Rural Communities

Edward Leigh Excerpts

Thursday 9th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

My hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh) has done the House a great service in ensuring that we have a debate on rural affairs—a subject we do not talk about enough.

There is an altogether too rosy picture of rural life, particularly in metropolitan circles. Some of the people who write our national newspapers seem to think that we all live in lovely stone houses in Cotswold villages inhabited by media moguls and retired admirals having country lunches. That is not to say that retired admirals can afford to live in the Cotswolds any more—it is probably only retired hedge fund managers who can. However, the reality of life in remote rural areas that are, dare I say it, less fashionable than the Cotswolds or Buckinghamshire, such as the part of north Lincolnshire that I represent, which is three and a half hours from London whatever form of transport one takes, is often very tough indeed. That is why this debate is important.

My hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton and the hon. Member for Ynys Môn (Albert Owen) outlined in a very measured way some of the extra costs of living in rural Britain. I will deal with those costs in a few moments, but first I will talk about planning and localism.

If I walk out of my cottage on the edge of the Lincolnshire wolds, which is an area of outstanding natural beauty, I can walk up the hill and have an uninterrupted view over the vale of Lincoln to the Lincoln edge. The hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) knows that view very well. It is a fantastic view. Perhaps it is not as good as the view that you have, Mr Deputy Speaker, in the forest of Bowland, but we do almost as well in Lincolnshire as you do in Lancashire. We are very proud of that.

It is likely, however, that local people will soon be ignored by the planning authorities and that vast wind farms, higher than Lincoln cathedral, will be built along the Lincoln edge. This is not a debate about wind farms, but it is a debate about rural areas and surely it is a debate about the right of local people to have a say. The planning committee of West Lindsey district council has opposed unanimously the application for those vast wind farms. I believe that the planning process should respect the views of local people, particularly given that there are good planning reasons relating to local archaeology and the proximity to RAF Scampton, as well as the famous view that I have mentioned.

Localism affects other parts of the planning process. If Members read the front page of The Daily Telegraph today, they will see a banner headline that contains remarks made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi), who sits in the No. 10 policy unit and is therefore a man of some influence. He talks about the national planning policy framework and makes the point that the views of local people about new housing must not be overridden by central Government.

Local councils are not naturally nimbyist. The people who sit on them are democratically elected. They recognise the need for new housing and for new affordable housing in particular. Surely we believe in localism. I thought that localism was a primary undertaking of the coalition Government. It does not behove central Government to impose their views about the nature of house building on rural councils. I am all in favour of encouragement and of a broad framework. However, if people of worth and ability are to be encouraged to serve on councils in Lincolnshire and other rural areas, they must believe that they will have some influence and power, and that knowing their local areas gives them some right, in broad terms, to determine how much new housing should be built.

To turn to a vexed issue, I want to disagree with one of the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton, because there is no bedroom tax—it really is a spare room subsidy. In rural areas, we have to try to find a way—she was feeling her way towards this point—to distribute low-cost housing and to move people on from housing that is under-occupied so that younger families can get into it. As she said, this is a complex issue because there is not enough low-cost, single-bedroom social housing in rural areas. Local councils such as East Lindsey and West Lindsey district councils in my area are working on the problem and the local housing associations are very aware of it. I agree with her to the extent that localism comes into this. In this complicated area, central Government must work with local councils to ensure a good supply of low-cost housing.

The cost of living in rural areas is often not recognised. One can get bogged down in statistics and details, but it is important that we, as Members of Parliament who represent rural areas, put on the record the sheer cost of living in rural Britain, compared with living in urban Britain. People who live in entirely rural seats a long way from the capital are very under-represented in this city. Often, our voice does not get through. That affects all essential public services. In policing, despite high rural crime—I am a victim of rural crime myself—Lincolnshire is bottom of the heap for funding per head. It affects transport and hospital services. Again and again, despite the fact that incomes are lower in rural areas, the funding that we receive from central Government is inadequate. Our political voice is not powerful enough. We do not have a sufficient number of Members of Parliament or, dare I say it, Members in marginal seats, but we have a right to speak out because there is a clear injustice in the national funding formulas against rural people, who are often living in poverty.

That is not just rhetoric; it is fact. There have been a number of academic studies on the minimum income standard. That concept was invented by researchers and is carefully worked out. It is based on what members of the public think people need in order to have the minimum acceptable standard of living. There is no doubt that people in rural areas tend to have to spend 10% to 20% more on everyday requirements than those in urban areas, even though they often have lower wages or salaries. To reach a minimum living standard on 2010 levels, the research indicates that single working adults need to earn at least £15,600 a year in rural towns, £17,900 in villages and £18,000 in hamlets or remote countryside. Those in urban areas need earn only £14,400. For couples with two children, the annual earnings requirement is much higher at about £33,000 to £42,000, depending on the circumstances. I assure the House that many people who live in rural areas do not earn anything like £42,000 a year. The Minister, who is an excellent Member of Parliament, knows the scale of the problem in Cornwall. Rural poverty is a real problem.

The hon. Member for Ynys Môn mentioned fuel poverty. The Government’s statistical digest of rural England for 2013 notes that, proportionally, more households in rural areas are in fuel poverty than the national average. That is obvious—it is a clear fact. Fuel poverty is even greater in sparse villages and hamlets than it is in rural towns. Some 36% of rural households are off the gas grid, as the hon. Gentleman said, as opposed to only 8% in urban areas. As we all know to our personal cost, those households are reliant on much more expensive domestic fuels than others. I do not pretend that I know the answer to that problem, but I know that the Minister will address it when he sums up.

Average weekly household expenditure on transport in urban areas is £55. In rural towns and their fringes it is £62, in villages it is £78, and in hamlets and isolated dwellings it is £90. The average for England is £58. In rural areas, the highest proportion of income that is spent on an individual commodity or service goes on transport. We should consider the sort of wages that people in rural areas earn. There are a lot of retired people on relatively modest pensions. They have to spend an average of no less than £90 a week on transport if they live in hamlets or isolated dwellings, which is an enormous burden.

It is obvious that most people who live in rural areas travel further than other people—45% further per year than the English average and 53% further than those who live in urban areas. Plainly, the very DNA of rural existence requires travel over longer distances. We in Lincolnshire know all about long distances. Some 96% of urban households have a regular bus service, and the 72 Members of Parliament who represent constituencies in Greater London have fantastic tube and bus services. Only 42% of households in rural areas have a regular bus service. Famously, in my constituency in north Lincolnshire, we have the train service between Gainsborough, which I represent, and Cleethorpes, which runs once a week. Imagine a train that runs once a week—it is truly bizarre.

We cannot assume that everybody in a rural area, in the type of village in which I live, has access to a car, although there have been tremendously impressive efforts such as dial-a-bus services. Even if they do have access to a car, the cost that I have mentioned—£90 a week—may be truly prohibitive. There was a local couple from north Lincolnshire on television who could not even afford to go on holiday in England, because they could not afford the petrol to get where they wanted to go on the coast. People are having real difficulty in affording petrol, and some people in rural areas do not have a car and so have virtually no transport.

I do not want to say a great deal about access to broadband internet, because my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton dealt with the matter so skilfully. However, we all know that average broadband speeds are much slower in rural areas than in cities, and that a higher proportion of rural households have slow or no broadband. I am a bit technophobic, I admit, but when I am sitting in my cottage trying to use my local wi-fi and get on to broadband to do my parliamentary business, it is ridiculously slow. It is absurd—if I were trying to run a business, I would be out of business by now. I simply could not work in my own rural area. I have to do all my work from a computer in London. The internet simply does not work fast enough in rural areas.

In 2010—again, this is fact, not rhetoric—only 5% of urban areas had broadband speeds lower than 2 megabits a second, whereas the figure was 23% of rural areas. Surely that must be a priority for the Government. We are going to encourage people to avoid heavy transport costs and so on by working at home, are we not? How can we charge the rural economy if we have such slow broadband speeds?

I turn briefly to support for farming. I welcome my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State’s announcement that the Government will reduce the planned common agricultural policy modulation rate from 15% to 12%, which shows that the Government are listening. Like many rural Members of Parliament, I have been approached on the matter by farmers, and the National Farmers Union has rightly been concerned about it.

I know it is a matter for Europe rather than for us, but my personal view is that we should still try to transfer more agricultural subsidies from larger farms and estates and towards working farmers, many of whom are struggling. We need to help them more.

It is obvious that we have a problem of poverty in rural areas, and that there is not sufficient political weight to address it. The idea of minimum income standards is, in some ways, tied to that of the living wage. There has been a lot of debate about the living wage, but mainly focusing on areas such as London and the other big cities. I believe that the concept applies even more powerfully to the countryside. The social teaching of the Churches, which is a rich vein of thought and very much to be recommended as a read, puts strong emphasis on justice in the relationship between employers and their employees. For an employer to deprive a worker of his justly earned wage is traditionally described as “a sin crying out to heaven for vengeance”. It is that important. Provided that an individual is working full time, it is basic justice that he or she be paid enough to support himself or herself and their family.

We Conservatives would be foolish to concede the forum of debate on economic justice to Opposition Members. Conservatism has never existed, and should never exist, in some hyper-capitalist vacuum. Of course, we know the value of economic freedom and the marketplace, because we can see the unimaginable leaps in prosperity and the reduction of poverty that have taken place under free market economies over the past 200 years.

[Nia Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Gentleman regret the abolition of the Agricultural Wages Board, which provided some of the very things that he is speaking about, such as decent levels of pay and a clear indication of what work is worth what pay?

[Sir Edward Leigh]

That is an interesting point, but we cannot go back in time to a structure created under the Attlee Government whereby agricultural wages boards determined what wages were paid in the agriculture sector. Let us look at the farming economy in Lincolnshire. I live on an estate of 5,000 acres—I do not own it, I hasten to say. When the boards were created, there would probably have been 40 or 50 agricultural labourers working the estate. Now, there are only one or two. Although the hon. Lady’s point is fair, I do not believe that agricultural labourers’ wages are quite the problem in current rural Britain that they were in the immediate post-war period. I am thinking more of the problems that are loaded on to the great majority of people in the countryside, who are not farmers and do not work for farmers but who are living in fuel poverty, are retired or find difficulty with their transport costs. Their children have difficulty in getting housing, and they perhaps work in low-paid jobs in the catering industry in local towns. That is more typically the structure of the current rural economy than the historic structure of large numbers of people working in agriculture.

I was talking about economic freedom and the value of the marketplace, but also about the common good, and I want to finish on that point. The freedom of the marketplace must be protected within an orderly context, with the best being conserved and the important and vital things that might otherwise be destroyed by the cold calculations of mere profit being preserved. In rural areas such as mine in Lincolnshire, that means businesses, farmers, employers and local and central Government coming together to co-operate for the common good, whether on agricultural subsidies, flood defences, the price of petrol or many other matters.

I am sure the Government are trying to listen to country people, but it is important that we speak out and put pressure on the Government. We need action on fuel poverty, the cost of living and disparities between rural and urban areas, particularly with regard to Government funding, which is in the Government’s control. I hope and trust that the Minister will give us good news in those regards when he responds.

--- Later in debate ---

[Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to take part in this excellent and wide-ranging debate. There have been experienced and knowledgeable contributions from all Members who have taken part. I thank the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, under the sterling stewardship of the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh), for its sixth report on rural communities. There are 143 pages of recorded evidence—written and oral—from, among others, the Rural Coalition, the County Councils Network, BT, the Dispensing Doctors Association, Calor Gas, the Consumers Association, the Plunkett Foundation and all other groups with strong rural interests. It is a thorough piece of work that should be commended.

This has been a good debate, and I want to touch briefly on some of the contributions. First, the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton summed up all the matters raised in the sixth report, which was a real tour de force, and I will return to some of them in a moment. Interestingly, her proposal for an annual debate on rural communities received good feedback from all parts of the House. In fact, there has been a great deal of support for it in the Chamber today. I am sure that you, Madam Deputy Speaker, will have noticed that, as will have the Leader of the House and the Minister. It is certainly something that we would support in line with other good debates we have on matters such as fisheries.

Let me turn to the contribution of my hon. Friend the Member for Ynys Môn (Albert Owen). I can vouch for the beauty of his constituency, which he waxed lyrical about. It is second only to the beautiful hidden gem of the sources of the Rivers Ogmore and Llynfi and the surrounding acres of heaven.

My hon. Friend mentioned the fact that transmission costs of energy are much higher in rural areas such as north-west Wales. He also talked about off-grid energy costs. More than 126,000 people in Wales rely on off-grid energy, and they are not all in areas that we would customarily regard as peripherally rural. They are often in mining communities such as my own. I pay tribute to him for championing these off-grid energy issues for many years.

Like other Members, my hon. Friend raised the issue of petrol rebates. He made the interesting observation that the rebates seem to be going to those areas that are of a particular colour on the political map of this country. I am sure that that will change over time with his strong representations.

The hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) spoke well for his constituents and highlighted the fact that poverty and deprivation can be hidden behind this idyllic rural image of thatched cottages and leafy lanes, or even, as he mentioned, hedge-fund millionaires’ mansions. He also talked about the additional costs of living in rural areas and of accessing services and said that 20% more is spent on everyday goods than in urban areas. That theme was picked up by other Members including the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Dr Whiteford), who also mentioned petrol costs.

The hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Glyn Davies) —we had a lot of Celts here today from the Celtic fringes, from the south-west of England, through Wales and elsewhere—talked about the costs of providing rural services such as health in places like Powys and the need for good cross-border work on this and on other aspects such as transport. I certainly subscribe to such a view as my wife works for the NHS in Powys. It is a very real issue.

The hon. Gentleman also talked interestingly about a potential review of the red meat levy and how it is properly allocated around the regions and nations of the UK. He recognised, though, the good work that is done centrally. His call on that matter is timely, and hopefully the Minister will have heard him.

My hon. Friend the Member for Llanelli (Nia Griffith) powerfully reminded us that some rural communities, including my own, were previously at the heart of the industrial and extractive industries such as steel and coal. Curiously, they are often missed from these debates on rural areas. In a fairly short time frame, those areas have been exposed to all the problems characteristic of rural isolation and peripherality, so it is good to see them strongly represented today.

My hon. Friend also picked up on the abolition of the Agricultural Wages Board, which was opposed in Wales not just by Labour but by the National Farmers Union in Wales, the Federation of Young Farmers and others, but I suspect that that matter is for another day. She also touched on the fears over the long-term future of rural post office deliveries and the link between Royal Mail and the health of the post office network.

The hon. Member for Ceredigion (Mr Williams) spoke well for his constituents, but was slightly derogatory about the fact that his area had not been included in the rural derogation for petrol proposals, and a few other Members picked up on that, and put in pitches for their area as well. He also talked about the additional costs of living in rural areas.

No one has talked specifically about the research that has been done to show the additional cost of food in rural areas, which was mentioned in the report. I am sure the Minister will remark on that matter when he comes to speak. The hon. Member for High Peak (Andrew Bingham) talked about the power of rural communities to come together to help and protect each other. It reminds me of much of the co-operative movement or even, dare I say it, the old slogan used by Labour and the union movement, which says, “In unity is strength.”

The hon. Member for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire (Simon Hart) observed that the numbers in the Chamber were not as high as we would all like. Perhaps they will be in future debates. We may be in few in number, but we are among the best. He summed up well the false and dangerous metaphorical wall that we put up around “rural” issues and communities. In fact, the health and wealth of our cities, market towns, hamlets or crofts and all points in between are seamlessly interwoven, a point also made by the hon. Member for Salisbury (John Glen).

The hon. Member for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire mentioned in closing that 2% had been suggested as the proportion of the electorate represented by rural MPs. I would challenge that, as it depends on how we define rurality. As I said earlier, a wide range of rural issues also affect places with industrial parts. My area is 20 miles from the M4 corridor and the main south Wales rail network, yet it has issues with off-grid energy, rurality, isolation and so on.

The hon. Member for Salisbury talked about the roll-out of superfast broadband and said that it would be the measure of success as the election approached. At that point, I looked across and I am sure that I saw the Minister gulp. I know that he is not at all worried about it—[Interruption.] The Minister is indicating from a sedentary position that he was smiling.

The hon. Member for Macclesfield (David Rutley) talked with passion about his constituency and mentioned the Wincle trout races. He also mentioned the Macclesfield sheep dog trials—not guilty, say I. The old ones are the best. He talked with some fluency about the economic impact of the Ramblers, and I declare an interest as president of the Glamorgan Ramblers and vice-president of Ramblers Cymru. We need to do more and to see a speedy and resourced roll-out of the England coastal path. That will be a huge benefit for rural coastal communities.

As I was preparing for today’s debate over my breakfast, I picked up my daily breakfast reading. I was surprised by the fact that who knows what glorious conjunction of the stars had brought about, on the same day as we were to debate rural communities, the front-page headline, “Coalition’s legacy could be harm to the countryside.” I spluttered over my Weetabix. One might expect such a headline ripping into the coalition’s record from the Morning Star, or from revolutionary pamphleteers such as The Guardian or The Independent, but from the Telegraph—The Daily Telegraph, the voice of the Tory shires? Incidentally, I must say that the Telegraph’s rugby coverage is very good.

One might expect such a headline to have been generated by a clarion voice of the left—a flag-waving, “Red flag” singing, barricade-storming sentinel of socialism, attacking the serried ranks of landed privilege and wealth—but I spluttered again over my breakfast, this time toast and jam, when I read that it was inspired by the criticisms of the hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi), a Conservative Member of Parliament and, apparently, an adviser to No. 10, too. I have cancelled my subscription to Socialist Worker, so taken am I by the successful attacks on the Government by this new revolutionary cell in No. 10 and our fourth estate. Rumours are circulating that the hon. Gentleman is what we term a “sleeper”, who has spent years burrowing into Tory high command and is now under instruction to tear the house of cards down from within. Time will tell.

Ultimately, the debate is set against a rural backdrop of tough times, including for working families. We know that across the UK working families are struggling because of the impact of the policies being pursued. A typical family will be £1,600 worse off at the end of the Prime Minister’s tenure, but research shows that there is an added impact on rural communities across the country, where wages fell in real terms by £1,300 between 2010 and 2012. The nature of rurality means that rural families are spending £2,700 more on everyday goods than their urban counterparts.

We know that the bedroom tax hits rural households disproportionately severely, as working families, who are already struggling to find affordable homes where they were brought up, close to where they work and to their families, are displaced further and further afield, weakening community ties, driving up the cost of living and working and ultimately undermining the sustainability of those rural communities.

The viability of rural communities is intimately tied up with their ability to access markets, to sell goods, to trade, to access services and to engage with Government and agencies remotely and digitally. Whether we are talking about a farmer sorting out forms for single farm payments on his handheld device or at the kitchen table on a laptop, a bed and breakfast or a field of yurts selling accommodation, a surf school in Cornwall, a school-child accessing online educational materials for homework, or just Mr and Mrs Jones trying to take up the Prime Minister’s advice to switch energy providers and save money or looking to make a fleecy purchase after taking up the Energy Secretary’s advice to wear a jumper to cut down on heating costs, they all need access to the internet. However, the National Audit Office damned the Government early last spring for being two years behind schedule and £200 million over budget, a point that has also been picked up by the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee in its work.

Things might be changing, but as the days of autumn closed in last year, the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr Heath), who was in the Chamber earlier, freed from the shackles of DEFRA ministerial office, said:

“A man with a stick would be quicker at delivering a message than my so-called broadband”

and as we approached Christmas, he further complained:

“The rural equivalent of waiting for Godot is waiting for high-speed broadband”.—[Official Report, 4 December 2013; Vol. 571, c. 912.]

Those words came from a former Minister. At least with “Waiting for Godot” some deep philosophical point is being pondered—the wait is the very thing—and there is ultimately an end point as we all return home from the theatre. People in rural communities cannot see the end of the long-running broadband and mobile drama.

I realise I risk sounding a little negative about the Government’s record on rural communities, so let me be a little more positive by suggesting some ideas that would help the hard-stretched rural communities, businesses and households struggling under a prolonged cost of living crisis. We know that the Government have turned their back on one proposal that would help many rural households by refusing to accept a price freeze while the market is reset for the consumer—we will have to wait for the next election for that—but they could do something for off-grid energy users in two ways. First, they could bring off-grid under a regulatory structure to bring long-term thinking to the sector and give certainty to consumers and investors that their interests are being looked after. Secondly, they could bring forward payment of the winter fuel payment so that vulnerable elderly householders could purchase oil and gas outside autumn/winter when typical costs can increase by hundreds of pounds, as I know from experience. The Government could also look at the lamentable delivery to those same households of the energy company obligation and green deal installations on energy efficiency. Of 379,297 measures installed before the end of October 2013, how many have been delivered under the carbon saving community obligation rural sub-obligation? Only 51. That is not good enough.

Labour would, with no additional spending commitment and within existing resources, transfer £75 million from the super-connected cities programme into a digital inclusion fund of clear and direct benefit to the businesses, communities and households in rural areas that could make the internet work better for them. As my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Toby Perkins), the shadow Business, Innovation and Skills Minister, has made clear, Labour’s proposals on business rates would lead to an average reduction of £410 in year one for the 1.5 million businesses with turnover below £50,000, a disproportionate number of which are in rural areas. That initial saving would be followed by a business rates freeze the following year.

Affordable housing has been talked about by many Members from all parties. As we have heard, purchasing a home in a rural community requires six and half times the rural average wage. More must be done.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

So, a Labour Government are going to transfer resources and funding from marginal seats in the great cities to Conservative seats in rural areas, are they?

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

The point raised by the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee on funding allocations in rural and urban areas is interesting and merits consideration. There are pockets of deprivation.

The point I was making about affordable homes when the hon. Gentleman intervened is that we need to build more homes, but they need to be the right homes in the right place, well designed and with bottom-up input from communities. We need to get on with it. The hon. Member for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire made exactly that point: the obstacles to planning and providing affordable houses to rent and purchase are stopping those communities growing and forcing young people to move away from the area.

I do not have time to touch on the cultural, social and economic importance of farming, on the food and drink sector or on transport, education and so on. Other Members did.

If I have been provocative in parts, let me be consensual in conclusion. I think we can all agree that this has been a good and strong debate and we thank the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton and the Select Committee for securing it. Perhaps we can all support her call to make it a regular fixture in the parliamentary calendar.