Rural Communities

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 15th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington]

My Lords, as someone who was brought up in East Anglia—indeed, in Norfolk, which, as a talented playwright said, is very flat—it is with some trepidation that I join a debate on the uplands. However, the main problem for rural areas and the uplands is the same: small communities are losing their heart because of the better transport facilities that are made available to people by the car. When enough people take their economic activity to other places, the small local community tends to wither and, as has been said by many people, local shops disappear, which leads to a loss of local casual employment. If you have not got access to transport—usually a car—you cannot get a job; this in turn means that you have to leave, which leads to a contraction of the community. The further up and the more difficult the hills, the worse the problem gets. It is an underlying social problem.

I do not know how many noble Lords have a holiday cottage, but those who do are adding to the problem because they have an economic reason for ensuring that that house is not available to the local community for people to rent or buy at an economic level.

There is a series of problems that are not effectively addressed by the way in which modern society is organised. It all comes down to the way we use transport. What we can do to counter the current trend is the only real question. We have talked about information technology and broadband and whether it will encourage people to work in the knowledge-based economy at home. Potentially it will—many do—but do people want to be isolated and spend all their time working at home? Many people want to spend some time at home and some time being interactive with people face to face. Are we providing enough incentives and encouragement to enable people to be by themselves or to spend virtually all their time within the family unit? We have not got there yet. There is still the problem that, if you are by yourself, you will still be dependent on your car and may have to travel slightly further and so on. Unless public transport is easily available at a mass level, we are always going to have these problems; people will become isolated in a modern community.

We do not know how affordable car transportation will be in the future. In the debate yesterday on the low-carbon economy, the question was posed whether the electrical car would prevent us from being priced off the road in private small boxes. We do not know yet. The Government should encourage the private sector —or do it themselves—to take on the role of ensuring that there is some kind of accessible public transport available to rural areas. This is a fundamental problem for rural communities in any part of the country.

The uplands of our society have become a recreational resource for much of the rest of the country—I thought that I might be the first person to touch on this after my noble friend Lord Greaves, but the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner, has just done so. That recreation takes the form of country sports, such as shooting, walking, mountain-biking, which is on the increase, and other forms of outdoor activity. Here, the uplands seem to have a real role. The problem, as has been pointed out to me, is that people may go there, have their sport and leave, but the economic spread is not as high as it could have been. Do we encourage people instead to go for several days’ walking or mountain-biking—those activities have slightly greater potential for this—to seek accommodation locally and to have at-leisure spend, for the pub or restaurant, after the main activity of the day? Are we doing enough to encourage this? Are we doing enough to encourage people to want go out there?

My noble friend Lord Greaves said that if we leave our hills spare, many of them will be covered in scrub woodland. Scrub woodland may look pretty, but just try walking or riding a bike through it. It is very easy to get lost in a wood. Will we have to invest in mountain rescue and more complicated forms of support if we do not maintain the type of landscape that has encouraged rural recreation? Walking over a comparatively open stretch of land with great views is a pleasant experience that has obvious health benefits. It is also a form of activity that is non-competitive, although one can often be very competitive with oneself, saying, “I’m going to try to get over that hill, see that view and get back again”. If we can encourage that type of activity, linking into the idea of making public transport more readily available, we would serve those communities. Local businesses, as my noble friend said, used to rely on a great pool of agricultural workers, who are simply not there now—modern agriculture seems to rely far more on mechanics than on people who have any great knowledge of the land. If we are going to encourage this type of activity, we have to make sure that we help rural people to be able to take on the business.

I will leave it there, because other noble Lords have dealt with this matter with considerably greater skill than I shall ever be able to manage. However, unless we start to look at this in the round and realise that recreation is also important to the survival of local communities, we will be missing a trick.