Rural Communities

Nia Griffith Excerpts

Thursday 9th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

My hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh) has done the House a great service in ensuring that we have a debate on rural affairs—a subject we do not talk about enough.

There is an altogether too rosy picture of rural life, particularly in metropolitan circles. Some of the people who write our national newspapers seem to think that we all live in lovely stone houses in Cotswold villages inhabited by media moguls and retired admirals having country lunches. That is not to say that retired admirals can afford to live in the Cotswolds any more—it is probably only retired hedge fund managers who can. However, the reality of life in remote rural areas that are, dare I say it, less fashionable than the Cotswolds or Buckinghamshire, such as the part of north Lincolnshire that I represent, which is three and a half hours from London whatever form of transport one takes, is often very tough indeed. That is why this debate is important.

My hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton and the hon. Member for Ynys Môn (Albert Owen) outlined in a very measured way some of the extra costs of living in rural Britain. I will deal with those costs in a few moments, but first I will talk about planning and localism.

If I walk out of my cottage on the edge of the Lincolnshire wolds, which is an area of outstanding natural beauty, I can walk up the hill and have an uninterrupted view over the vale of Lincoln to the Lincoln edge. The hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) knows that view very well. It is a fantastic view. Perhaps it is not as good as the view that you have, Mr Deputy Speaker, in the forest of Bowland, but we do almost as well in Lincolnshire as you do in Lancashire. We are very proud of that.

It is likely, however, that local people will soon be ignored by the planning authorities and that vast wind farms, higher than Lincoln cathedral, will be built along the Lincoln edge. This is not a debate about wind farms, but it is a debate about rural areas and surely it is a debate about the right of local people to have a say. The planning committee of West Lindsey district council has opposed unanimously the application for those vast wind farms. I believe that the planning process should respect the views of local people, particularly given that there are good planning reasons relating to local archaeology and the proximity to RAF Scampton, as well as the famous view that I have mentioned.

Localism affects other parts of the planning process. If Members read the front page of The Daily Telegraph today, they will see a banner headline that contains remarks made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi), who sits in the No. 10 policy unit and is therefore a man of some influence. He talks about the national planning policy framework and makes the point that the views of local people about new housing must not be overridden by central Government.

Local councils are not naturally nimbyist. The people who sit on them are democratically elected. They recognise the need for new housing and for new affordable housing in particular. Surely we believe in localism. I thought that localism was a primary undertaking of the coalition Government. It does not behove central Government to impose their views about the nature of house building on rural councils. I am all in favour of encouragement and of a broad framework. However, if people of worth and ability are to be encouraged to serve on councils in Lincolnshire and other rural areas, they must believe that they will have some influence and power, and that knowing their local areas gives them some right, in broad terms, to determine how much new housing should be built.

To turn to a vexed issue, I want to disagree with one of the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton, because there is no bedroom tax—it really is a spare room subsidy. In rural areas, we have to try to find a way—she was feeling her way towards this point—to distribute low-cost housing and to move people on from housing that is under-occupied so that younger families can get into it. As she said, this is a complex issue because there is not enough low-cost, single-bedroom social housing in rural areas. Local councils such as East Lindsey and West Lindsey district councils in my area are working on the problem and the local housing associations are very aware of it. I agree with her to the extent that localism comes into this. In this complicated area, central Government must work with local councils to ensure a good supply of low-cost housing.

The cost of living in rural areas is often not recognised. One can get bogged down in statistics and details, but it is important that we, as Members of Parliament who represent rural areas, put on the record the sheer cost of living in rural Britain, compared with living in urban Britain. People who live in entirely rural seats a long way from the capital are very under-represented in this city. Often, our voice does not get through. That affects all essential public services. In policing, despite high rural crime—I am a victim of rural crime myself—Lincolnshire is bottom of the heap for funding per head. It affects transport and hospital services. Again and again, despite the fact that incomes are lower in rural areas, the funding that we receive from central Government is inadequate. Our political voice is not powerful enough. We do not have a sufficient number of Members of Parliament or, dare I say it, Members in marginal seats, but we have a right to speak out because there is a clear injustice in the national funding formulas against rural people, who are often living in poverty.

That is not just rhetoric; it is fact. There have been a number of academic studies on the minimum income standard. That concept was invented by researchers and is carefully worked out. It is based on what members of the public think people need in order to have the minimum acceptable standard of living. There is no doubt that people in rural areas tend to have to spend 10% to 20% more on everyday requirements than those in urban areas, even though they often have lower wages or salaries. To reach a minimum living standard on 2010 levels, the research indicates that single working adults need to earn at least £15,600 a year in rural towns, £17,900 in villages and £18,000 in hamlets or remote countryside. Those in urban areas need earn only £14,400. For couples with two children, the annual earnings requirement is much higher at about £33,000 to £42,000, depending on the circumstances. I assure the House that many people who live in rural areas do not earn anything like £42,000 a year. The Minister, who is an excellent Member of Parliament, knows the scale of the problem in Cornwall. Rural poverty is a real problem.

The hon. Member for Ynys Môn mentioned fuel poverty. The Government’s statistical digest of rural England for 2013 notes that, proportionally, more households in rural areas are in fuel poverty than the national average. That is obvious—it is a clear fact. Fuel poverty is even greater in sparse villages and hamlets than it is in rural towns. Some 36% of rural households are off the gas grid, as the hon. Gentleman said, as opposed to only 8% in urban areas. As we all know to our personal cost, those households are reliant on much more expensive domestic fuels than others. I do not pretend that I know the answer to that problem, but I know that the Minister will address it when he sums up.

Average weekly household expenditure on transport in urban areas is £55. In rural towns and their fringes it is £62, in villages it is £78, and in hamlets and isolated dwellings it is £90. The average for England is £58. In rural areas, the highest proportion of income that is spent on an individual commodity or service goes on transport. We should consider the sort of wages that people in rural areas earn. There are a lot of retired people on relatively modest pensions. They have to spend an average of no less than £90 a week on transport if they live in hamlets or isolated dwellings, which is an enormous burden.

It is obvious that most people who live in rural areas travel further than other people—45% further per year than the English average and 53% further than those who live in urban areas. Plainly, the very DNA of rural existence requires travel over longer distances. We in Lincolnshire know all about long distances. Some 96% of urban households have a regular bus service, and the 72 Members of Parliament who represent constituencies in Greater London have fantastic tube and bus services. Only 42% of households in rural areas have a regular bus service. Famously, in my constituency in north Lincolnshire, we have the train service between Gainsborough, which I represent, and Cleethorpes, which runs once a week. Imagine a train that runs once a week—it is truly bizarre.

We cannot assume that everybody in a rural area, in the type of village in which I live, has access to a car, although there have been tremendously impressive efforts such as dial-a-bus services. Even if they do have access to a car, the cost that I have mentioned—£90 a week—may be truly prohibitive. There was a local couple from north Lincolnshire on television who could not even afford to go on holiday in England, because they could not afford the petrol to get where they wanted to go on the coast. People are having real difficulty in affording petrol, and some people in rural areas do not have a car and so have virtually no transport.

I do not want to say a great deal about access to broadband internet, because my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton dealt with the matter so skilfully. However, we all know that average broadband speeds are much slower in rural areas than in cities, and that a higher proportion of rural households have slow or no broadband. I am a bit technophobic, I admit, but when I am sitting in my cottage trying to use my local wi-fi and get on to broadband to do my parliamentary business, it is ridiculously slow. It is absurd—if I were trying to run a business, I would be out of business by now. I simply could not work in my own rural area. I have to do all my work from a computer in London. The internet simply does not work fast enough in rural areas.

In 2010—again, this is fact, not rhetoric—only 5% of urban areas had broadband speeds lower than 2 megabits a second, whereas the figure was 23% of rural areas. Surely that must be a priority for the Government. We are going to encourage people to avoid heavy transport costs and so on by working at home, are we not? How can we charge the rural economy if we have such slow broadband speeds?

I turn briefly to support for farming. I welcome my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State’s announcement that the Government will reduce the planned common agricultural policy modulation rate from 15% to 12%, which shows that the Government are listening. Like many rural Members of Parliament, I have been approached on the matter by farmers, and the National Farmers Union has rightly been concerned about it.

I know it is a matter for Europe rather than for us, but my personal view is that we should still try to transfer more agricultural subsidies from larger farms and estates and towards working farmers, many of whom are struggling. We need to help them more.

It is obvious that we have a problem of poverty in rural areas, and that there is not sufficient political weight to address it. The idea of minimum income standards is, in some ways, tied to that of the living wage. There has been a lot of debate about the living wage, but mainly focusing on areas such as London and the other big cities. I believe that the concept applies even more powerfully to the countryside. The social teaching of the Churches, which is a rich vein of thought and very much to be recommended as a read, puts strong emphasis on justice in the relationship between employers and their employees. For an employer to deprive a worker of his justly earned wage is traditionally described as “a sin crying out to heaven for vengeance”. It is that important. Provided that an individual is working full time, it is basic justice that he or she be paid enough to support himself or herself and their family.

We Conservatives would be foolish to concede the forum of debate on economic justice to Opposition Members. Conservatism has never existed, and should never exist, in some hyper-capitalist vacuum. Of course, we know the value of economic freedom and the marketplace, because we can see the unimaginable leaps in prosperity and the reduction of poverty that have taken place under free market economies over the past 200 years.

[Nia Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Gentleman regret the abolition of the Agricultural Wages Board, which provided some of the very things that he is speaking about, such as decent levels of pay and a clear indication of what work is worth what pay?

[Sir Edward Leigh]

That is an interesting point, but we cannot go back in time to a structure created under the Attlee Government whereby agricultural wages boards determined what wages were paid in the agriculture sector. Let us look at the farming economy in Lincolnshire. I live on an estate of 5,000 acres—I do not own it, I hasten to say. When the boards were created, there would probably have been 40 or 50 agricultural labourers working the estate. Now, there are only one or two. Although the hon. Lady’s point is fair, I do not believe that agricultural labourers’ wages are quite the problem in current rural Britain that they were in the immediate post-war period. I am thinking more of the problems that are loaded on to the great majority of people in the countryside, who are not farmers and do not work for farmers but who are living in fuel poverty, are retired or find difficulty with their transport costs. Their children have difficulty in getting housing, and they perhaps work in low-paid jobs in the catering industry in local towns. That is more typically the structure of the current rural economy than the historic structure of large numbers of people working in agriculture.

I was talking about economic freedom and the value of the marketplace, but also about the common good, and I want to finish on that point. The freedom of the marketplace must be protected within an orderly context, with the best being conserved and the important and vital things that might otherwise be destroyed by the cold calculations of mere profit being preserved. In rural areas such as mine in Lincolnshire, that means businesses, farmers, employers and local and central Government coming together to co-operate for the common good, whether on agricultural subsidies, flood defences, the price of petrol or many other matters.

I am sure the Government are trying to listen to country people, but it is important that we speak out and put pressure on the Government. We need action on fuel poverty, the cost of living and disparities between rural and urban areas, particularly with regard to Government funding, which is in the Government’s control. I hope and trust that the Minister will give us good news in those regards when he responds.

--- Later in debate ---

[Nia Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh) on her excellent work as Chair of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee and her very good exposé today.

My constituency is a mix of rural, semi-rural and urban. Some choose to live in the countryside, some go for more space, some were born and brought up there, but there is a real problem of rural poverty. Some of the hardest-hit areas are former mining areas, places nobody would ever have dreamt of building houses had there not been mines there. We have people from mining families who were born and brought up there, many in old terraced or social housing, and the difficulty for them is that costs escalate, it is hard to find work, transport costs are high and all the local costs, such as buying in the local shop rather than a supermarket in town, are much higher, yet their incomes are not comparable to those of the sort of people who can commute, have two cars and all the rest of it. Rural poverty is a major issue, therefore, particularly in many of the former mining areas of south and west Wales.

On social housing, in the past people were allocated rooms, bedrooms and homes on the basis of what was available in their village. I am pleased that the EFRA Committee has identified the bedroom tax as a major problem for these areas, but I am disappointed in the Government’s response, which repeats a fallacy peddled by Ministers from the Department for Work and Pensions: that a person needs only two or three hours’ work at the minimum wage to make up the £15. Worryingly, given that these are DWP Ministers, this completely misunderstands how housing benefit is calculated and the idea of clawback. Things such as housing benefit and tax credits depend on a person’s income, so extra hours do not simply equal extra income because there is a clawback; they do not get the extra housing benefit when they do the extra work, so they actually have to do an awful lot more hours, which obviously is a major problem for people in rural areas, where sometimes even getting the bus to do an extra day’s work can be almost counter-productive. Unless they do six, seven, eight hours’ work, the price of a bus, if they only do three or four hours or have a split shift, makes it completely impractical. There are some particular difficulties in rural areas, therefore, and I am pleased that we are committed to repealing the appalling legislation that has brought in the bedroom tax.

In rural areas there is very little employment. Interestingly, there was recently a campaign to keep open Pontyates fire station, which was run by retained firefighters—people who work in other jobs but get called out when there is an emergency. Obviously, whereas there used to be many miners and other people working in the villages and valleys, some of those areas now have nobody there in the daytime, because people commute out. One of the problems facing the fire station, which I am pleased to say we convinced the fire authority to keep open, is that it now needs a major recruitment campaign to identify people it can train up as retained firefighters. That is symptomatic of the lack of working-age adults in the community during the day.

That brings me to the issue of transport out of the villages and how much more difficult that is for people in rural areas. As more and more people have acquired cars, it has become even more difficult because bus services have become less and less viable. If it were not for the pensioners with their passes, some buses would not have any passengers on them. That is a major issue we have to consider, particularly when transport costs make it difficult for people to take up work opportunities.

Rural areas face much higher fuel bills—both types of fuel: the fuel people put into their vehicle, if they have one, and the fuel they use to heat their home. As hon. Members have said, there is much less choice in rural areas. If someone is not on mains gas, they cannot benefit from dual fuel deals, and many areas in my constituency are not on mains gas and so face either higher oil prices or even higher coal prices. On liquid petroleum gas, there are real problems with tied deals, where groups of houses have to order and switch at the same time, which raises competition issues. How can anyone escape from the provider they are forced to take on when they move into a property? I raised this matter with the former Member Chris Huhne and with the regulator, but it was not entirely sorted out. We need a regulator that can deal with these off-grid issues, which is something Labour is committed to doing. As was mentioned, Wales also has particularly high electricity costs—electricity usage in rural areas tends to be higher because of the lack of gas, and again, a tough new regulator could look into that and make much sharper recommendations.

I welcome Labour’s decision that the winter fuel allowance should be paid earlier, and if we get into government, we will certainly implement that proposal. It is important that people be able to buy when prices are low in the summer months and prepare for the winter, but of course, the Government have cut the winter fuel allowance—we had forgotten that. One of the very early cuts, it took £100 off the over-80s’ allowance and £50 off the over-60s’ allowance. It is a significant cut that has affected many people, particularly in rural areas, over the past few years, as prices have rocketed.

I wish to repeat my dismay at the abolition of the Agricultural Wages Board, which was supported by the Farmers Union of Wales because it provided a framework for settling disputes and enabling farmers to calculate how much to pay neighbours, friends and relatives—people it is sometimes difficult to bargain with—for the work they did. Furthermore, there was its “standard of accommodation” clause for workers working on agricultural premises. Especially disappointing have been the Government’s efforts to prevent Wales from retaining an equivalent board. Having spent £150,000 going to the Supreme Court to dispute Wales’ right to pass the byelaw legislation, they have spent more money this year going to court over the board. All this could have been easily sorted out through discussions between the Welsh Government and the Government here and need not have cost the taxpayer all that money. It is a real shame, particularly as it obviously went against the will of people in Wales.

I turn now to Royal Mail. In my Christmas visit to Royal Mail, it was interesting to learn that the big rush now takes place in November, not December, because so many people shop on the internet. The preference for internet shopping is even higher in rural areas. I was told that proportionately, more packages were going to rural areas than to urban areas, because obviously—it all makes sense—if it costs someone too much to get in the car and drive to the shops, they will be more tempted to go on the internet and pay the postage costs. But, of course, those postage costs are also an important issue for rural businesses, many of which rely on postal services, particularly where internet access is not as fast as it might be.

It is worrying, therefore, that with the privatisation of Royal Mail, we might see the erosion of the universal service obligation. Moya Greene has openly said, “Well, in Canada, a delivery once every two or three days is sufficient in rural areas.” Given that she is the head of Royal Mail, we can see the direction of travel, and it is worrying because it could affect the many rural businesses that depend on Royal Mail. The other problem is whether Royal Mail will keep its link with the post office network, because without that link, the network will be much weakened. While I welcome a recent announcement on safeguarding several rural post offices in my constituency, others have not benefited from any safeguard.

Whatever issue we are considering, right across the board, it is important to think about the impact on people in rural areas. We must continue, time and again, to look at how to decentralise our employment opportunities—whether it be through better broadband or investment in small villages and communities— and we must not let everything become centralised. Decentralisation is the key to building more prosperous rural communities.