Farming and Rural Communities

Lord Bishop of St Albans Excerpts

Thursday 3rd April 2025 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans]

My Lords, I too am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Roborough, for securing this debate and for his excellent opening speech. I declare my interests as president of the Rural Coalition and a vice-president of the Local Government Association.

I have already spoken in your Lordships’ House on changes to the agricultural property relief and business property relief, so my views are already recorded in Hansard. I lament the sudden closure of the sustainable farming incentive, and the reforms to compulsory purchase in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill.

If your Lordships’ House will indulge me, I want to focus on two associated areas which are pertinent to this whole debate. First, the rural economy has great potential to contribute to the economic growth that is needed. I think we all believe in this; it is just a matter of how we achieve it. Secondly, I will make a few comments about the almost complete lack of strategic rural policy or effective rural-proofing in government decision-making.

It is very easy for us to sit here and talk about the things we do not like—we spend a great deal of time doing that—but I am proud to be president of the Rural Coalition, which has tried to work alongside government over many years to put some positive ideas, initiatives and facts and figures on the table to help us achieve the growth in the rural economy that we believe we need.

I want to mention the Pragmatix report that we commissioned, and which some noble Lords will have read, entitled Reigniting Rural Futures. This report evidences the extraordinarily large productivity gap between rural and urban areas and the billions of pounds that are lost through chronic underinvestment in rural infrastructure and services. We made an economic case that, with the right policies in place, the rural economy could contribute up to an additional £19 billion in tax revenue for the Treasury. That would, of course, mean addressing the digital divide, rural transport, access to banking services, the rural affordable housing crisis and fair funding for rural local authorities. Yet none of His Majesty’s Government’s policies in these areas mentions or accounts for the needs of rural communities.

Despite 1,254 respondents to the question about rural affordable housing in the NPPF consultation, the Government have provided no guidance on the delivery of affordable housing in rural communities. The Planning and Infrastructure Bill also misses the opportunity to implement changes to help deliver small rural housing sites. The Bus Services (No. 2) Bill, which contains many good provisions and for which I am very grateful, needs to implement cross-subsidy between rural and urban areas to account for the additional costs generated by sparsity.

This year’s local government funding settlement once again leaves rural local government underfunded, with urban areas receiving 40% more per head in government funding spending power than their rural counterparts. This comes on top of the additional costs of delivering services due to sparsity. I urge His Majesty’s Government to address these issues in their review of the funding formula, to recognise that density of deprivation is not the only factor that affects the costs of service delivery, and to level per capita spending power across rural and urban authorities.

The word “rural” is not mentioned once in the industrial strategy Green Paper. From a series of Written Answers, I can only conclude that the rural industry is not really being considered in the Government’s drive for growth. What a waste. The Government urgently need—indeed, it is vital—to develop a coherent rural strategy and ensure that all policies across the board account for and involve rural communities. If these communities are left behind again—20% of the population live in rural areas and over 500,000 businesses are registered there—we will all be the poorer for it and the entire nation will lose out.