Local Government Finance (Rural Authorities)

Debate between Andrew Bingham and Helen Goodman

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.