Making Britain the Best Place to Grow Up and Grow Old

Selaine Saxby Excerpts

Monday 16th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Selaine Saxby (North Devon) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Ruth Cadbury), my co-chair on the all-party parliamentary group for cycling and walking, where we so often agree—tonight we probably will not.

We are looking to make Britain the best place to grow up and grow old. I am delighted to represent the beautiful constituency of North Devon, which is certainly one of the most popular places to grow up and grow old, having had a surge of people move there during the pandemic, for their primary residence and for second homes. We are also an incredibly popular holiday destination, which has led to a surge in Airbnb short-term holiday lets. Although that is great for our tourism economy, it does mean that we have something of a housing crisis. Although I warmly welcome the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill, I very much hope that, as it makes its passage through the House, we will see more done to tackle second homes and short-term holiday lets, to rebalance our housing economy in North Devon. While I have the opportunity to put this on record, I also hope that the long-awaited consultation on short-term holiday lets promised last June as part of the tourism recovery strategy will be forthcoming as the first step on the journey to sorting out our housing market.

I am a former maths teacher and I have spent time in this place before talking about averages and variations. When it comes to education and the Schools Bill, I very much hope that we will look deeper than the average that says that Devon is okay, because when we look at the variants in a county the size of Devon, we can see that there are some issues in my constituency. If we were to look at the social mobility index, we would see that South Hams is 49th out of 324, Exeter is 81st, my North Devon constituency is 238th and my neighbouring area of Torridge—northern Devon, as we call it up there—is 283rd. We need to look deeper than at just the large local authority if we are to enable those children to have their education levelled up, because to date we have missed out on cold-spot funding.

I am delighted to welcome Multiply, but I do not know quite how it will be delivered in my constituency, where we have only one further education college and are 65 miles from the nearest university. My FE college, Petroc College, is utterly brilliant but please don’t tell me that Multiply will come in as an online course, because what we do not have in North Devon is broadband. The Queen’s Speech talks about the elimination of the barrier of digital exclusion, but when I talk about digital exclusion, it is not so much about the gadgets that the children have; it is that we cannot even connect to the outside world.

The inequalities that I talk about as regards levelling up are about rural and coastal communities. My theme throughout my few minutes’ speech tonight is how we can ensure that, as we level up the country, we reach into those pockets of deprivation in rural and coastal Britain. Health inequalities on the coast are perhaps better documented than educational ones, but I would like to sing the praises of my tiny North Devon District Hospital, the smallest on the mainland. It has done a fantastic job for the people of North Devon through the pandemic. We have also recently seen it merge with the Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Foundation Trust, which means that we are managing the flow of patients and medical professionals between that tiny hospital and the bigger one further south.

In Devon, we have retained our Nightingale hospital, and I am terribly proud that we will be the first to deliver our covid catch-up fund wards. On 23 May, the £1.9 million given to my hospital in December will mean that we can start to deliver operations and orthopaedic procedures such as knee and hip replacements. That is a remarkable achievement and the team is also ready to build our new hospital. We are one of the 40, and the plans are modular. While I have the attention of the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Maria Caulfield), tonight, I want to ask whether there is any chance of bringing that forward. We are in the final phase, and we could build it now. Without those new theatres and the new housing element of the hospital, we are struggling to bring people to North Devon because of the housing crisis I described earlier.

I would not say that everything health-wise was rosy. It will come as no surprise to the Minister to hear that we are a little short of dentists. If any of them are listening tonight, let me tell them that the surf is fantastic, the countryside is beautiful and they will get the warmest of welcomes. I hear that the Indians have a lot of dentists looking for work, and we would welcome them with open arms. Also, this is a Department that has managed to deliver things in buses, so please may we have a mobile dental unit to visit our children in the coming weeks and months? As we look at how we can level up rural and coastal Britain, I hope that we can morality-check our policies, because many of them that work so well in Westminster have lost that certain je ne sais quoi by the time they reach us in rural and coastal North Devon.