Rural Communities: Government Support

Helen Morgan Excerpts

Tuesday 28th November 2023 Westminster Hall

[Sarah Dyke (Somerton and Frome) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered Government support for rural communities.

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Charles. This is the first debate that I have held. I feel it is important to highlight the challenges facing many of our rural communities. The Government must recognise the financial support needed, especially for local authorities to deliver essential frontline services.

To begin, I will explain the challenges that affect rural communities, and how their rurality provides specific complications that are often missed or ignored by central Government. People who live in rural areas face added living costs known as the rural premium. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that they typically need to spend around 10% to 20% more on everyday essentials than their urban counterparts. The rural economy is 19% less productive per worker than the national average, which is reported to cost the UK economy £43 billion per year. Employers face difficulties recruiting staff as rural areas generally have poorer public transport connections, resulting in employees relying on private vehicles and facing higher fuel expenditure.

The Government recognised the need to assist rural areas with the cost of travel and introduced the rural fuel duty relief in 2001, and it was extended again in 2015. However, it extends only to the most remote parts of the UK. I urge the Government to listen to Liberal Democrat calls for the scheme to be extended to cover most rural areas in the UK, including Somerset.

Fifty-three thousand people live within 10 km of Langport and Somerton, yet they are without access to a train station. Travellers have to drive 24 km to Taunton or 25km to Castle Cary. For those without access to private transport, the travel time by bus between Langport and Taunton is 51 minutes, and for Somerton it is 62 minutes. There is no direct connection to the rail by bus between Langport and Somerton and Castle Cary, with public transport requiring an interchange. The shortest journey time is therefore around one hour and 17 minutes. Bus routes in my constituency are also under threat, with four routes currently without guaranteed long-term funding.

[Helen Morgan (North Shropshire) (LD)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing her first Westminster Hall debate. She is making an excellent speech. Does she agree that bus services are important not only for getting people to train stations but for preventing social isolation and getting people to school and to the doctors and so on?

[Sarah Dyke]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend that rural isolation is a very important matter.

I received a phone call today from a constituent who cannot get to their medical appointments. The 58 bus service is currently under threat, and if that closes they will not be able to move around the constituency and access the vital services they need. It is clear that sparse public transport is a constant constraint to regeneration of the local economy.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Coffey]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. About a decade ago our ambition was to get to 10 megabits as the universal service obligation. We have much greater ambition that that now. Of course it is about delivery, and quite a lot of legislation in the past few years has been about unblocking some of the barriers to making delivery happen, but it is good that the process is under way.

However, I share the concerns about mobile phones. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Barrow and Furness (Simon Fell) has undertaken an assessment, and will be working with DEFRA and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. Ofcom needs to look again when it says an area is covered for mobile phones. All of us have examples from our constituencies of that not being the case. It is particularly distressing when I think about the removal of copper-line communications that is due to happen this decade and the impact that could have if Ofcom is working off not totally reliable communication points.

[Helen Morgan]

The shared rural network is obviously designed to address that issue, but in many cases the equipment that providers have is not shared by other providers. Does the right hon. Member agree that either the equipment needs to be shared by all the main mobile providers or there needs to be rural roaming?

[Dr Coffey]

That is a good point. I do not know enough about the detail of what the hon. Lady suggests, but I know there are two sets of providers because they already share connection masts, but I appreciate that is not totally comprehensive.

I want to say a bit more about the importance of farming to our countryside and in our rural communities. Over the past year, I have made a lot of effort to try to ensure that that is recognised and that farmers are seen as the custodians of the countryside. Perhaps that speech will have to wait for another time, given the variety of issues that rural affairs covers, as the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome set out extensively.

One of the things that will continue to be of interest to me is school transport. My hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Chris Loder) has a debate tomorrow on funding for rural councils. There is no doubt that young people miss some opportunities because they cannot necessarily get to their college, which is a long distance away. More broadly, hon. Members who represent urban constituencies may not understand that children leave home very early in the morning, have quite long days--although those days seem to get shorter—and often may miss out on the regular opportunities that others have for sports, debate and similar.