Rural Communities

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Thursday 15th July 2010 Lords Chamber

Moved By

[Lord Greaves]

To call attention to the future of rural communities, in particular those in the uplands and more remote parts of the United Kingdom; and to move for Papers.

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, we move on to the debate about the British uplands and highlands. They are, broadly speaking, more than half the country. They are an essential part of the great diversity of Great Britain and England. They are at the very centre of our history, culture, economy and society. They include most of our national parks and are the place people often refer to as “the great outdoors”. I declare an interest as a member of the Access, Conservation and Environment Group of the British Mountaineering Council.

We forget that, many years ago, before the Industrial Revolution, many of these places were great industrial areas. They were areas where copper, zinc, lead and other minerals were mined, and where small mills made all kinds of goods. Later, they missed out on the Industrial Revolution to the coal mining areas. The coalfields were often based in areas that were on the fringes of the highlands and uplands. They drew a huge amount of population to the new industrial areas in the 19th century from the old industrial areas in the uplands. Nowadays the coalfields suffer the same kind of decline and the uplands themselves continue to suffer multiple problems. They are more remote, their soils are less fertile and the terrain is difficult. There is a shortage of jobs and low wages, combined with an often higher cost of living and housing costs, exacerbated by second homes and people moving to these beautiful areas to retire. Very often there are also declining services, an ageing population and problems of access to modern services, whether they are traditional, such as railways and motorways, or more modern, such as broadband. However, these areas are full of opportunities which we could seize.

Where are the uplands? I will talk mainly about England. My noble friend Lord Roberts will talk about Wales. I hope other noble Lords who are taking part in this debate—I thank them all—will talk about Scotland. Traditionally the uplands are much of the area that lies to the north and west of the geological Tees-Exe line. They are the areas of the old Paleozoic rocks, although that is a rough and ready assumption. The Lancashire plain and the Cheshire plain are on one side and the North York Moors on the other. The point about the uplands is that you know you are there when you are there. You recognise them instinctively because you know what they are.

Last year Natural England produced the first of two reports which I want to refer to this afternoon—Vital Uplands: A 2060 Vision for England’s Upland Environment. It used the boundary of severely disadvantaged areas to define the uplands. As such, it defines them on the map as rather detached blocks of moorland and fell. I think the uplands are widely considered to be wider than this. They are sub-regions and smaller areas which have these areas of higher land at their core but include the valleys and market towns, and the communications going past.

I do not know what has happened to this vital uplands report. It may now be on the shelf with the change of government. When it was produced, there was a lot of concern that it had downplayed the importance of food production as opposed to environmental goods in the uplands, and substantial changes were made to it while it was in gestation to make it more balanced in the direction of food production. However, it includes a useful checklist and puts forward 10 top changes—not in order—which it wanted to see implemented in the uplands. The first is stabilised soils, which is vital. The reserves of upland peat and blanket bogs are absolutely crucial because of carbon sinks and carbon reserves. Secondly, it looked forward to diverse, open uplands with a distinctive landscape. This is important. These are decisions which as a society we can, and must, make. Do we want our upland areas to continue to be the open areas they are now, with not a lot of forestry in most parts, and what forestry there is concentrated in the valleys and on the slopes? Is it the open views, the wide open spaces which we want to see? To what extent are we prepared to allow wind farms to disturb this? These are crucial questions which continue to deserve debate.

The third item is grazing systems that produce food and much more. We have to remember that the great wide open spaces of the Lake District, the Pennines, Dartmoor and Exmoor and all the rest of the uplands would not be as they are if they were not grazed. Not everybody understands this, but it is the sheep, cattle, deer and other animals on the moors which maintain them as they are. Food production is not just important in itself but for landscape reasons as well.

The fourth item is more and better managed woodlands, carefully planted and located. The fifth item is green energy. It is not just wind farms to which the uplands can contribute. The sixth item is the importance of low-carbon growth in these areas in transport, tourism and the footloose businesses which, with modern communications—if they are available—can operate from anywhere. Provided you have your broadband and your communications, you can operate from Upper Teesdale or a valley in Exmoor just as well as you can from the middle of London, and you might have a much higher quality of life. Businesses, which are the other side of the coin, I suppose, can develop using local materials.

I must move on but an important vision of the report was the need for reward and recognition of what the uplands contribute to this country. It refers to the need for upland farmers and land managers to be,

“rewarded for providing a range of vital environmental goods and services”.

It is not just this country where this debate is taking place; it is happening in Europe as well. Last year, the Agricultural and Rural Development European Commissioner, Mrs Fischer Boel, launched a debate and investigation into mountain farming in Europe. We missed out on that as we were not considered to have proper mountains such as they have in Europe. However, the nature of agriculture and of communities in our uplands is exactly the same as in the much higher mountain ranges of the Pyrenees, the Alps and other parts of Europe. In a speech at Alpbach in Austria last December, Mrs Fischer Boel said that,

“in looking after the countryside, farmers and other people in mountain areas are actually providing a service of value”.

By carrying out their normal economic activities, farmers are contributing much more than simply farming.

A further report has come out very recently from the Commission for Rural Communities, which, ironically, is about to be abolished. The report, High Ground, High Potential—a Future for England’s Upland Communities, is excellent. I commend the whole of it, not just the summaries, to your Lordships. It was set up to provide policy recommendations,

“to enable and equip them”—

that is, the uplands,

“to move towards more secure, economically prosperous and sustainable futures”.

One of the benefits of this report is that it starts by setting out the assets. It does not start by saying how dreadful everything is and listing all the problems; it sets out the natural and cultural assets of the uplands, which are closely interrelated. As I have said before, the landscape in the uplands—our wonderful hills, fells and moors—would not exist were it not for the social and economic activity that takes place there. The report lists as assets the biodiversity of the uplands, supplies of drinking water, the upland peat lands and the necessity to use them better as a means of flood control, the producers of products and services, food and woodland products, fuel, energy, tourism and recreation. The foot and mouth outbreak really brought home to people that in many rural areas where people go for recreation and tourism, such as the Lake District, the tourism economy is far more important in terms of the amount of income it raises than is farming. I say from memory that in the whole of Cumbria the ratio is 2:1—tourism is twice as important as farming in Cumbria. I could not get the figure for the Lake District, but the ratio must be 10:1 or higher—perhaps a lot higher. However, those ratios do not in any way downgrade the agricultural industry in those areas because, as I have said twice—I think—without the activities of the farmers, particularly the hill farmers in the Lake District, the landscape would be very different.

The CRC report goes on to say:

“The greatest threat to these valuable assets, however, arises from a lack of recognition that these are embedded in social and economic systems—in other words, their sustainability is reliant on the sustainability of upland communities”.

The benefit of this report is its stress on upland communities because without sustainable communities the whole system will collapse—the ecosystem and the economic and social systems will collapse. At the heart of it all is hill farming. At present, we have the transitional period in which the upland entry level stewardship scheme is replacing the old hill farm allowance. There are alarming figures of the proportion of hill farmers who have not yet signed up to the new scheme. The Minister may have some figures on this and, if he does not, perhaps he can write to us with the up-to-date figures.

As we know, the whole of the common agricultural policy is due to be recast in 2013 in ways that are not yet known, although it is highly likely that there will be a substantial transfer from Pillar 1 to Pillar 2. The vital thing in my view is that this transfer, and whatever happens to the common agricultural policy in terms of its total allocation in this country, should not in any way disadvantage farmers in upland areas because without substantial subsidy in these areas, farming will simply not be viable.

The report talks about the representation and governance in upland areas that my noble friend Lady Scott of Needham Market will discuss. It also talks about local services in upland areas and the difficulty of keeping them going. Bus services, affordable rural housing, normal council and health services and village services such as schools and post offices will be severely at risk, along with a lot of other local services, in the present round of government cuts. I hope that the Government will reinvent the term which was all the rage two or three years ago—rural proofing—and severely rural proof the cuts to local authorities which will take place. Local authorities in rural areas are often not particularly strong in terms of lobbying and are often not particularly influential. Many of them comprise small districts and small counties. They do not have the clout of the Manchesters, Liverpools or London boroughs, but it is vital that services in these areas are, as far as possible, kept going.

The report sets out a whole series of useful recommendations that I do not have time to go through. I am very concerned, not about the future of the CRC as a quango, but about the future of its work. The emphasis that it has given to research into and action on rural poverty and deprivation has been essential, because these aspects are very often overlooked. In those areas, they do not come in chunks, like they do in inner cities, but in small pockets here and there—but they are vital. Poor and deprived people in rural areas are very often the people whose families have been living there for ever.

I am pleased to propose this Motion. The uplands are special places and I look forward to the debate.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, I have time to make only two brief comments in response to the debate. First, I thank everyone who has taken part—particularly noble Lords who put quite a lot of flesh on the bones of what I initially set out to be a very broad and general introduction to the subject, rather than an attempt to cover everything. I am extremely grateful for the very high quality of the speeches of all those who took part, including the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, who jumped rather rashly into the gap but seems to have survived. I thank everyone and hope that the record of this debate will be something that people, including the Government, can use in going forward with rural policy.

I particularly thank the Minister for his very comprehensive reply. I always thought that the little red book that he had in his pocket was the Companion. It turns out to be the Thoughts of Chairman Mao, so perhaps I shall become more adjusted to calling him my noble friend after all.

The other point that I want to make concerns advocacy.

[Baroness Anelay of St Johns]

I am sorry to interrupt my noble friend but the Deputy Speaker must put the Motion at 4.35 pm.

[Lord Greaves]

I have mentioned advocacy, so it is on the record as something that I shall want to take up in the future. I now only have time to beg leave to withdraw the Motion for Papers.

Motion withdrawn.