Public Services: Rural Areas

Debate between David Smith and Emma Foody

Wednesday 22nd January 2025 Commons Chamber

[David Smith (North Northumberland) (Lab)]

Colleagues across the House will be delighted to know that, as we have rattled through the business today, we get to have a four-hour debate, so I welcome interventions, and will welcome anybody else making a speech.

It is genuinely a delight to lead my first Adjournment debate, especially one focusing on access to public services in rural areas. I am proud to be a rural Labour MP, so it is especially good to talk on this subject. I have given my debate the subtitle, “The Case for the Countryside”; Members can feel free to bear that in mind when making an intervention.

The key point in this debate is that we as a country need to value the people, the landscapes, and the produce of our countryside a great deal more. For too long, successive Governments have not recognised the crucial role of rural communities to our national flourishing. Up to 10 million people across the country live in rural areas like North Northumberland, and our natural landscapes and quiet places form a deep and enduring part of Britain’s imagination. Rural areas often possess enduring community, but they also risk becoming museums, full of interesting artefacts for visitors, but lifeless and neglected underneath. That is something, I am sure, that none of us in this Chamber wants. It is vital that rural communities are vibrant and full of life.

In this speech, I will outline the domino effect, by which a range of below-average rural public services, especially poor public transport, underperforming education, inaccessible healthcare and low connectivity, interact and overlap to drag rural areas down, including North Northumberland. I will also remind this place that rural Britain is a deep and integral part of our nation. As the frantic pace of life in our big cities has increased, so has our ability to extract, consume and bottle the virtues of rurality, while rural regions struggle at times to see the benefit in return. Every time we eat a meal, switch the lights on, turn the radiator up or take a trip to the countryside, we are benefiting from rural areas doing the hard work of producing and delivering, often out of view.

I have to ask whether our increasingly urban nation is committed to the flourishing of our rural areas in return, because the quality of our public services sometimes suggests that it is not. According to the Rural Services Network, those in predominantly rural areas pay 20% more council tax than those in predominantly urban areas, yet in urban areas, Government-funded spending power is 41% higher. I am not trying to set up some kind of dichotomy or competition between rural and urban areas; we simply have to acknowledge that sometimes our rural areas miss out when it comes to public services.

That spending gap impacts the practical delivery of services. In the northern part of my constituency, the nearest accident and emergency department is an hour and a half away. Many children heading out of the constituency for secondary school spend two hours a day travelling to and from school. The village of Pegswood, of 3,000 people, has a doctor for just half a day a week. I wonder how rural Britain can nurture our nation’s traditions, history and community, as well as produce the goods so desperately needed by urban areas, when its basic public services can fall below the basic standard.

Any conversation about rural public services begins and ends with transport. Rural authorities spend 4.6 times less per head on bus services compared to urban authorities, yet those living in small rural settlements travel a third greater distance than their urban counterparts.

[Emma Foody (Cramlington and Killingworth) (Lab/Co-op)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on bringing this important topic to the House. As an MP whose constituency also covers part of Northumberland, I know all too well the impact on public services in recent years. A mum in New Hartley recently shared with me how the unreliability and inconsistency of the local bus service means that her son is often late for school. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is unacceptable for children to miss out on their education as a consequence of poor public services in rural areas?

[David Smith]

I could not agree more. I will come on to talk about bus services, but the situation is especially challenging in counties such as Northumberland. I certainly find that there are students in my constituency who struggle to get to school.

Getting around areas such as North Northumberland without a car is extremely difficult, and North Northumberland residents are right to be sceptical of local bus services, considering that Arriva, which runs the primary bus service in my area, is owned by an American equity investment fund based in Miami. Members can make of that what they will. From 2017 to 2022, the distance travelled by bus services in Northumberland fell by over a third—the highest reduction of any authority in the north-east. The confused status of cross-border buses makes a bad situation worse, with many people around Berwick crossing the Scottish-English border multiple times a week, and having to own multiple bus passes or buy new tickets to change services. Also, the elderly cannot use their free bus pass on both sides of the border.

Recently, I was made aware of a constituent’s teenage daughter who undertook an apprenticeship across the border in July. Emma—not her real name—lives in Berwick and was catching a bus to and from work; however, just a few weeks later, Borders Buses removed the morning bus. This young woman is now relying on taxis to get her to her apprenticeship in the morning. This is costing her family, who are not in a position to afford it, £150 a week. She endured a difficult time at school, but was thriving in her apprenticeship, yet that is now at risk.

What we need in rural areas is a publicly controlled bus system run for public service, not private profit, with an emphasis on accessibility, affordability and simplicity. As luck would have it, that is exactly what the Government are aiming for and what Kim McGuinness, the Labour metro Mayor for the North East, is seeking to introduce. She has capped bus fares at £2.50 for over-18s and started the process of bringing bus routes back into public control, and she wants to invest in an integrated public transport system that gets people where they need to go. No one expects rural Britain to have the same level of public transport as central London, but a reliable network would boost confidence, improve work and school opportunities, and boost struggling communities.

Estate Adoption: North-east England

Debate between David Smith and Emma Foody

Tuesday 15th October 2024 Westminster Hall

[Emma Foody]

This is an experience that is shared around the country, and we need to look at all available options to we resolve this matter. We are not talking about months that residents are left in this situation, but years—five, 10, 15 years, in which families see their children grow up and leave home before a road is completed.

Before the debate, I asked my constituents for their testimonies and experiences of the range of issues that they face. David, who lives on the Fairways estate in the west of Cramlington speaks of roads and pavements on the estate that are largely without tarmac, which has made using bikes, wheelchairs, and pushchairs dangerous outside the home. He talks of how residents are cut off from other facilities such as shops, schools, and parks, because the necessary footpaths were not built for years. He says that only after constant pressure from residents did the developer build a footpath, which is unlit and poorly laid—it would be difficult to use a pushchair or a wheelchair on it—and it links one housing estate to another through a field. If people have a car, the roads are not much better. They are often unfinished, with is a higher risk of damaging vehicles. When the roads are icy, there is more risk of traffic accidents.

Another constituent, Iain, has been contacting the developer of Five Mile Park in Wideopen for three years regarding the road surface. The estate was constructed almost 10 years ago, and he has been given excuse after excuse about why work has been delayed on the roads, pavements and footpaths. The developer informed Iain that the road had been completed more than a year ago. However, poor-quality work by contractors means that it has not been brought up to adoptable standards. That is just one case of many in which a developer will claim to have completed roads, pavements or other infrastructure, but not up to a standard for the local authority to adopt them.

[David Smith (North Northumberland) (Lab)]

This is such an important debate. Likewise, in Amble in my constituency of North Northumberland, constituents have contacted me about a private developer that has left their estate in a scruffy and untidy manner and which is using a contractual error to try to escape blame. That is in the context of a 65% decrease in planning spending in the north of England, so there is also a key issue about the resources that local authorities need. Does my hon. Friend agree that private developers should be willing to bring estates up to an acceptable standard so that local authorities are not forced to adopt unkempt and unfinished estates?

[Emma Foody]

I thank my hon. Friend for raising those issues. I know it is something that is raised with all Northumberland MPs, and I agree that we need to look at all mechanisms to ensure that estates are at an adoptable standard.

In my constituency, Dan from West Meadows, another estate, shared his worries that local football pitches would never be brought up to the standard that has been promised. Mark, who lives in Backworth View, told me how the street lighting on his road has never been switched on in the five years he has lived there, yet he is paying full council tax and management fees. Many residents express frustration that they are paying both estate management fees and council tax, yet, because the estate is unadopted, they have poorer quality infrastructure, despite paying more.

Local authorities often feel the brunt of complaints from residents, but they hold little power to compel developers to bring private unadopted estates to the standards required for them to be adopted. Local authorities should not be footing the bill for delays and lack of delivery from private house builders. Too often, local authorities are hamstrung. The developers have long since left the site, so local authorities are left fielding complaints from residents, despite having little power to compel action. A chief planning officer at a local authority told me that the current system is skewed towards developers. They pick their own contractors, timeframes and materials, which are often not up to the standard for a council to be able to adopt their work, yet it is the local authority that is left with understandably frustrated residents long after the developer has gone.