Rural Communities

Caroline Nokes Excerpts

Tuesday 17th April 2012 Westminster Hall

[Caroline Nokes (Romsey and Southampton North) (Con)]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire (Simon Hart) for securing this important debate. I will keep my remarks brief. In the spirit of alliteration that we saw throughout the Easter recess, I will focus on the two p’s—planning and pubs. I am a little surprised that so far we have not had any comment on rural pubs. In my constituency, village pubs close frequently. In rural areas across the country, they close at a rate of six per week. In my constituency, we have seen the phenomenon of pub companies, where a leaseholder will have several pubs, one of which might be very successful, but most of which are failing. The failing pubs are dragging down the popular, well liked village pubs. This is a classic case for the community right-to-buy policy, whereby a village can step in and rescue a critical and important asset that provides not just a place to meet and have a drink, but a number of other services such as post office facilities and cash points. Without such services, that community might be very isolated.

I spent an entire day last summer recess with a pub company, visiting various pubs across the Romsey and Southampton North constituency. It may sound like a pub crawl, but I can assure hon. Members that it was not. Representing a constituency that has both rural and urban areas, I was struck by the stark differences between the two. I saw how easy and possible it was to run a successful and thriving pub in a suburb or in a city compared with running a pub in a village, where there is a much smaller customer base. I welcome the community right to buy policy, and I hope that we will see some progress in helping to preserve pubs in my constituency in the future.

Planning, the second area on which I wish to focus, is always something of a political hot potato. What I have seen in my constituency over the past six weeks or so, certainly as the local authority produces its core strategy, is the emphasis placed by local people on having a greater say in planning and more control. Test Valley borough council was at the vanguard—this will mean nothing to most people—of policy ESN 05. The clue is in the 05. Some years ago, the council introduced a policy that allowed local communities to propose small affordable housing developments that were specifically designed for local people. People had to prove that they had a coherent link to a village, to gain access to one of the affordable homes being built there. It is an excellent policy and I am pleased to see that, through the Localism Act 2011, it is being widened and used across the country. But of course, it produces something of a conflict, because ties to local areas generally have to be very current and we have a lot of people living in our towns and on the edges of the city of Southampton who may have been forced out of the villages years ago and now have great aspirations to move back to them. There also tends to be a little bit of conflict between villages, as people who live in a nearby village will try to claim that they have a good link to a village that has introduced an affordable scheme, so there is—as ever—an enormous balancing act to be done.

The key issue that I want to highlight is that of productive land. I was pleased to hear the hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley) talk about the importance of productive agricultural land, because that issue is certainly a huge concern around the edges of Romsey, where significant farm land could be brought into agricultural use very easily and would be very productive. But of course, landowners tend to look towards the opportunities that they can gain by providing their land for future housing development.

My big plea to the Government is to ask them to consider changing the rules to make the green belt easier to establish. Currently, it is very tricky to establish what is green belt. Many people in rural Hampshire actually believe that the county has many areas of green-belt land; it does not, and there is only one small corner of green-belt land in the county. Much of the countryside in Hampshire is just deemed to be ordinary countryside, without any special designation whatsoever.

I have a final plea to the Minister. Will he please give greater consideration to the beautiful River Test, from which an enormous amount of water is abstracted, to ensure that we have enough water for the new houses that are being built?