Businesses in Rural Areas Debate
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Damian Hinds
Main Page: Damian Hinds (Conservative - East Hampshire)Department Debates - View all Damian Hinds's debates with the Department for Business and Trade
Businesses in Rural Areas
Damian Hinds Excerpts(1 day, 21 hours ago)
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Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)
It is a great pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Western.
The family farm tax was a hammer blow to our agricultural businesses. We understand that the Government seek to raise money, but there is an alternative on the table: the so-called clawback proposal. I hope that the Minister will update us on that and, if the Government do not think that the clawback proposal would work and raise potentially even more money than the current policy, I hope that he can explain that.
More broadly, the Government have said that they will increase spending on environmental land management schemes, but they are cutting back in other areas. The overall budget for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is coming down in real terms. What will that mean for our agricultural businesses?
Beyond specifically rural businesses such as farms, rural constituencies have all manner of other businesses that just happen to be in rural areas. As colleagues have said, those businesses face additional challenges, first among which is connectivity. I hope that the Government will do more on the shared rural network; it is going quite well in Scotland and Wales, but we need more of it in England.
On the transition to VoIP—voice over internet protocol —we need to ensure that businesses have proper power back-up systems in place for power cuts. We need a rapid expansion of banking hubs, because the loss of banking infrastructure is felt particularly in rural areas, where banks are more spread out, and we need full utilisation of the national post office network.
As well as dealing with problems, we must seize opportunities. A couple of colleagues have already mentioned the wine sector, which is a great growth opportunity for rural areas. Much more could also be done on tourism, both inbound and domestic, as well as agritourism. We need to ensure that young people growing up in our constituencies have the same opportunities as others, and that means a particular focus on T-level industrial placements for children from rural areas, as well as ensuring that they can get to work; I would love to see a national version of the wheels to work programme, renting scooters to young people.