Levelling Up Rural Britain

Daniel Kawczynski Excerpts

Wednesday 9th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Helen Morgan (North Shropshire) (LD)]

North Shropshire is a lovely place to live, with beautiful countryside, historic market towns and warm, welcoming people. I encourage everybody to come and visit. But behind the bucolic scenes, North Shropshire and indeed large parts of the rest of rural Britain are beginning to fall behind their urban counterparts.

Levelling up was the second most popular catchphrase of 2019. While it had not a lot of meaning for the northern towns that it was aimed at, it had virtually none at all for rural Britain. If we want our rural communities on a level playing field with the towns in the north, and indeed the south, we need to address the causes of the problems that have led to dysfunction in many sectors of the economy and society.

We have young people leaving rural areas in search of work at the same time that local employers from all sectors are struggling to fill vacancies. Our hospitals are full to capacity, with ambulances queuing outside the front, while beds are taken up by people who could be cared for at home. We have pensioners and young people desperate to get out into the towns to spend their money, but they have no cars and no alternative way to get there.

On Friday, I visited the excellent Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital in Gobowen near Oswestry. It is a good example of how dysfunction can affect a place. It is undoubtedly one of the best hospitals in the country, with a fantastic reputation, excellent patient satisfaction and some of the world’s finest surgeons. Most medics would be honoured to work there, and yet it has a vacancy rate of 14%. Two key reasons behind that are a lack of affordable housing and a lack of public transport to the hospital. The nurses who work there are unable to get home after a 12-hour shift because a hospital with world-class facilities is being let down by a fourth-class public transport system. If they make the move to work in that top-class hospital environment, they will struggle to find a flat to rent not because they are too expensive but simply because not enough furnished flats are available on the market.

People of working age obviously need to be able to find a secure home in the area where they want to live and to be able to access all the public services that will give them a decent quality of life, but those services are being cut because local government budgets are taking the strain of the pandemic and of Conservative chaos. Our councils need to be properly funded, but the Local Government Association reports that local authorities face a funding gap of £3.4 billion next year and £4.5 billion in 2024-25 just to stand still, so improving services seems a distant prospect.

Shropshire council is reportedly spending 84% of its budget on social care. As the population gets older, the pressure on services gets higher and more young people leave—and the cycle continues. If rural Britain is going to thrive, that cycle needs to be reversed. It should start with the industry that is already the success story of rural Britain: farming. However, the Conservatives have taken our farmers for granted by bargaining away their level trading field for one pitched firmly in favour of their Australian and New Zealand competitors.

[Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)]

I very much hope that the hon. Lady will talk about the three cases in Shropshire up for assessment for levelling-up funding. The one for modernising Shrewsbury town centre in my constituency is extremely important. Will she welcome that project? As she knows, a thriving county town is good for the whole of our county.

[Helen Morgan]

I supported a levelling-up bid in my own constituency as well, but I will come on to the nature of bidding for small pots of money.

The Government have implemented a new subsidy scheme so complex and tedious to access that only 2,000 out of 83,000 farmers nationally have applied to join it, despite the aims of the scheme being good. Unable to plan ahead through the constant chaos, many farmers are leaving the industry, taking local jobs, and indeed food security, with them. Grand schemes and big infrastructure projects are all very well, and they benefit the towns that win them, but they are no use to the people who cannot get to those towns in the first place. I will come on to that shortly, but before I do I want to talk about digital infrastructure.

It is not surprising that the UK is one of the least efficient countries in Europe when, in 2022, one in 10 of my constituents still cannot get internet speeds above 10 megabytes per second. It is not fair to expect rural businesses to compete with their urban counterparts when they cannot connect with their customers or suppliers. Connecting rural areas both digitally and physically is key to improving their futures.

Last week, I heard from a pensioner near Market Drayton who was without a driving licence for 18 months —a Government failing for another day—and was therefore effectively under house arrest, only allowed out on day release once a week when the local charity bus passed by. He and his wife wanted to contribute to the local economy but were held back from doing so because they could not get to the high street. We live in a country where nearly £18 billion has been spent on a rail service in one of the best-connected cities in the world, but in Shropshire on a Sunday there is only one bus service running in the whole of the county, and Market Drayton is at risk of losing its one-hourly service on a Saturday as well. Boosting bus services will reconnect communities, enable young people to access work and social opportunities, and benefit healthcare, the economy and the environment.

The reality is that the Conservatives have taken the votes of rural Britain for granted for so long they have just stopped listening to its needs. Take the cost of living crisis, which is undoubtedly worse in rural areas. Housing costs are higher, food costs are higher and transport costs are higher. Houses are often older and more expensive to heat and wages are lower, but if your home is off-grid the support available is a measly £100, to which access is the best-kept secret in Britain.

We need to fund our councils fairly so they can provide not only the social care to free up our hospitals and ambulance services, but the other services taxpayers expect to improve the quality of life of all residents. We need to invest in our digital infrastructure for businesses, and to encourage young people to stay and work in the local area. We need to allow councils to develop and deliver housing plans that meet the specific requirements of their economies and communities. Councils bidding for small pots of money to spend on isolated projects that will go way over budget because of the economic chaos will not deliver that. Giving the power to our councils, properly funded to be able to deliver them, will deliver for our communities. We really need to address this point now.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Dunne (Ludlow) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Robert Courts). He has been such a powerful campaigner for improvements to the quality of water in our rivers and in his West Oxfordshire constituency, so it is great to hear him speak about the subject. My constituency neighbour, the hon. Member for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan), also made a powerful speech.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby), who is a member of the all-party parliamentary group on rural services, which I chair, on securing the debate. It will not surprise the House that I will focus my brief remarks on the role that the Government have to play in improving the allocation of funding to rural areas.

The metrics for measuring rural deprivation in the funding formula are regrettably flawed, as the Prime Minister recognised when he toured the country this summer. He was roundly criticised for pointing out that even in seemingly more affluent areas of the countryside, there is real rural deprivation. Our political opponents tried to make fun of him for being out of touch, but he represents one of the largest rural constituencies in England and what he said revealed that he is completely in touch with what is going on in real rural Britain. At present, the indices used to measure multiple deprivation do not adequately take his point into account. The Rural Services Network, which supports the all-party group I chair, has provided a useful briefing on this debate for colleagues. It has found that rural areas receive 37%—£105—less per head in Government funding than their urban counterparts.

Rural communities not only receive poorer services, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon pointed out, but suffer as a result of lower wages—£2,500 less per head, on average—and face significantly higher costs. Rural residents pay 21%, or some £104, more per head in council tax bills than their urban counterparts because the Government grant is distributed in favour of urban areas. Weekly transport costs are about £40 higher; rural families spend 4% more of their disposable income on transport each week. In many larger rural areas, and particularly in Shropshire, public transport is very thin on the ground, so people have to rely on cars. The way energy prices have been going, the £40 figure, which predates the energy crisis, will be an underestimate.

Nowhere are these issues more apparent than in my constituency. Ludlow is geographically the sixth largest constituency in England; following the proposals announced yesterday by the Boundary Commission, it will become the fifth largest by gaining 100 square miles from my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski), whom I am pleased to see supporting the debate. Rural areas have their own inherent beauty, and the lack of people—the sparsity of population—is one of the reasons why they are pleasant places to live and why people choose to live there. However, population density is a fundamental problem because the allocation of funding from central Government is based on people. With just 56 people per square kilometre, Ludlow has one of the lowest population densities of any constituency in England.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

The size of Shropshire’s elderly population is disproportionate, and our social care costs are going through the roof. Our council spends 83p in each pound of its budget on adult social care costs. Does my right hon. Friend agree that as well as levelling up, the Government need to do more to support our councils in this regard?

[Philip Dunne]

The pressures of social care costs in areas whose demographics make them particularly acute are reaching crisis level. We notice that in Shrewsbury in particular, and the same point was made by the hon. Member for North Shropshire.

As others have pointed out, we also suffer from poor broadband provision speeds. Although broadband accessibility may be there as a result of the Government’s gigabit programme, the speeds in rural areas are about a third slower than those in urban areas. We also have problems with access to public transport, as I have already mentioned. Fewer than 50% of rural residents have access to a further education site within 30 minutes of their homes via public transport. Access to both employment and education is a challenge. Rural residents are now more reliant on off-grid energy generation; many face huge rises in the cost of domestic heating oil this winter as about a third of Shropshire households are not connected to the gas grid.

It is therefore critical that the Government continue to connect rural homes to superfast broadband, support rural transport provision, and, as a matter of urgency, clarify the way in which those in off-grid homes—including residents of park homes and others who do not pay their own electricity bills—can gain access to help with their energy bills.

I strongly encourage the Minister to look again at the funding formula. Although Shropshire is an objectively affluent county, two of its lower-layer super output areas fall within the 10% most deprived in the country, including one in Ludlow. However, they are unlikely to be highlighted by any of the national indices of deprivation that the Minister’s officials will draw to his attention.

The Rural Services Network is offering some suggestions to encourage closer alignment of funding formulas with the reality of rural living, and to ensure that they reflect the increased cost of delivery in rural areas. I should be happy to discuss these issues with the Minister, through the all-party parliamentary group. In addition to the metrics already included in the White Paper, metrics such as the proportion of those in fuel poverty, the frequency of public transport services, the percentage of premises with superfast broadband and the distance to further education providers would all supply a more accurate snapshot of inequality in rural areas.

Finally, let me add to the comments of my neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham, and encourage the Minister to look favourably on the levelling-up bids from Shropshire Council, including the Craven Arms “gateway to growth” bid, which I have been pleased to support. The bid would deliver a major transport infrastructure project in the heart of south Shropshire, and would unlock undeveloped employment land. This would provide up to 50,000 square metres of space for jobs, and a further 500 residential dwellings in a future phase. Unlocking new jobs, and opportunities for training and skills, ticks many of the boxes in the Minister’s criteria. I urge him to consider accepting some of the bids in rural areas, so that those areas are not left behind in the levelling-up round that falls under his careful stewardship.