Rural Economy

Lord Fuller Excerpts

Thursday 19th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak as a council member of the Royal Norfolk Show, which is much better than the other ones that have been mentioned. This is a debate about growing the rural economy. There is so much I want to say but, in the six minutes I have, I will focus on rural governance and show how the Government’s actions are making the country cousins the even poorer relations.

Before we start, there is not even a firm definition of what constitutes “rural Britain”. Yes, it is the rolling countryside, but are our county towns and market towns part of that scene? No one is really sure so, as part of my prep, I thought I would create a definition myself. It is that part of Britain where, at 4 am, you cannot get an Uber within half an hour after a particularly heavy bender or a night on the tiles: “Can’t get an Uber late at night? Well, you’re in the sticks. That’s just how it is”.

The confirmed city dweller looks down on these sorts of places. It is all rather provincial, you see. That is the problem: rural Britain is governed by metropolitan voices who ill serve 70% of the landmass. Even the new mayors are to be called “metro mayors”. When the governance and rural voices are marginalised, it is harder to champion the rural economy.

There are more councillors within the M25 than in all the county councils of England. It is an extraordinary state of affairs. The metropolitan bias is structurally embedded in our nation. The shires are levelled down to London. It takes just 3,109 electors to elect a councillor in London but 15,000 in Essex and 18,000 in parts of Kent. Contrast this with the approach for parliamentary elections, where constituencies must, by law, be of the same value so that everyone has the same weight of voice. Somebody who lives in the shires has between a third and a fifth of the say of the townie. That is a problem for rural democracy, which is not addressed by the devolution White Paper.

As my noble friend Lord Gascoigne mentioned, the closest the Government have to a rural definition can be found in Defra’s local authority districts rural-urban classification 2021 dataset, which classifies local council areas as either predominantly rural, rural with some urban or just urban. It turns out that the Government will abolish all the 84 predominantly rural councils. Another 50 that are “urban with significant rural” are likely to be abolished, with their rurality subsumed into urbanised population units of half a million and their local distinctiveness decorated by the detritus of chicken shops.

Then, of course, there are 175 urban, city, London borough and metropolitan authorities, mostly controlled by Labour, untouched by abolition if they do not want to ask for it. I know it is Christmas, but I think we all know that turkeys do not vote for this kind of thing. Labour denies that there is a war on the countryside, but these announcements prove that there is a war on rural Britain and the lack of Members on the Government Benches rather proves this point. Labour always secretly wished we all lived in big cities and now it gets to pretend that we do.

Labour is slashing £110 million from the rural services delivery grant. I was grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Devon, who is not in his place. He identified that £10 million out of a £100 million will be taken from that county. Norfolk is not far behind and North Yorkshire will be £12 million short. We are being short-changed. Reorganisation will increase stealth taxes to mayors and a levelling-up of council tax where rural people used to live to pay for their urban neighbours. With no money, how can the countryside grow?

The White Paper promises a new fair funding settlement for what is left of local government, but we all know what that means: redirecting money from the countryside to their friends in the city, where social problems can be concentrated. It totally ignores rural areas, where poverty is diffuse. Being spread out does not make it any easier. In fact, isolation can make it worse. The additional cost of delivering services in areas where houses can be miles apart is ignored. I could go on. The point is that short-changing the countryside and diluting its say makes it harder for rural areas to grow in stature and make the economic contributions they should.

At least you can say that rural Britain has resilience—which it needs, with a Government characterised by townies hell-bent on fighting a class war that never really existed. Labour does not understand rural Britain, but rural Britain understands Labour. I almost feel sorry for the 90 Labour MPs representing the countryside. They have been abandoned and sacrificed by their party, unforgiven by those who lent them support. It is not too late to change tack. But, unless there is a change of tack, it will be difficult to grow the rural economy as part of a United Kingdom.