Building Societies Act 1986 (Amendment) Bill

Debate between George Freeman and Thérèse Coffey

2nd reading
Friday 19th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[George Freeman (Mid Norfolk) (Con)]

It is a huge pleasure able to join Friday business as a Back Bencher and to support this important Bill on behalf of my Mid Norfolk constituents. Let me start by congratulating the hon. Member for Sunderland Central (Julie Elliott) on introducing the Bill and on winning that prized first place in the ballot, so that she can make a difference with the Bill. I thank the Government for working with her and all of us who have supported her on the Bill. This is a good example of cross-party work, and of the Government working with Back Benchers in the interests of our constituents and the shared and mutual interests of the citizens of this country. I only wish more people around the country were able to see the quality of the work going on in the House on days like this.

I want, particularly, to highlight the importance of the Bill for rural areas such as mine. The hon. Lady represents the magnificently urban constituency of Sunderland Central, but I represent a magnificently the rural constituency of Mid Norfolk—114 villages and five towns. As I candidate, I rashly promised to cycle the border one Saturday morning, but then discovered it was 94 miles long. It took me rather more than one Saturday morning. Much of this country is rural, up north as well as down south and in the south west. I want to focus on the importance of the Bill and building societies in rural areas and on our town high streets in providing cash facilities, and supporting first time-buyers and pensioners with cash.

In Dereham recently, I saw Nationwide packed, with queues outside of pensioners moving from the bank, which is closing, to support Nationwide, as Nationwide supports them. In my part of the country we have a huge number of retired folk who want cash—they do not all want to be totally digital. They value and need that interaction with a living and breathing human being when they go to save or take out cash. Nationwide Building Society is doing great work to support them. I am really keen to support the Bill, as the hon. Lady knows, largely because of that particular rural need.

[Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)]

I should declare that I am a member of three building societies, and until recently I had a mortgage with Nationwide. I agree with my hon. Friend about the importance of building societies in rural communities. I think of local examples such as Suffolk Building Society, but elsewhere around the country there is Newbury Building Society and similar. That connection to the community really matters. It is important to get on with this primary legislation, but we also need to get the negative secondary regulations through as quickly as possible so that we can boost mortgage borrowing for families who are keen to get on to the housing ladder.

[George Freeman]

I completely agree—my right hon. Friend makes an excellent point, and we will come to that in due course. She is absolutely right.

I want to focus on building societies in rural areas. The flight of the banks, in particular from rural areas but also from a lot of high street banking and the role they have traditionally carried out—this is partly why the Bill is so important—highlights the importance of cash in the rural economy. Many of my local small businesses are really struggling with how to bank cash properly. We also have a problem in our part of the world with ATMs now being subject to JCB theft—ATMs being ripped out of the wall. So, there is a cash problem and building societies have a really important role.

As well as reflecting the very best of old Labour, this is also, if I may say so, the very best of civic conservatism. This is Edward Burke’s little platoons. This is the weft and the warp of local connected responsible civic community-based capitalism; the sort of capitalism that small platoon civic conservatism has long championed. I would argue that all parties in Government over the past 40 years have slightly forgotten that that needs to be championed. We have seen the rise and the domination of big capital, big banks and big disconnected capitalism. I am here today as a card-carrying supporter of the mutuality model and civic capitalism. I think both main parties have that in common in their different traditions and history.

On rural banking and finance, in Mid Norfolk we have five towns and 114 villages. We are not quite halfway between Cambridge and Norwich. Traditionally, it has been something of a rural backwater. It is an agricultural community, with many retirees and pensioners moving to quiet rural Norfolk. It is a real challenge to ensure that our villages remain vibrant and our towns remain thriving. The model of development over the past 40 years has been over-focused on commuter housing. People drive their cars to Norwich and Cambridge during the day, and that sucks the life out of many of our villages.

The rise of online commerce and digital retail has also taken quite a lot of the life out of many of our towns, and our high streets are struggling to remain vibrant. The Government’s moves to reduce business rates has helped, but the pandemic and the cost of energy crisis, coming off the back of the Ukraine war, has hit rural areas disproportionately hard. That is a theme I will be picking up in the coming months in this House in the run-up to the Budget. Everyone has been hit by the cost of energy increase of course, but in rural areas there is a double triple whammy. Every member of staff in a company has to drive. Most of my relatively low-paid working families have one, two or three cars. They are not a luxury; they need them to be able to get to work. All our public services are hit—our bus services and our county council services—all across rural areas. We are paying a double whammy because of an over-dependency on transport and heating. That huge rural impact is hitting remote backwater rural areas very hard, particularly in my part of Norfolk.

In that context, it is urgent that we encourage the revival of the rural economy. I have long believed and campaigned locally that, with a slightly different approach to planning and development in our area, we could trigger something of a rural renaissance, with many small businesses popping up off the back of the Cambridge phenomenon and the Norwich Research Park. Small businesses often start off by working from home or looking for converted farm units; they are not in the city centre, but distributed. If we can get more businesses back into villages and small towns, we will have more people of working age in communities during the day. That will reduce congestion and commuting.

The model of a vibrant rural economy is key to so many of the priorities of successive Governments. We will never get to net zero if we keep shovelling people into cars and making them commute long distances in congested traffic jams. The more we can get people to work from home or nearer to home, travelling when they need to during the day and not in peak hours, the better. That vision of rural renaissance is key, but it will never happen if young people cannot afford to buy a house near to where they work, if thriving businesses on the high street are unable to cash-up, save and deposit cash safely, and if pensioners are unable to save, take out their deposits and interact with banking in the way they have for the past 50 or 60 years. We need to ensure that we build an economy for the people who live there.

That is what my campaign, The Norfolk Way, is all about. It is a project to promote that vision of rural growth. The Bill touches on much of that. One has only to see the flight of the mainstream banks out of such areas—I know that colleagues in other constituencies see that—and the desperation that people feel, whether they are first-time buyers or pensioners.

Ash Dieback Disease

Debate between George Freeman and Thérèse Coffey

Monday 12th November 2012 Commons Chamber

[George Freeman (Mid Norfolk) (Con)]

I speak as the Member of Parliament for Mid Norfolk, which sits right at the heart of the Norfolk cluster of the disease, and as the chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on agricultural science, which is taking a close interest in the matter. I know that all colleagues agree that this outbreak is a serious problem for our forestry industry and our landscape. I welcome the urgency of the reaction shown by the Secretary of State and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs team, and the professionalism with which they have handled the issue. More than 100,000 trees were felled in the summer, and the biggest ever survey of ash trees has been conducted. We have also seen several Cobra meetings, a national summit and an immediate ban on imports.

Outbreaks of disease that affect our biodiversity are never easy to manage, and it ill behoves the hon. Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh) to criticise the Government in the way she did. Her words were somewhat at odds with the reaction of the former Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn), who I think all colleagues would agree has dealt with the matter in an extremely responsible way. He has also sat in the Chamber today and listened to the entire debate.

The hon. Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner) is a former forestry envoy, and it was interesting that he devoted his speech largely to criticising the Government, rather than talking about the responsibility of the previous Administration. The truth is that this is a wake-up call for us all, as my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) has said, and it is unhelpful wilfully, negligently or merely incompetently to distort the scientific evidence, to peddle petty personal conspiracy theories or to scaremonger.

I welcome the Minister’s clear, careful account of the issue. I particularly welcome his reassurance that the disease is not spreading, and that funding for plant health has not been cut—indeed, it has increased. I strongly endorse his acknowledgement of the role of the many voluntary groups and charities that have helped to support the Department’s work. The key now is to focus on what we can do to prevent the spread of the disease. We must use the British science base to explore all possible avenues—not least, resistance—and to put in place a proper framework for biosecurity.

The Government have taken a series of important steps in relation to prevention, and it is important to acknowledge the Minister’s assertion that the disease is not spreading now. We have some time in which to put in place a proper framework, which is why a responsible reaction from Members on both sides of the House is important. I also welcome the launch of the tree health action plan and the imposition by the Secretary of State of an immediate ban on imports. Unfortunately, however, the scientific evidence shows that because the disease has been allowed to incubate in this country for many years—probably between 10 and 15—we might not be able to eradicate it. Our ash population could be facing a serious epidemic.

[Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)]

Seven or eight outbreaks of the disease have been identified in mature woodlands in my constituency, yet in one of those woodlands no ash trees have been planted for 20 years. Is it not therefore plausible to suggest that it could be carried in on the wind or by birds, especially in the light of the maps of the infected sites?

[George Freeman]

My hon. Friend makes an extremely good point based on the evidence in her own constituency, which also sits at the heart of the East Anglian cluster. She allows me to draw attention to the map, which is extremely compelling. It shows that 90% of all incidences of the disease are down the east coast, and most of those are on the bit of the east coast that is closest to Europe and that is affected by the prevailing winds from the east.

I am quite pessimistic about the long-term prospect of our controlling and stopping the disease, but there is a glimmer of optimism in the science of resistance, and it is to that subject that I shall now turn. There are signs that some of our older ash trees might have developed a resistance to the disease, and we now have an opportunity to show scientific leadership by throwing as much resource as possible into identifying a solution.