Rural Communities: Prince’s Countryside Fund

Lord Roberts of Llandudno Excerpts

Thursday 7th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno]

My Lords, it is a delight for me to follow my longstanding friend, not only in the political sense in this House but from many years of campaigning together on these sorts of issues. When my noble friend Lord Taylor was first elected, he was for 10 years the youngest Member of the House of Commons. He won his seat at the age of 24, he took a senior spokesmanship at the age of 26 and he has just made a remarkable speech that I am sure will make us look forward to his contributions in the Upper Chamber. We are a little older than those he would have found in the other Chamber, but we will listen with great excitement and we look forward to the future. My noble friend followed another distinguished Member of Parliament in Cornwall, David Penhaligon, and both of them have kept that part of Cornwall at the forefront of our attention and served it remarkably well. We welcome him, and he knows that he is among good friends here in the Upper Chamber.

I am deeply concerned by a statement that has been made about the grants to 50 Welsh pubs. There is going to be a massive queue of applications for these grants, and they might need as a referee a teetotal Welsh Methodist minister to try to sort it out.

I shall concentrate on one or two subjects—briefly, because others want to speak. The first is the need for co-operation within the countryside. We are told that Defra does this, the health service does that and the Department for Transport does the other, but to serve the rural community we have somehow to bring these organisations together so that each knows exactly what the others are doing. People sometimes say, “They dig up the road for the gas people this week, for the electricity people the next week and for fresh sewers the following week”. We need co-operation and understanding between the various organisations that are part of community life. That applies not only on the outside but on the inside as well, within the communities. Many communities now are a shadow of what they used to be. Can we not somehow encourage local community councils in Wales and parish councils in England to work together and decide that certain aspects of their responsibilities are better attended to on a co-operative basis, working together on many of the issues?

I would also like to suggest that we need somehow to encourage local organisations to put their members up for election to the community or parish council. Often you find empty places in the nomination list. You will find that many people have come to live in the area, and they are very welcome to take their place, but we also want members of the Women’s Institute, the Mothers’ Union, the NFU, the FUW, the young farmers’ clubs or the Merched y Wawr in Wales—the community organisations—to be able to have their voices heard in the running of the local communities. In many villages and local communities, I do not think that party politics should play a big part. It is the individuals, the individual communities and the community organisations that should be listened to. The local community council or the parish council should be a forum where the young farmers, the older farmers, even the 50 pub landlords, the church minister and the others can speak as representatives and bring their own life to their communities.

As we have seen, certain communities are not viable in themselves. Perhaps there is no doctor’s surgery, the bank visits for only half a day a week or the school somehow has to come to some sort of relationship with neighbouring schools. All these things mean that those communities should work together by having an agreed hub. I do not mean in a self-interested way; rather, one village might be able to provide the facilities needed to keep a number of villages together.

Finally, we must ensure, as has already been mentioned, that agricultural workers are respected and shown that they are still a greatly valued part of their communities. The Agricultural Wages Board is threatened with abolition, and we need to discuss that in great depth. Often the smaller farms, and I speak only for areas with small farms, have only one or two employees. Without some larger organisation to speak for them, their negotiations and agreements will be very difficult to undertake.

This has been a valuable debate. There is much more to be said, and I am sure that in the coming months we will be able to say a great deal more.