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Kali Mountford (Colne Valley): Does my hon. Friend agree that the diversion from public to private transport is
exacerbating rural poverty? People who most need to get to their perhaps poorly paid jobs are having to depend on cars, which they can ill afford.
Mr. Pickthall: That is true. Elderly people in particular, who are unable to walk easily, cannot get even to what facilities there are in rural communities. It is an important point, which the Government have to address.
My local council, under both Tory and Labour control, has a wonderful record of building sheltered accommodation in small rural communities, so that elderly people, when they retire, can stay in the communities where they have lived and worked all their life, but the collapse of the rural transport system has effectively isolated many of those people, many of them retired farm workers on pitiful pensions, who cannot afford to run cars. I know more than a few who, as a result, have moved from the communities and tiny villages where they have lived all their lives to market towns such as Ormskirk, simply to escape the isolation of those rural communities. They then find themselves isolated in an urban community, but at least the clinic and their general practitioner are around the corner.
Dan Norris (Wansdyke):
Does my hon. Friend agree that, although some people cannot afford cars, they often have to run one because it is essential to do so, even though it can be to the detriment of other aspects of their lives because they then have less to spend on clothing or food? In some ways, the tax system is also prejudiced against those people. They can afford to tax their cars for only six months at a time, but that method costs £15 more a year than taxing it for the full 12 months in one go. Perhaps the Chancellor of the Exchequer could consider that matter, as life for some people in rural communities would be difficult, if not impossible, without a car.
Mr. Pickthall:
My hon. Friend makes a good point. When one sees some of the cars that are miraculously kept on the road in rural areas, one has to wonder about their safety. However, it is true that many people make incredible sacrifices simply to keep themselves mobile.
As village shops, sub-post offices and even rural pubs began to close in my area, it became clear that people who live in rural areas and who are poor pay more for everything, from groceries to furnishings, than those who are not poor. They pay more because they cannot get to the supermarket in the town. Just as important, their choice is cruelly circumscribed when compared to that available to people on the same income who happen to live in even a modest-sized town.
My constituency is served, and used to be well served, by two cross-country rail lines with 10 rural stations. One might think that that was a good network but, during the Tory years, it was steadily run down. The services became less frequent--dramatically so in some cases. It was decided that many of the services would omit every other station or miss out two stations, thus making them less useful. The unreliability of the rail service has come to have serious consequences for workers. People who have jobs in Wigan, Southport, Preston or Liverpool find that their service is late perhaps three times a week, and they are sacked. That happens regularly.
Two stations in my constituency are wholly inaccessible to anyone who is not fully fit. Burscough Bridge station, for example, has a platform so low that an elderly person could not get onto the train.
Mr. Drew:
When the jobseeker's allowance was introduced by the previous Administration, it highlighted the problem caused by the lack of public transport. People in Gloucestershire who had to sign on in person found it very difficult to do so, because they had trouble getting to a particular place at a particular time. The county council's public transport unit had some heart-rending calls from people who had to sign on at 10 am on Wednesday but who were told that the first bus was on Thursday. How were they supposed to sign on? That is the sort of problem facing people in rural areas.
Mr. Pickthall:
That is absolutely true. To add insult to injury, the person going to sign on could be paying £3 out of his dole just to get to the office to be able to sign on. Virtually everything that the previous Government did in the past few years hit the rural poor harder than it hit anyone else. I would like to think that they did not quite understand what they were doing. In my view, it was a serious social crime for an effective, if sparse, public transport system to have been sabotaged by the previous Government in recent decades. Fundamentally, the Government did not believe in or understand public transport.
In my area, it is two Labour authorities--Lancashire county council and West Lancashire district council--which have struggled to patch up the mess, with an expanding system of dial-a-ride and community car schemes and some subsidised bus services. Although I admire those services and the work that goes into them, and they are useful, it is a hotch-potch of a system. It certainly cannot cover the area satisfactorily, and does not replace the full public transport system that we had.
I do not want to talk only about the problems facing the elderly in rural communities. The lack of public transport is also a problem for schoolchildren. My hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean has already dealt with that point, so I will not go over it again.
Teenagers who do not come from well-to-do families and who do not have the money to hire taxis or own cars have difficulty getting into town for even basic leisure facilities. This is leading, certainly in my area, to the problems that we usually associate with teenagers on urban estates. In one case, a community that comprises only 40 people has still managed to manufacture its own little gang.
Mr. Peter Bradley (The Wrekin):
Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the first victims of the shortage of local government finance is all too often the youth service? Does he further agree that, in many county areas, we desperately need a proper comprehensive review of the standard spending assessment system, so that we can deliver essential services to people in rural communities, not least to the young people on whom we depend for our future?
Mr. Pickthall:
We do indeed need a comprehensive review of the SSA system with that in mind. As my hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean said, all the
We said at the time that the right-to-buy housing policy introduced by the Conservatives would have a catastrophic effect in rural areas, and it did. By the time that the former Secretary of State for the Environment, the right hon. Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer), woke up to that fact, it was too late--the council properties in rural areas had all gone. Most of them were attractive properties; some were extended, and were then sold on to second owners.
The integration of the transport system, which the Government are proposing and on which they are consulting, is absolutely crucial, but we must not forget that we are talking about two countrysides. The first is populated by affluent people, often off-comers and people who escaped, in my case from Merseyside. Sometimes, these people managed to dodge the planning system and build a nice house, or had the money to buy one.
Mr. Stephen Day (Cheadle):
Does the hon. Gentleman think that an integrated transport policy should include an increase of 20p on a gallon of petrol?
Mr. Pickthall:
Personally, I think that the tax on petrol is probably where it should be. I should prefer the car tax to be removed and put on petrol, but a lot of thought is going into how we can protect people in rural areas who need cars from an increase in the price of petrol. So far, every suggested solution, such as special registration, is too easy to dodge and fiddle. I do not know what the answer is.
As I was saying, there is the countryside of the affluent but, alongside that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean said, there is the countryside where people are living in the direst poverty. The contrast between the two is just as stark as it is in the cities.
I always compare poverty in rural areas with the gulag archipelago--poverty is scattered throughout the communities, and, because hundreds of people are not clustered together, it is not noticed. However, when one canvasses in rural areas, as we do all the time, it is noticeable. Every 10th or 15th house suffers poverty as dire as one might find on estates in Manchester or anywhere else.
I disagree with my hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean on one point. She said that we must ensure equity of provision of services for the countryside. I do not think that that is ever going to be possible. We could never provide for the rural areas all the facilities that are available to people in large concentrations in the urban areas. People in reasonably well-off households swap that inconvenience for the great benefits of clean air, quiet, a pleasant landscape and so on. They do a deal.
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