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Mr. Paul Keetch (Hereford): I apologise for not being here for the start of the debate, although I watched it on television and listened to the excellent speech by the hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mrs. Organ).
My hon. Friend is speaking about Cornwall. Is he aware that it is a pilot area for the Government's new deal project? Are the people of Cornwall worried about the compulsion element of the new deal, which means that people are told to take up training or education or lose
benefit? In deeply rural areas such as Cornwall and my constituency, there are no such options, and people will be penalised by losing benefit.
Mr. George:
As my hon. Friend says, Cornwall is a pilot area, and we shall give the scheme a fair wind. I share his concern about compulsion.
Although per capita GDP in Cornwall is 71 per cent. of the UK average, it is lower than the level anywhere in England except for the Isle of Wight. It was never protected by the Conservative Government from rampant and inappropriate housing developments throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. Under the Conservatives, Cornwall was one of the fastest growing areas in the UK, although that merely contributed to its economic problems. In terms of a comparison with urban poverty, both Cornwall and the Isle of Wight have GDPs per head that are significantly lower than traditionally deprived areas such as Merseyside, with which Cornwall is often compared.
Cornwall's GDP is among the lowest in Europe, and is on a par with the poorest parts of Greece and Spain. However, that is not always how Cornwall is perceived. Many such rural areas have to overcome assumptions that have been generated by the images about the place. The Cornish people become quaint appendages to the landscape, and people talk about discovering the place almost as if it had never existed until their arrival. In reality, the Cornish live in ghettos and what are often described as windswept council house reservations, not in pretty cottages in the cove.
We shall always have to return to these matters, not only because of poverty among rural people but because of a poverty of understanding of what it is like to be poor and living in a rural area. Behind those images there are even deeper problems, such as the high cost of living in rural areas. Cornwall has the highest water and electricity charges in the country, and the biggest mismatch between earnings and house prices. Hundreds of Cornish council homes have been sold off and not replaced, but some better properties have been bought as second and holiday homes, and lost to the local community.
As if Cornwall had not experienced enough, it also lost a further 1,500 jobs in 1997, including the largest factory in my constituency. Most of Cornwall's farm holdings now fail to generate enough income to support even one person, and the bovine spongiform encephalopathy and bovine tuberculosis crises are affecting Cornwall more severely than most other agricultural regions. As the hon. Member for Falmouth and Camborne (Ms Atherton) knows, Cornwall is bracing itself for the possible closure of Europe's last remaining tin mine after 2,000 years of proud history.
Mr. Öpik:
Does my hon. Friend agree that the closure of factories--indeed a factory in my constituency, Machynlleth Design in Machynlleth, is in the same position--has a far more devastating effect in the countryside, where the geographical mobility of the work force is impaired due simply to their circumstances?
Mr. George:
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The problems of grabbing new work opportunities are extremely restricted by the fact that one has ties to the local community, and the opportunities for further employment are simply not there in many rural areas.
What have the so-called new guardians of the countryside on the Conservative Benches done to help over the past 18 years? They have sold off council houses, and given second homes a 50 per cent. council tax rebate. They have given Cornwall the highest water and electricity bills and privatised aspects of our health service, including the dental service and sight tests. They have reduced funding for essential local authority services and failed to heed the case, not for special treatment, but for a fair deal for places such as Cornwall and many other rural areas. They have given our livestock farmers the BSE problem, and they have placed Cornwall in perpetual recession. I have to concede, however, that they did give us the cones hotline.
If the Conservatives were behaving as the guardians of rural areas and the countryside, I do not know whose countryside they were guarding. It certainly was not the countryside of the poor. It was therefore no wonder that, in the Celtic regions and countries of Scotland, Wales and Cornwall, the Conservatives were completely wiped out.
In all those years, at least the Tories did not abolish the great invention of the last Liberal in this House by the name of George, Lloyd George: the creation of the Development Commission, now the Rural Development Commission, which is widely accepted as one outstanding Government agency that has worked. It has been widely acclaimed for its contribution to the understanding of rural poverty and to actions to reduce it.
That is why there is strong opposition to the Government's decision to draw their resources largely into what will be urban-biased regional development agencies. RDAs, by the way, will be about not unifying communities of interest in the English regions, but replacing the bland uniformity of a centralised state with the bland uniformity of regions, which I believe do not exist. RDAs will be based on administrative convenience.
As defined from above, RDAs will contain, in regions such as the so-called south-west, more internal conflict than shared agendas and will therefore hold the seeds of their own destruction. As they will be about focusing on bringing up the average for the region as a whole, RDAs will prove largely irrelevant for remoter rural areas.
Ms Candy Atherton (Falmouth and Camborne):
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that what Cornwall needs is a devastating voice in Europe to make our case on rural poverty and to attack the problems? If we have a strong development agency that is well staffed, equipped and supported by Government, are we not going to be in a stronger position than we would be with an agency purely for Cornwall?
Mr. George:
The hon. Lady raises an important point, with which I strongly disagree, because Cornwall's voice will be lost in this so-called regional development agency.
The political reality that the Government must face up to is that rural poverty has now been proven to be a serious problem which, away from the prosperous suburbs, is set to get worse. Action needs to be taken. I and my colleagues strongly recommend that rural poverty should receive proper recognition in Government policies and programmes; that the proposed social exclusion unit should have a clear rural dimension; that official indicators of poverty must show a greater account of rural circumstances; that the problems of providing services in
scattered rural areas are properly recognised in a rural sparsity factor in all local government departments; and that the extra cost of meeting rural housing needs is acknowledged by the Government and the Housing Corporation.
Mr. Colin Pickthall (West Lancashire):
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mrs. Organ) not only on securing the debate, but on covering it so thoroughly in her opening speech--so thoroughly, in fact, that I can throw away about two thirds of what I intended to say.
For about six years, I have represented a rural part of Lancashire. I am aware that, in this part of the world, there is a mind fix that Lancashire is full of cotton mills, with docks at one end and Blackpool tower at the other. In fact, it is largely a rural shire. On a small map, my constituency appears to be sandwiched between Greater Manchester, Merseyside and Preston, but if people live in it--as I have done for 30 years--they realise that it is a huge area of tiny hamlets, larger villages and lousy transport systems.
I want to talk about the problems faced by people who live in that area, and who depend on other people to get about. In particular, I want to concentrate on the plight of many elderly people. A main factor in rural poverty--not just financial, but psychological poverty--is isolation.
When the Conservative Government deregulated bus services in Britain, they dealt many people in the rural population a severe blow. Before deregulation, bus services were skeletal, but they did exist, making it just about possible for people on low incomes to commute to shops, schools, hospitals, leisure facilities or, perhaps most important, work.
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