Rural Affairs

Debate between Alec Shelbrooke and Simon Hoare

Monday 11th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[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.