Rural Affairs

Sam Rushworth Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

What a privilege and a pleasure it is to have been here this evening for three outstanding maiden speeches. It is a great honour to follow the hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead (David Taylor). As it happens, I learned to swim at Dacorum leisure centre, but I never knew what “Dacorum” meant until tonight, so I am grateful to him for that. It was great to hear about the developing film industry in Hemel Hempstead, which used to be famous for the old Kodak building. The hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Josh Newbury) says that Cannock Chase is more than a forest; the hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead has certainly demonstrated that Hemel Hempstead is much more than an extremely complicated roundabout. All three hon. Members will be great contributors to this House of Commons and assets to our democracy. It was a pleasure to hear from them.

Rural Britain is different. The rural economy is different, quality-of-life issues are different, the profile of crime is different—almost everything is different. In some ways it is better—we have somewhat better air quality, and we spend less time sitting in traffic—but there are also many challenges. The sheer distances involved affect so many things, from people’s ability to access regular specialist healthcare treatment to their ability to get the right T-levels placement for their career. That, in turn, has an impact on health inequalities and social mobility. The costs of provision mean that many of our constituents are off mains drainage, and many more again are off the grid. That has implications for their costs and, indeed, for decarbonisation.

On connectivity, things have improved a great deal, but many Members of this House will have had, or heard about, the experience of having to go to the end of the lane to receive a text message verification code that has already expired by the time they get back. Thankfully, such things continue to improve, but there is still a big gap between our rural and urban areas.

This is a broad topic. We could debate any of the issues that I mentioned, but to avoid being repetitious of other Members, I will restrict myself to three disparate topics. The first relates to connectivity, not for broadband or mobile but for an older technology that often gets overlooked: the phone. Rural areas have a particular angle on the upcoming roll-out of the voice over internet protocol, which will replace the public switched telephone network. Another thing to add to the list of differences in rural areas is the weather, which means that electricity lines get knocked over more often. We still have power cuts in rural areas, with a frequency that people in cities might find hard to believe. Sometimes they last for a few hours, but we had one in East Hampshire in the past few years that lasted for more than three days.

The proposal to get rid of traditional telephones, which are a lifeline in such cases, and replace them with internet telephony that relies on a one-hour power back-up was never going to work in rural areas. I am pleased that there has now been a pause, and I am also pleased that some operators, including Vodafone, which I spoke to the other day, are looking into a much better power back-up. We need to see more on that, but in the meantime we need to ensure that consumers who are changing system are made aware of the position.

My second topic relates to housing and affordability. It is quite a niche topic nationally, but it is definitely not niche in my constituency, where we have an area that is partly in a national park and partly outside it. The housing targets are set for the whole district, but there are severe restrictions on what can happen inside the national park, so there is a great deal of pressure on development and therefore on services just outside it, in places such as Alton, Four Marks and the southern parishes of East Hampshire. It is also an issue inside the national park, because there is already an affordability discrepancy between inside and outside. Over time, as there is disproportionate development outside, that discrepancy will grow. I hope the Minister will discuss this anomaly with his colleagues in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and that it can be fixed in the national planning policy framework rethink.

The situation is exacerbated by the massively higher housing targets now coming for rural areas, with the change in the formula meaning much higher targets for areas such as mine but with targets reducing for parts of London, where clearly there is a major, and in most measures a greater, housing affordability issue. I ask Ministers to look again at how the affordability ratio and the overall formula work and seek to ensure that the new housing that gets built, not just the existing stock, is truly accessible and affordable to local people, not just creating very large numbers of new five-bedroom executive homes which will be just as out of reach as those already there.

My final point, which I know all Members will make tonight, is about the importance of farming. Nobody here needs to be told about the importance of farming; it is not quite the same thing as rural affairs but there is such a heavy overlap, and we rely on farmers for so much—for land stewardship, biodiversity, and managing the attractiveness of the countryside for the visitor economy. When we get snowed in in Hampshire, we even rely on the farmers to clear the roads.

Most of all we must never forget that we rely on these men and women for our food. Land yield really matters; it matters to them as agricultural businesses, but it also matters to us. The one asset we cannot increase in size is the total amount of land that we have in the country. It is in our national interest to support the farming sector to be able to get the most production possible out of the land. I urge the Government, genuinely, to think again about how they support this sector with the farming budget, with having a formal target for food security, and of course with rethinking their terrible move on inheritance tax.

There have always been different types of farms—large and small, owner-occupied and tenanted—but family farms have always been at the heart of our agricultural sector. They are businesses, but in one sense they are unlike other businesses. Their biggest asset is not something they have bought and is not something they intend to sell, so in that sense they are more like custodians of an asset than owners.

[Sam Rushworth (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Damian Hinds]

I must ask the hon. Gentleman to forgive me, as I need to finish in less than one minute.

The agricultural property relief and business property relief changes will cut right into this asset. I have a constituency example, a 50-acre farm with an estimated farm value of £5.5 million, but the profit from it is only £19,000 per year. In the event of the demise of the parents, the liability could be £900,000, and there is no way with a return on total capital of 0.35% that they can do anything other than sell it. That matters not just to that family but to all of us. First, there is the concern that larger businesses will come along and buy up these family farms, and they are not necessarily buying them to plant crops or rear livestock; they may use them for renewable energy projects or carbon credit use, and that will mean less food production. Secondly, being aware that a tax is coming upon death, the current generation farming the land will be disincentivised from investing in the farm, knowing the return effectively will be lower. For those two reasons, it does not just matter to those families; it matters to every single one of us in this Chamber and every single one of us in this country, and I ask the Minister to please think again.

--- Later in debate ---

[Patrick Spencer (Central Suffolk and North Ipswich) (Con)]

This debate has been about APR, but I will talk about flood risk. Suffolk is, by its nature, a county at high risk of flooding. Large parts of my constituency are covered by rivers: we have the Rivers Deben, Orwell and Alde. We have tributaries that filter across low-lying land and clay soil, which apparently is not particularly permeable—I learned that during the general election campaign. That means that whenever there is heavy rainfall, streams and rivers become overburdened very quickly, creating bogs, waterlogged fields and eventually flooding across our fields. The water has nowhere to go. Roads are overwhelmed, as are irrigation and sewerage systems, and whole villages can find themselves under a foot or two of water after one night.

One year ago, Storm Babet did exactly that. We experienced an incredibly wet October. One month’s rainfall fell between 11 and 13 October, then 80 mm in the 24-hour period of 18 October. People were stranded in villages and cars were stuck on driveways. People living in Wickham Market, Needham Market, Framsden and Charsfield were forced out of their homes. Some are not yet back in. People were traumatised, exhausted and facing financial oblivion after insurance companies used small print to stop paying out on the damage caused by the flooding.

We do not want to see that again, but the reality is that our climate is getting more volatile and the risk of flooding is as high as ever. We must take preparedness seriously, which is why Suffolk county council, the Environment Agency and community groups have undertaken to clear rivers, improve water flow through pipes and guttering, dig trenches and develop overflow areas in case of higher than average rainfall. I am more critical than many people of Suffolk county council and the Environment Agency for dragging their feet at times. I am working with residents of Earl Soham who are trying to get the highways agency to clear pipes and drainage. Suffolk county council is just not reacting quickly enough to that.

I recognise that the funding is not there when it should be. The funding from the centre is not adequate, and responsibility over who should take control of the situation is confusing, which is why I support the private Member’s Bill by my hon. Friend Member for Mid Norfolk (George Freeman) to sort this out.

I want to talk about something else that I believe is a real reason that flood risk has increased, and to remind the House that we have the option of reducing it in future. One of the reasons that flooding has worsened in recent years is the development of vast numbers of housing units in areas of high flood risk. Each development not only puts more homeowners at risk of flooding, but compounds that by increasing the risk of surface water run-off.

I know deep down that the decision to reform APR and increase the inheritance tax liability for small farms is fundamentally about releasing land in rural areas so that developers can build more houses on it. There is no justification whatsoever for it from an economic point of view. There is no way the Government will raise enough money to support public services, as various Members have said today. The only viable reason that I can understand for the Government introducing APR on small farm holdings is because they want to release land for development. If we continue to concrete over fertile farmland, of any soil type, we will increase that risk.

[Sam Rushworth]

The Daily Telegraph, which I know is the paper of choice for more respectable Conservative Members, reported last year that wealthy investors are “hoovering up” agricultural land to avoid inheritance tax, a situation that it said meant more land was falling into the hands of private and institutional investors.

[Patrick Spencer]

Let me take a moment—Members throughout the House have an opportunity to watch—to address that exact case. The Labour party wants to tackle big landowners like James Dyson and the Grosvenor Group; I have two points. First, take for a moment the incredible work done by Dyson Farming on food technology, which is increasing the productivity of our land and the standard of food production on his farms. Think of what the Grosvenor Group has done in the moorlands and peatlands of the north-west—it is a protector of our environment and has supported our natural environment and increased the ecosystem.

Secondly, do the Government think for a moment that either of those two people are going to go to bed worried about the IHT change? No, they are not. They will dodge it, much like many of the well-heeled business people always do with taxes. The people who will bear the brunt of the Labour party’s tax policies are small farms—family farms—that do not have a huge amount of capital. When we try to tax and demand liquidity from an illiquid source, we force people to fire sale their capital. It will not work. We have to understand the economics.

The risks are real. In Needham Market, Hopkins Homes built the St George estate at the base of a hill in an old disused quarry close to sea level, and right next to an area considered at high risk of flooding.