Local Government Finance (Rural Authorities)

Andrew Bingham Excerpts

Monday 11th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Helen Goodman]

Precisely—it is unfair. There is a lot of deprivation in rural areas, many of which in my constituency are former mining areas and old mining villages where the levels of deprivation are among the highest in the country. That is also true of Cumbria and in Derbyshire.

It is important to consider why service delivery is more expensive in the countryside. Distance issues that do not apply in urban areas mean that the costs of delivering village schools, school transport, health services, social care, transport to hospitals and ambulance services all shoot up.

[Andrew Bingham (High Peak) (Con)]

In a two-tier authority, all the things the hon. Lady mentioned that cost more because of rurality would relate to a county council. Does she agree that there are also extra costs to rurality at the district level?

[Helen Goodman]

The hon. Gentleman is right. On roads, for example, in my constituency there is not only the cost of their upkeep but of dealing with the snow, and the bus network covers 900 sq km. He will immediately see that huge costs are falling on Durham county council.

We need to have more community centres and village halls—extra facilities to deal with the fact that people cannot be expected to travel all the time to reach their public services. Last month I had a particularly poignant example involving a training centre in a village that is needed because the bus fares are so high to get to the further education college in the main town. Unfortunately, because of the cuts in the local government settlement, Coundon and Leeholme community partnership found that the training centre was going to have to close. That is a terrible problem for the people in the village, who will not be able to afford the training that they need.

School transport is also a significant problem. It is absurd for children to be walking 3 miles to and from school every day, as is possible under the law at the moment. Such laws were instituted in the days when there was not a lot of traffic on the roads as there is now. We really need to pay attention to these special rural issues.

I want to say a couple of things about the system. The summer consultation showed that rural areas were gaining more than £30 million, but those gains were lost because of damping, as the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton said. A one-off grant of £8.5 million has been provided to some authorities for 2013-14, but there is apparently no plan to continue with the grant beyond that period. It would be helpful if the Minister could tell us his plans for future years, because rural areas have lost proportionately more than urban areas. I want to raise with him a specific point about Durham.

--- Later in debate ---

[Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)]

There is the possibility that those on the Front Bench will have a weary cynicism about this debate—a feeling that statistics are being thrown around, that special pleading is going on, names of councils being showered down on them, and figures of 50% or 2% and different definitions and so on being mentioned, but the point, of course, that hon. Members are making on both sides of the House is not about councils, but about rural communities and the very particular situation in which rural communities in Britain find themselves after 50 years of intense fragility.

We are talking not about individuals, wealthy second-home owners or people who retire to the countryside, but about organic, living communities of the sort that we prize in this country and that everyone in the Chamber prizes—communities containing young families, living small farms and a living school. Those things desperately depend on how rural councils are funded, however, and they face a perfect storm. Ministers are not the only people putting pressures on them. It is important to understand the overall context in which agri-environmental schemes, the huge movement towards supermarkets and capitalism itself have eroded rural communities. This is simply the last straw on the camel’s back. For all the reasons we have heard in the House—sparse population, fuel poverty, cost of living—these communities now face a serious crisis. Whatever we do with the 50% or the 2%, rural councils have inherited a situation in which they are significantly less well funded per head than urban councils.

[Andrew Bingham]

As my hon. Friend points out, this situation has been going on for a long time, so does he share my disappointment that, although we thought that this would finally be dealt with and that rural communities would get their fair share, that does not appear to be happening?

[Rory Stewart]

That is an excellent point. Perhaps Ministers will address the fact that this is an inherited situation, stretching back to the ’60s and the ’70s, and relating to the debts of urban councils and the types of assets that urban councils possess. The financial settlement was not designed to address real instances of deprivation or to take into account the indexes of deprivation that we all experience day to day—the cost of heating rural homes, the cost of living and so on.

The nub of the argument, however, has to be about the communities themselves—about why we care about them and wish to keep vibrant, living, organic communities alive. There are three reasons: first, there will come a time when we treasure the food security offered by those small farms, which do not exist independent of the funding that the council is prepared to provide for schools, transport or housing; secondly, tourism, which is one of the most rapidly growing sectors in the rural economy, is dependent not on our weather or food, but on a living landscape of humans; and finally, the fact that this is something deeply precious to Britain. In this the 21st century, our country has the privilege of being one of the most advanced developed countries in the world. We can set an example to other countries of how an advanced industrial economy should behave, what kind of civilisation and future we want and what kind of landscape we imagine for our grandchildren. The decision that Ministers make today will determine that: it will determine whether instead of a network of small farms, organic communities and vibrant villages, we end up with nothing but a wilderness for millionaires.