Rural Communities in Cumbria: Levelling Up

Neil O'Brien Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd February 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (Neil O'Brien)]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Dr Hudson) on securing this important debate. He is a relentless champion for his community, and the many different issues that he touched on this evening are a small selection of the matters he has raised with us. He always makes important and serious contributions to driving forward the different policy agendas he has raised.

Let me address some of the specific points raised by my hon. Friend. One of the themes of his speech—appropriately enough for a vet, horses for courses—was about how the levelling-up agenda must be shaped to the needs of rural communities such as the one he represents in Cumbria. He raised the issue of second homes, and I am acutely conscious of the strong feelings held by him and his constituents about that. He will know that we recently closed the second homes tax loophole, which was being abused. That was a serious part of the problem, and a serious contribution to tackling it. Partly as a result of my hon. Friend’s work on this issue, we are considering what further steps we can take to address it. Many local people have a sense of their children not being able to live where they grew up, or of not being able to stay in their own community because it is a wonderfully attractive place. We all love those places, but we must not kill the thing we love by local people not being able to live there. My hon. Friend is completely correct, and it is something we are actively looking at.

[Tim Farron]

Given the urgency of this, I cannot stress how important it is that action is taken, well, yesterday really. In the South Lakeland District, there has been a 32% rise in the number of holiday lets in one single year. That is the private rented sector collapsing into the “not lived in” market. We need action now. Let us please not have another inquiry.

[Neil O'Brien]

I completely agree with that, and we have the same sense of urgency about this issue.

My hon. Friend raised a point about the need for small grants in the kind of community he represents. That is exactly why we have set up the new £150 million community ownership fund, which is helping people across the country take control of assets that are of importance to the local community, from pubs to sports pitches to important cultural locations. We are at the start of allocating that fund, and I am sure my hon. Friend will be assiduous in helping us to identify fantastic projects in his constituency that are deserving of such support.

My hon. Friend raised the issue of how things work in the kind of area he represents, and about parish councils sitting virtually. He has made numerous representations to us on that point, and again today he made a powerful argument. The Government launched a call for evidence last year to gather views and inform our longer term decision about whether to make express provision for councils to meet remotely on a permanent basis. The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities is considering the responses to that consultation, and will respond shortly. I know that many local councillors found it extremely useful to have a wider range of voices able to attend, particularly in areas where the geography is large and the community is somewhat older. A decision has not been made, although once again my hon. Friend made a powerful case on behalf of his constituents.

Likewise, as part of my hon. Friend’s theme of how Cumbria is not London and has different challenges and different sorts of issues, he made important points about mental health. It is really a crusade for this Government to have true parity between the treatment of mental and physical diseases, of exactly the kind my hon. Friend called for. As part of that, one of the most exciting things that the Government are doing as part of the anti-loneliness agenda is rolling out social prescribing across the country. There is a target to have 900,000 people referred through the NHS to social prescribing by 2023-24. My hon. Friend is a vet, and a long time ago I was a medical student, and when I met patients I was struck how often both their medical needs in the traditional sense and many mental health issues were not being grappled with. Through the social prescribing agenda, we can start to have a proper plan to connect those people to the help that they need. He was right to raise that.

My hon. Friend was also right to raise terrestrial TV. There are places where people cannot just get on to an ultrafast fibre broadband connection, so that terrestrial TV signal will remain extremely important.

I will touch on some of the wider things that the Government are doing across the whole of Cumbria—of course, there are huge economic connections between all the parts of the county. Our levelling-up funds are making a big difference. Barrow, Carlisle, Cleator Moor, Millom and Workington are all getting a share of £110 million of investment through the towns fund to improve town centres and public services, which will also benefit my hon. Friend’s constituents. Through the first round of the levelling-up fund, £16 million is being invested, and there is much more of that £4.8 billion fund to come.

My hon. Friend will be acutely aware that the landmark and historic borderlands growth deal is helping both sides of the border—those in Cumbria and in southern Scotland. It is helping with projects such as the upgrade to Carlisle railway station and creating 5,000 new well-paying jobs. In total, I think it is bringing £452 million of fresh investment into Cumbria, Northumberland and southern Scotland.

The different funds are doing a lot, but there are also national programmes recognising the central importance of the connectivity issues that my hon. Friend raised—they have the potential to transform the economy of some rural areas—and addressing them. That is exactly why we did the £1 billion deal with mobile network operators. He talked about sharing masts, and that is exactly what we will be doing through the shared rural network. In Cumbria, the deal will mean that 4G coverage from all mobile network operators will rise to a minimum of 88%, up from 73%, and coverage from at least one network will go up from 94% to 98%. We are starting to close off those notspots that he correctly identified. Through Project Gigabit and our £5 billion investment, we will also be connecting broadband across Cumbria and driving up high-quality coverage.

My hon. Friend has been a brilliant champion on all these issues—he raised so many of them—but I am conscious of time and the need to bring my remarks to a close. He raised devolution and the future of local government in Cumbria. In the levelling-up White Paper we alluded to the prospect of a devolution deal for Cumbria, which is an exciting prospect that we can use to address many of the specific issues that he raised in this important debate.

My hon. Friend’s fundamental thesis is completely correct: we must have a levelling-up agenda that works with the grain of what is going on locally. When we go to Cumbria, we see its beauty, all the things that are fantastic about it and the new investment, but we are also conscious that, for many people, it is an area of low pay and one with a need for more high-quality jobs and new opportunities to learn and progress. He has been the most fantastic champion across all those issues and I look forward to working together with him as we drive them forward.

Question put and agreed to.