Rural Communities

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Thursday 15th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, on securing this debate and on initiating it so comprehensively and engagingly. In the spirit of the coalition, I say that long gone is that joke of yesteryear when torrents of Liberal oratory were said to pour down from Welsh hills and leave deposits on the English plains. I also congratulate him on his serendipity in attracting speakers from all corners of the realm, except Northern Ireland. I cannot personally fill that gap, but Ulster also has its remote uplands in the mountains of Mourne, the Sperrins and the north Antrim hills in the constituency of the noble Lord, Lord Bannside. I am, however, conscious that the Commission for Rural Communities’ paper on England’s upland communities, helpfully provided today in the Printed Paper Office, is, by the laws of devolution, confined to England. I hope that my noble friend the Minister in his reply will indicate how upland experience is compared throughout the United Kingdom, especially as the Northern Ireland economy is so concentrated on agriculture.

I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, on having attracted the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester to the speakers list. One of the great practical arguments for retaining the Lords spiritual in your Lordships’ House is that they are by definition regional voices for their dioceses. The canvas that the noble Lord offered us is very wide, but I always think that community shops are a particularly vivid index of the communities referred to in the Motion—doubly so, because they serve the community and derive that service from the community itself.

I shall not dwell with latitude on any particular one of the many standard rural issues—housing, jobs, energy costs or communications in all senses. However, I want to reiterate from earlier debates in your Lordships’ House on planning and housing that the present habit of urban and suburban incomers to seek immediately to marry more than one dwelling into a single one, or to seek planning permission for extensions, is not the most sensitive way of entering their new community, not least when they reduce the supply of apposite and/or affordable housing among their neighbours. If the coalition were to contemplate changing the right of housing association tenants to acquire their properties, I hope that it would think long and hard first about rural communities and the protection that will be needed for such housing in them.

On jobs, the Minister responded to the debate on the economic aspects of the Queen’s Speech and I shall not weary him by repeating what I said then about broadband, which is important to rural areas for multiple direct and indirect reasons. However, it is noticeable how social entrepreneurs in remote areas can enhance social capital there. Alston in Cumbria is far from where I live in south-west Wiltshire, but I am struck by the way in which it not only has embraced and exploited broadband in its community, but also, until recently, provided national publicity for homes “in the sticks”—the title of its magazine—all over the nation to increase the ubiquity of such entrepreneurs all over the country.

The noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, who will follow me, will speak more eloquently and comprehensively about the particular issues of the south-west than I can, but I am struck by how the scale of the heritage, measured by scheduled monuments, listed buildings, parks, public gardens and conservation areas, enlarges the further west you go. It is noticeable that the counties of Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, which are more remote, have a significantly larger part of the heritage than those counties directly to the east. This has a powerful effect in encouraging and providing jobs in the heritage skills industries, when agricultural labouring, with all its historical richness in country lore, is dying out so fast. I declare an interest as president of COTAC, an acronym that conceals the Conference on Training in Architectural Conservation. We are doubly blessed in the heritage by what it does for tourism and thus the economy.

I vicariously congratulate the right reverend Prelate who is to speak later and the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, who is proving to be so dynamic and imaginative a chair of English Heritage, for the emphasis that they place on the health of rural churches, both in fabric and in their communities. Anyone who expresses anxiety about the Church of England and other traditions in rural areas should unblind themselves to how much rural life is built around our churches and chapels, which also provide the setting for much extracurricular culture.

I close with a scattergun of unrelated questions for the Minister and shall of course be content if he answers only one of them today. I should first declare an interest—or, more precisely, a responsibility—as the former government Whip on the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Bill, which featured in the recent case brought by the Badger Trust on the legality of the Welsh Assembly’s badger cull. My question is of a supplementary nature. Can my noble friend tell us how much of the massive anxiety about the health of our bee population is caused by the liking of badgers, like the liking of Winnie the Pooh, for treating bees’ nests as a direct source of honey and how far that weighs in any consideration of the badger population? Secondly, given the coalition’s announcement on building in gardens, how satisfied are the Government about the clarity of the present definition of brownfield sites? Thirdly—I join the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, in this—given that my understanding is that the Commission for Rural Communities is itself threatened by a cull, is it intended to substitute some alternative form of rural advocacy to fill the gap? If I may hark back to my references to churches and chapels, let me remark on the fact that the mode of address of the chairman of the commission, Dr Stuart Burgess, conceals that he is a clergyman by background—how apposite that has been to his pastoral role within a national community that still feels a little beleaguered. I am delighted that his contribution on our behalf has so rightly and recently been honoured.