Local Government Funding: Rural Areas

Jesse Norman Excerpts

Monday 11th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Sir Edward Garnier (Harborough) (Con)]

If the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey (Drew Hendry) will forgive me, I will not follow him up the highways, byways and glens of Scotland. I find local government finance complicated enough without adding in a Scottish element. As he has spoken in the debate about local government funding for rural areas, which of course include vast swathes of Scotland, I hope that he will let us know during the course of the evening whether his party will vote in February when we come to discuss the final settlement for these proposals, which may or may not have a direct effect on Scotland. Given the way in which the Scottish nationalists’ rhetoric has been going since the May general election, they will no doubt claim that it has an indirect effect on the matter. I am sure that the Government will listen with great interest to whether Scottish National party Members of Parliament will be here on that night in February. That might have some bearing on the Government’s thinking.

In the 24 or so years that I have been in this House, I have deliberately never spoken about local government finance because it is an impenetrable subject. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart) for having spoken so cogently and clearly on the subject today and for leading our campaign to persuade the Government to treat rural areas more fairly when it comes to local government finance.

[Jesse Norman (Hereford and South Herefordshire) (Con)]

Does my right hon. and learned Friend share my view that, in the extremely eloquent speech made by my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart), he omitted to mention “The Picturesque”, which of course comes originally from Herefordshire, as described by Gilpin? Does he also agree that our hon. Friend was the most picturesque adornment present on these Benches as he gave us his presentation? Does my right hon. and learned Friend share my view that the counterpart to the extraordinarily poor settlement that rural areas have received might involve not only an improvement in that settlement on the current basis but also additional capital funding to allow rural areas to develop an economic strength from which future revenue could derive?

[Sir Edward Garnier]

A number of points flow from my hon. Friend’s intervention. First, he confirms why it was sensible of me never to have spoken about local government finance. Secondly, I agree with him that Herefordshire is a beautiful county, and he illustrates that, but many of us who represent shire counties do not just represent rural areas. For example, my constituency is 90% rural geographically, but 50% of my electorate come from a suburb of Leicester—Oadby and Wigston, a borough in need of special attention from the Government. I have discussed that with the Minister and I will bring the matter back before the House before very long.

My hon. Friend the Member for North West Leicestershire (Andrew Bridgen) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Melton (Sir Alan Duncan) are in their places tonight. Because we represent that bit of Leicestershire outside the city of Leicester—there are seven Conservative Members of Parliament for the county of Leicestershire and three Labour Members for the city itself—it is assumed that we all represent, and all our constituents live in, wonderful leafy idylls. I refer to the pre-penultimate paragraph of the speech made by my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness there. There are, however, people living in my constituency, for example, in South Wigston, Market Harborough, Fleckney and Kibworth, who are not at all well off. Market Harborough is a market town, as its name suggests, but Kibworth and Fleckney are large villages. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Melton would agree, there are people living on farms and in little hamlets who are not at all well off. The fact that we represent so-called “shire counties” does not mean to say that everyone there drives around in a Range Rover and is looking forward to the next cheque from the common agricultural policy—life is not like that.

As has been mentioned, school funding in our area is second bottom of the Whitehall funding list, although it costs just as much to educate a child in rural or semi-rural Leicestershire as it does in the city of Leicester. Indeed, many schools in the borough of Oadby and Wigston, which abuts for three or four miles the city of Leicester, are educating city children, who come across the boundary into the county of Leicestershire because, by and large, the schools in my constituency, and no doubt in the equivalent parts of the county around the border of the city of Leicester, are, on average, better than those in the city. Yet we have to pay for the education of those children from the city of Leicester with the much-reduced county funding. That is just an illustration of the problem we face year on year.