during the debate, there is wide support for it across the House.

The right hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) pointed out her genuine delight in the fact that this House has so many experts to speak on such an important issue. She echoed the concerns of my hon. Friend the Member for Romford on what will happen with the Chagos Bill. I do not want to go into great detail on that, because we are going to be here a long time on Monday evening debating that Bill, but I think she was driving at the fact that the assurances in the Chagos Bill do not go far enough in protecting the blue belt. I welcome her clarification that my party has raised the issue of the blue belt. She comes with expertise and deserves to be listened to when she is raising these important points.

The Minister opened the debate by talking about the urgency and importance of this moment. That is true. When my hon. Friend the Member for Romford spoke, he made some very serious points, not least about how we can ensure that the responsibilities that the United Kingdom has always taken towards marine fisheries do not get overridden if we cannot control our work entirely. He made the point that, in the scheme of things, we must ensure that we do not hand over the ability to other countries to stop us doing that work.

The reality is that—again, I will touch briefly on this because it is not part of the debate—the UN Security Council, set up for a reason, finds it hard to react to what is happening in Ukraine because Russia can override anything with its veto. We must ensure that we have the ability, as a Government and a country, to employ the laws and protections that we need to put in place. We will raise these areas in Committee, even if that is through probing amendments, because we want to ensure that the Bill can do exactly what it intends to do.

The reality of the Bill also comes into some of these situations that we see on the horizon. We know about the opening up of the Arctic, the melting of the sea ice and the opening of the north-east passage, which for many months—certainly weeks—of the year is fully navigable; the ice has gone away by that much. At the same time, we know that President Putin and the Russians have said that there are hydrocarbon resources in that ocean that they want to mine. That would be devastating for the fragile ecosystems that exist in that unique area of the world, which is almost completely untouched.

I had the pleasure back in May of being part of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly visit to Svalbard. The University Centre in Svalbard has dozens of countries, universities, academic institutions and hundreds of nationalities studying that region, climate change and the effect it has on the Arctic, and the effects on ecosystems. It is absolutely vital, as we see the geopolitical tensions forming in areas where they have not been before, that we have those strong protections in place.

[Barry Gardiner]

Will the right hon. Member give way?

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke]

I was about to finish, but I will give way to the hon. Gentleman.

[Barry Gardiner]

The right hon. Member is absolutely right to talk about the opening up of the Arctic and the geo-strategic threats that we face there. In that respect, would he support my earlier call that the Government should release the Joint Intelligence Committee’s report on the link between biodiversity, sustainability and national security?

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke]

I will not be drawn quite into that trap about releasing Joint Intelligence reports. However, the hon. Gentleman makes an important point, because there is no doubt that we are talking about sovereign security if we do not get this right, and that applies to all countries around the world. If we allow climate change and not the protection of valuable ecosystems, as has been described by many hon. and right hon. Members across the House, it is all of us who will suffer.

We have our concerns about some areas of the Bill. We will be tabling some amendments in Committee and probing those areas, but on the whole we hope that we can support the Bill, and it is important to carry on the work that our Government started.

Rural Affairs

Alec Shelbrooke Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

It most certainly is a concern, and I thank my hon. Friend for raising that. He represents a very rural constituency and knows only too well the concerns his constituents are facing. It is a good point, which I will develop later in my speech.

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke (Wetherby and Easingwold) (Con)]

On that point, will my right hon. Friend give way?

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[Sir Alec Shelbrooke (Wetherby and Easingwold) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to take part in the debate. I congratulate all hon. Members who have made their maiden speech today; they have all been genuinely fascinating and worth listening to.

I want to touch on the flooding issues that really cause concern in rural areas. Even in towns such as Tadcaster, which has the River Wharfe running through it, flooding is caused not just by water from the river, but by run-off in the town. The town depends on serviceable drainage, which can often get blocked, and drainage flaps. We are trying to get flood defences built, and are moving forward with money put in place by the last Conservative Government. Tadcaster’s flood alleviation scheme is crucial to the economic regeneration of the town, because people in such towns cannot have faith in the local economy if they are flooded all the time.

I say with this with great disappointment. I have had several meetings on these issues with the Environment Agency, Yorkshire Water and Councillor Kirsty Poskitt—she is an independent councillor, but we are working well together—and Yorkshire Water promised us that the flap valve in Tadcaster that drains the water from the high street would be serviced once a month. That was a lie, and it has now said that it will do so every six months. That is not good enough. We are trying to do what we can for our communities, but we see the people in charge—the people whose responsibility this is—lie to our faces. We will have further meetings about that, because communities need certainty, and so do businesses.

There are also issues when housing developments are built in places with existing flood concerns. When we really get out into the countryside, communities can be cut off completely. They are struggling to cope with the watercourses as they are now, and we know that the weather and climate are changing—there is more water.

I have had had several meetings in one village, Bishop Monkton, since I became the Member of Parliament. I have spoken to local people, the parish council, local councillor Nick Brown and the flood groups. Again, promises were made, but we are not getting anywhere. Bishop Monkton has been let down by Yorkshire Water and the EA for too long. There is a new planning application for 60 new homes, and they say that the water system can cope with it. It cannot—that is blatantly obvious.

When these big developments go in, Yorkshire Water and the Environment Agency should make them do water alleviation work through soakaways and slowing the flow, rather than just saying, “Well, according to our models, it can cope.” Sewage flows down the street in that small, picturesque, beautiful Yorkshire village in my constituency, yet it is claimed that there is nothing wrong.

The hon. Member for Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme (Lee Pitcher), who is a sound man, being a West Ham fan, said that nobody knows land better than those who manage it. He is absolutely right. That is why we should be concerned about this inheritance tax raid on farming, which will get rid of tenant farmers—those who have worked the land for generations and understand best the watercourses and what happens there. In the villages where I talk to people, who knows better than anybody else the hydrology of the land? It is the farmers and the people who live there. If all that goes to corporates who have no contact with the local communities, we will lose the knowledge and memory of the people who have worked that land for centuries.

[Sir Gavin Williamson]

I am not sure whether my right hon. Friend will have found this in his constituency, but in Staffordshire many farmers feel utterly betrayed. They listened when the Labour party said it would not punish them through inheritance tax changes, yet that is what it is doing. There is a real sense of being let down and betrayed by the Labour party.

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke]

I am most grateful to my right hon. Friend. We know what our rural communities are like, and I am sure we all enjoy a pint, but when I go to the pub at the moment I hear farmers in despair saying, “We were told this wouldn’t happen.” As much as the small family farms, it is the tenant farms who are under real threat.

For all the statistics that are pumped out by the Treasury saying this and that, it very much sounded from the Secretary of State’s opening remarks that there is a small cabal at the top of No. 10 making all the decisions and that everybody else has to go out and sell them. We have all read that book, and we know where it comes from. I have to say to the Labour party that “Animal Farm” is not an agricultural playbook. That is what is going on: it is, “We will tell you how to run your farms. We will tell you where to get the money from. If you can’t do it, it is your failure. The state knows best how to run it.” Everything we have heard from Labour Front-Bench Members dismisses everything that has come from the NFU and thousands of farmers around the country.

I find it hard to believe that anybody has had nothing but positive letters and positive emails in their inbox saying, “Oh, it’s fine. We’re very happy about it. Everything you’re doing is great for the community. It’s all right. We believe you. It was written in big white letters on the barn door that everything will be fine.” That will probably change later on and Labour will say, “No, that’s what it always said.” We have read that book, and the Labour party needs to start listening to the people who till and farm our land.

It is not good enough to say, “You will be protected,” because they know that they will not be. That brings me back to the beginning. If we lose the people who understand the countryside and the hydrology, when in towns such as Tadcaster and rural villages such as Bishop Monkton and many more around my constituency we see housing going up on the land that has to be sold off to pay the inheritance tax bill, the flooding will become greater and greater. Ultimately, that will lead to a far higher cost to the country than the small amount of punitive tax that Labour claims will save the NHS.

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[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

Some 88% of my constituency is hill, wood or farmland. It is the “Vale of Little Dairies”, in Thomas Hardy’s phrase. It is a mosaic of farms, both family-owned and estate and many of them tenanted, punctuated by villages and market towns. I would willingly swap my inbox with that of the hon. Member for Shrewsbury (Julia Buckley)—who is no longer in the Chamber—because her constituency, like those of many Labour Members, seems to be full of farmers who are, with a spring in their step, welcoming the wonderful, halcyon field that the Government are offering them.

Let me make again a point that I made in an intervention earlier. I am still at a loss as to how farmers are supposed to be rejoicing, as we are told they are by so many Labour Members, with all this record investment and expenditure in rural areas, when they are being told by the Secretary of State that they must do more with less. You can have one or the other, Madam Deputy Speaker, but you cannot have both.

Many of my right hon. and hon. Friends have spoken very authoritatively about the taxation changes. I am fundamentally opposed to what the Government are trying to do because of the damage that it will cause, in the long term, in constituencies such as mine and many others—particularly, but not exclusively, in the south-west. It also concerns me that many Labour Members have been told that the money raised will give them an oncology centre in every constituency, and that other wonderful things are going to happen. In fact, this is just a round of drinks when it comes the amount of money that it will generate in taxation for what may be required by the health service or by education, so I say to the House, “Please do not fall for that old chestnut.”

The Minister and I worked very closely together on the Agriculture Act 2020 and on trade issues. Now is the opportunity—I have been very clear that we had opportunities over the last few years, but they were not delivered for a whole variety of reasons, including covid, Ukraine and other things that we all know about—to have some serious, grown-up thinking about rural-proofing policies, because, as others have mentioned, the delivery of public services in our rural areas is more expensive. Our populations are sparser, and our communities are further flung. As the hon. Member for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan) said, we do not have big teaching hospitals and so forth. The Home Office needs to give proper consideration to rural-proofing the funding formula for rural policing, and likewise with the fire service. We have the rural services delivery grant, and I hope that the Minister and his departmental colleagues are strongly making the case to both the Treasury and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government that the rural services delivery grant is vital for enabling rural local government to deliver the services that our communities are looking for.

In an earlier contribution to the debate, reference was made to the entirely urban-centric rubric of Environment Agency funding decisions when it comes to flooding. It effectively boils down to how many chimneys benefit from the investment. The larger the community—by definition, the more urban or metropolitan—the more likely they are to be successful in a bid, compared with a scheme that will benefit many hundreds of acres of prime farmland but possibly only 200 or 300 households. There needs to be rural-proofing.

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke]

My hon. Friend is hitting the nail on the head. In my speech, I mentioned that Tadcaster is unable to get rid of the surface water. That affects a few businesses, but the whole town is destroyed by those businesses not being able to reopen and having insurance problems, despite the fact that there are not enough houses under the Environment Agency’s plan. The point that the Environment Agency has to take notice of is, where does the economy build from?

[Simon Hoare]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. Then we can think about the impact on insurance premiums, which will close businesses and put householders out of the insurance market, with the exception of the scheme that the previous Government introduced. All these things have knock-on effects.

I think the Minister and his departmental colleagues have sympathy with the point I want to make. Across Government—it is not just his Department—the funding formula and the rubric that decides where these things go need to have a far more digital, contemporary account of the challenges in delivering services in our rural areas. It is an issue that I have banged on about in this place in the nearly 10 years that I have served my communities of North Dorset, and I will continue to talk about it because that is the right thing to do. I hope that there is sympathy for that argument on both sides of the House.

Many Members have referred to access to housing. A lot of my constituents have invested in rental properties and so on, but we all know that quite a lot of housing in rural areas is older. It could be in a conservation area, it could be listed or it could be thatched—it could be all of those things. People are trying to meet the EPC regulations for rental properties, which is putting huge, artificial and urban-centric pressure on the rural rental housing market.

The Prime Minister recently launched a very welcome initiative about skills. Again, I urge that a bespoke channel of work is carved out that looks at how we skill young people in rural areas. We suffer from a young person’s diaspora too often: the elderly retire to an area, and the young move away. Property prices go up, and people will only come back as and when they able to inherit something—that is, of course, on the presumption that the Treasury has not taken everything by that point and that the only thing they are able to inherit is a very small part of the family grave plot, although that might be taxed as well. I would urge a ruralisation of this area.

I will mention two other things, both of which begin with “d”. Hon. Members on both sides of the House have mentioned dentistry. There have been too many nascent plans for a revival and renaissance of dentistry over the years. For reasons that I cannot understand, none has come to fruition, save for the entirely skewed and bogus funding formula for dentists. All Governments wed themselves to doing something; I just hope that something will be done. The other issue is driving tests. It is very hard to get a driving test in rural areas, which deprives young people of access to work, and to colleges and learning.

In this debate on rural affairs, it is not just about the proposals for changing the way farmers are taxed. It is about the whole mosaic and rich tapestry of rural life, of which this Government currently find themselves the custodians. Historically, the Labour party has always been urban-centric, but it now has some rural seats. I hope that the Front Benchers listen to rural Members, hear the concerns that we, too, are hearing, and actually make some progress towards making life in our rural areas a little better.