Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Brandon Lewis and Simon Hart
Simon Hart (Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire) (Con)
T3. Does the Minister agree that we could amend the law to help small businesses by reducing the amount of time between a business rate being appealed against and a local authority going after the money?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Brandon Lewis)
I understand the concerns of businesses—particularly small businesses—and ratepayers who are waiting for appeals to be settled by the Valuation Office. My Department is talking to the office, and we expect to resolve more than 400,000 appeals over 24 months to catch up with the backlog. The delay in the revaluation scheme will actually aid that process.
Rural Bus Services
Debate between Brandon Lewis and Simon Hart(13 years, 1 month ago)
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Brandon Lewis
I thank both my hon. Friends for their interventions. To take them one at a time, I agree that we need to look at more progressive and more flexible options for rural communities, and local authorities need to look at how we drive those forward. There are things the Government can do to encourage that, and I will touch on those in a moment, but we should certainly be nudging people and leading the way in pushing local authorities to look at different options.
There are options in rural areas where a bus route is simply not economically viable for a bus company and where the rural authority might not have the funding to subsidise that route for very low usage. It would be advantageous if people could use a concessionary pass more flexibly, whether in taxis or other forms of community transport. The Government could make such an option available; I will touch on that in a moment. My hon. Friend the Member for Hexham (Guy Opperman) is right about creating the flexibility to allow local authorities to push things forward.
The cuts in funding to rural authorities, which already receive less than urban authorities, combined with the additional cost of providing bus services in rural areas, mean that rural residents are at an even greater disadvantage than urban residents. A 2009 Leeds university study on the use of passes showed that—in Lancashire, for example—76% of passengers live in large urban areas. It also highlighted the difference in the use of passes, with 53% of pass holders in urban areas not using their passes during a five-year period, compared with 71% in village areas. That might be because of lack of bus availability in those rural areas or higher car ownership, but it is clear that the bus scheme pushes higher usage in urban areas. The point is that although rural areas might have lower usage, buses are vital to those who use them. If we are not careful, we will create a vicious circle.
The Commission for Rural Communities and others, including the Countryside Alliance, have highlighted the lack of transport as a key to social exclusion in the countryside, which is already particularly prevalent among young, elderly and disabled members of rural communities, and it can only get worse against a background of rising fuel costs.
Simon Hart (Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend recognise—perhaps he will implore the Minister to take this on board—that there is rural and there is rural, and we should not generalise too much? The point about social exclusion is far more relevant in isolated rural areas than in reasonably well populated rural areas. In places such as Meirionnydd in north Wales, we are talking about isolation, which is a very different matter, so I hope we can make a distinction between rurality and isolated rurality.
Brandon Lewis
I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention and support his comments. One important issue on which we need to move forward, and one thing I will ask the Minister to work on with colleagues, is flexibility. In the spirit of true localism, we need to ensure that we achieve solutions that are suitable for an area, rather than just one size fits all, because what suits one place will not necessarily be perfect in another.