Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Rory Stewart and Robin Walker

Thursday 17th March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

5. How many schools are taking part in the Government’s new tree planting scheme.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Rory Stewart)]

So far, 800 primary schools have participated in the scheme. The hope is that in the next stage we will give 1 million individual schoolchildren the opportunity to select, plant and care for their own tree.

[Mr Walker]

I congratulate the Minister on this fantastic scheme. I know that schools in Worcester, which are great fans of the forest schools initiative, will want to play their full part. Trees are a fantastic investment in cleaner air, in the quality of life in our cities and in flood defence. Will the Minister come to Worcester and see the tree renaissance that is taking place in our city, where our mayor, Roger Knight, is leading the planting of thousands of new trees?

[Rory Stewart]

I should be delighted to take up that offer. Worcester is showing real leadership, but we would like many more towns and cities in the United Kingdom to engage in planting more trees. As my hon. Friend has pointed out, it is fantastic for tackling air pollution, fantastic for biodiversity and great for our leisure and health. In particular, I pay tribute to the work in Worcester at Laugherne Brook and Perdiswell.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Rory Stewart and Robin Walker

Thursday 5th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Rory Stewart]

This is a very important point. With the Government spending a record amount of money on flood defence—about £20 million in this case—it is important to have a standard that flood insurance companies recognise so that when we make the investment householders can benefit from it. I am happy to consider the individual case.

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

17 . I was pleased to welcome the Government’s investment in repair work for the Barbourne brook culvert in my constituency last year, but investigations have since found significant deterioration in that culvert and there might be a need for some extra support. Will the Minister convene a meeting with the Environment Agency and Worcester City Council to discuss the issue?

[Rory Stewart]

Again, I shall be delighted to do so. Worcester is a special case, as it is on the Severn, like Gloucester. Much of the flooding there has affected assets, such as road assets. That culvert is central and I am happy to sit down with my hon. Friend and with the Environment Agency in order to address the challenges of that culvert.

Funding for Local Authorities

Debate between Rory Stewart and Robin Walker

Thursday 10th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Walker]

My hon. Friend is extremely generous. I believe this campaign has strong support across the Back Benches. It is an issue that we can take forward; we must see real progress made on it. I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s comment, but it is, of course, a team effort in which many others have played their part.

In Worcestershire as in many other counties, the education department shares staff and resources with the broader children’s services area, so wherever education funding is under pressure, it places additional pressure on other aspects of children’s services, including looked-after children and safeguarding—issues raised by a number of Opposition Members. As a long-standing supporter of the f40 campaign and having met Ministers many times to discuss it, I know that reform of the school funding formula is on the way and I have every confidence that we will eventually get a fairer deal, but we need to learn the lessons of what seems to have gone wrong with local government funding and not repeat the same mistakes.

It appears that in this case the Government set out to correct some of the imbalance in funding for rural local authorities, but then introduced a damping mechanism that outweighed the impact of the change—effectively, as my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness said, putting the whole thing into the deep freeze rather than simply damping it. In effect, a funding reform designed to move things in a fairer direction has been so watered down as to make the problem worse. That cannot be allowed to happen when it comes to school funding, and it should not be allowed to happen to the wider CLG funding for local authorities.

[Rory Stewart]

Would my hon. Friend touch, perhaps briefly, on health funding, which is one of the other great examples of this problem?

[Mr Walker]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right; it is exactly the problem I was about to move on to. As I mentioned earlier, health funding is another area of major concern. Rural areas tend to have higher numbers of elderly people and a higher life expectancy than the major cities. As so much health funding is allocated according to life expectancy and targeted towards areas of high perceived deprivation, it means that the population of big cities is generally much better funded than that of rural areas.

With an ageing population and more people living with long-term conditions that require regular treatment, this creates enormous pressure on all rural health services, particularly on community health services. Worcestershire as a whole gets lower health funding per person than do more urban areas of the west midlands, but it has an older population, placing greater demands on our health service. Shifting the balance of health funding from mortality to morbidity would help to address this, as would having a more activity-based formula for community health. In health as in education, however, the local structures do not exist in isolation from local government. There are close links between the health and the social care systems, while pressures on both the acute and the community health systems create additional pressure on local authority-run social care. The fact that we are underfunded for health means that our underfunding for social care is a more serious challenge for our local authority.