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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions (Angela Eagle): I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mrs. Organ) on raising this important issue. The subject should concern us all. I was pleased to hear the range of views expressed, especially by my hon. Friends, who prove that Labour is now the party of the countryside. They bring insight and passion to their advocacy for the countryside, as well as great experience of the particular difficulties suffered by those living in rural poverty.
The Government firmly believe in opportunity, fairness and prosperity for all. That applies equally to all our citizens, whether they live in the city or the country. Rural areas, where many live and work, are a key part of the national economy. Our countryside must be a living one. We are committed to addressing its problems as much as we are those anywhere else. At the same time, we recognise the distinctive needs of all people in rural areas.
Today's debate has been particularly illustrative. We heard three speeches by Conservative Members. The first was by the right hon. Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Mr. Clark), who, sadly, is not in his place. He talked about farming. The second was by the hon. Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen), who also talked about farming, and said that Labour Members mainly come from urban areas. Anyone who had listened to today's debate would know that that is not true. If the hon. Gentleman considers who initiated the debate and who has contributed to it, he will have to admit that my hon. Friends are from rural areas, and do a good job representing them.
I was attracted to the view expressed by the right hon. Member for Kensington and Chelsea about organic farming. The Government are looking very closely at that. I am a particular fan of farmers' markets. We need far more of them. I know that my colleagues in the Ministry of Agriculture are considering what they can do to encourage such markets.
When we consider rural poverty, we must recognise the legacy left by the previous Administration. I am always ready to give them credit where credit is due, as Opposition Members know.
Mr. Day:
I must have missed it. When did you do that?
Angela Eagle:
Well, occasionally.
The legacy has had a particular impact on rural areas. Hon. Members were right to emphasise transport issues. Poverty was bequeathed to us by the previous Government. We have inherited a situation in which one in four pensioners and one in four children are in families dependent on income support. The percentage of the population with household incomes below half the average more than doubled between 1979 and 1994-5. The number of children living in households with below average income increased from 1 million in 1979 to 2.6 million--before housing costs are taken into account.
Distribution of employment is also important. One in five households with adults of working age are without work. That is a terrible waste of one of our most important
resources. We are determined to tackle this legacy by helping young people, lone parents, long-term unemployed people and sick and disabled people--where that is appropriate--back into work, regardless of whether they live in rural or urban areas. We have set up the social exclusion unit specifically to co-ordinate activity in that area across government.
Mr. Drew:
Will my hon. Friend give way?
Angela Eagle:
I do not want to give way, because I have a very short time in which to respond to the debate.
Inaccessibility and sparsity play a major part in exacerbating problems of the rural poor, such as unemployment and lack of services. Many rural areas are poorly served by major transport routes--a problem in attracting and retaining businesses and services. Many rural settlements are scattered and remote, making the provision of services more difficult and expensive. The scattered nature of rural communities can add to a sense of isolation, especially among the poorest members of society.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean said, it is a sad fact that much of the deprivation in rural areas goes unnoticed. We need to challenge the perception that rural areas are universally prosperous. Relatively wealthy rural areas can mask small pockets of deprivation--in some cases, just one or two families or a few poor elderly people. Problems of unemployment and lack of services in rural areas lead to younger people moving away, resulting in a larger percentage of elderly people in some rural communities compared with non-rural areas. Many such older people are alone and living on the margins of poverty.
In recognition of the hidden nature of rural poverty, work has been commissioned from a team of researchers at the University of Cambridge to review potential indicators of rural disadvantage, which can be helpful in the development of rural policy. One idea that the team has come up with is that key indicators are bundled together to identify specific aspects of rural poverty and deprivation. We shall be considering how its findings can be used when the final report is available. We want to tackle the issue of deprivation indicators so that they reveal more of what is going on in our rural communities.
Many of the initiatives that we are developing are being specifically tailored to meet the needs of rural areas. Welfare to work is an essential element of our integrated approach. Our new deal for young unemployed people emphasises high-quality options, all including education or training designed to reach accredited qualifications. The new deal for 18 to 24-year-olds began in 12 pathfinder areas in Britain on 5 January, and will be introduced nationally in April. The pathfinder areas have been selected to reflect a range of social and economic areas, including rural areas.
We intend to design and deliver the new deal in a way that is sensitive to rural circumstances, the needs of rural businesses and communities and unemployed young people living in rural areas. I thank the Rural Development Commission and local authorities that have made an important contribution to the debate and enhanced our understanding of how we can deliver the new deal in rural areas.
Low pay continues to be a particular problem in rural areas. A central plank of our plans to alleviate poverty is the introduction of the national minimum wage. It will
aim to make work worth while for people who are stuck on benefits. The United Kingdom is the only modern industrialised country without some form of minimum-wage-fixing machinery. The minimum wage will provide a statutory level below which pay should not fall, and help to remove the worst excesses of low pay and exploitation of those at work. It will be a single national rate, and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean pointed out, will be of particular assistance in some rural areas.
Regional rates raise a number of serious difficulties, such as effects at the boundaries of regions, and where those boundaries are. Regional concerns were taken into account during the independent Low Pay Commission's regional visits. The commission is consulting widely with employers, employees and other interested organisations and individuals, and will make its recommendations to the Government by May 1998.
In the short time left to me, I want to say something about rural transport. As I have said, many of the problems of rural areas are exacerbated by inaccessibility and remoteness. Many people in rural areas are unable to drive, either because they cannot afford to do so or because of age or disability. They are likely to find their access to services and employment opportunities severely limited as a result. Better public transport services are vital, so that people can have real choice over how they travel, and need not be so dependent on the private car.
The rural dimension of transport and accessibility issues is being addressed in our continuing review of transport policy. The Government are considering the action necessary to deliver integrated transport systems to meet the differing needs of all parts of the country.
The Tory legacy has been especially damaging in that respect--the deregulation of buses and the total disappearance of services in many rural areas, as well as the decimation of rail services. We must tackle those issues if we are to tackle rural poverty through its causes, and that will give people access to services and the ability to travel to and from work.
Mr. Nicholas Soames (Mid-Sussex):
I am grateful for the opportunity to debate this important matter--a debate that takes place at a time and against a backdrop about as sombre as it would be possible to imagine. It is clear that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction remain a quantifiable and lethal threat to the stability and security of the region, and it is essential that Saddam Hussein be made to meet the obligations of unconditional and unrestricted access demanded by the United Nations resolutions. Her Majesty's Government are rightly determined, as were their predecessors, to secure his full compliance--it is to be hoped, by diplomatic rather than by military means.
However, it seems to many of us that the virtual stalling of the middle east peace process represents a thoroughly unhappy and potentially dangerous state of affairs, which also has profound consequences for British strategic and other interests.
The Foreign Secretary is leaving today for Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. He, like the American Secretary of State, will find his dialogue with both the Saudis and the Kuwaitis to be courteous and correct, but wholly unenthusiastic. It is a matter for shame and regret that the Foreign Secretary, now eight months into his office, should be so late in visiting our Arab friends. That shows, again, his remarkable lack of judgment about priorities, as Britain's interests in the middle east should, without question, remain at the forefront of any Foreign Secretary's business.
As we approach, in May, the 50th anniversary of the foundation of the state of Israel, I welcome the chance at such an opportune moment--as the middle east approaches what could possibly be a profound climacteric--to re-focus on the outstanding and unresolved questions of Palestinian self-determination and Israeli-occupied Arab land, which are at the heart of the middle east conflict.
I hope that during the debate, we shall remind ourselves of the original principles and aims of the middle east peace process started in Madrid in 1991, and that we shall examine both why so many people in the middle east, both Arabs and Israelis, have lost faith in it, and what must be done to restore confidence and progress.
In this anniversary year of the state of Israel, it is right and proper that we in the British Parliament should remember what the events of 1948 meant to the 700,000 Palestinians who fled, who were forced into permanent exile from their homes in the newly established Jewish state and who, to this day, are unable to return to the places of their birth. The Arabic word for what happened in 1948 is "al-Nakba"--the catastrophe.
The results of that today are that three quarters of the Palestinian population is forced to live outside the country, with no right of return, and the Palestinian people who live in the west bank and Gaza are deprived of many of their most fundamental civil and political rights. They still have not achieved their goal of self-determination, which is enshrined in the United Nations charter of 1945. We should remember that the events of 1948 meant that the Palestinian people became the largest refugee population in the world, with the most horrendous and tragic consequences for them.
I should remind the House of the principles on which the peace process in Madrid in 1991, and then the agreement in Oslo in 1993, were based. In the lengthy and complicated diplomatic negotiations that led to the convening of the Madrid conference, the more reluctant Arab countries were persuaded to participate only when they had received cast-iron assurances from the co-sponsors that the negotiations would be based on Security Council resolutions 242 and 338--that is to say, land for peace.
In the letter of assurance from the United States Administration to the Palestinian deputation in October 1991, it was set down that
The result of that process, and the reality at the beginning of 1998, is very different. Five years on from the 1993 Oslo agreement, Israeli troops have fully redeployed from only 3 to 4 per cent. of the west bank and from 60 per cent. of the Gaza strip. East Jerusalem has been fully encircled by wholly illegal settlements, and movement within the occupied territories is more restricted than it ever was before the peace process began. Palestinian living standards have plummeted, and plans to increase the settler population in the west bank continue to flow from the Israeli Ministry of Housing.
Since the election of the Likud Government and the adoption of anti-Oslo policies, relations with neighbouring states have again soured, to the great detriment of peace and stability in the middle east. War continues in southern Lebanon, and the Israeli Prime Minister shows no interest in pursuing negotiations with Syria--and, if the truth were told, no interest in seriously pursuing the middle east peace process at all.
According to the Oslo timetable, full redeployment of Israeli troops from the occupied territories was supposed to have been completed by mid-1998. Yet in meetings with Netanyahu last week, the Administration seemed unable--indeed, unwilling--to try to persuade the Israeli Prime Minister away from his hard-line refusal even to contemplate a second redeployment plan on a scale that might restore some confidence in the peace process. In truth, the Americans simply bottled out yet again.
When we remember that the Palestine National Authority had envisaged a second redeployment which would leave it with 60 per cent. control of the west bank
and Gaza, the 9.5 per cent. offered by Israel is seen, rightly, as derisory. President Clinton seemed to water down the Oslo formula still further by suggesting that a way out of the impasse would be to break down the 9.5 per cent. into three separate phases of redeployment, and even then only after the PNA had taken unspecified security measures as a prerequisite.
Through sheer fecklessness--and, in the case of America, a total lack of will to take on the Zionist lobby--the middle east peace process has been allowed to drift away from its firm moorings in international law and from the principles of the Oslo agreement. That situation is once again being thrown into sharp relief as the Secretary of State rallies support for the implementation of United Nations Security Council resolution 687, on Iraq.
10.59 am
"the US continues to believe firmly that a comprehensive peace must be grounded in UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 and the principle of territory for peace. Such an outcome must also provide security and recognition for all states in the region, including Israel, and for the legitimate political rights of the Palestinian people."
The same is true of the Oslo agreement of 1993, which despite widespread concern about the way in which the settlement was to be reached, was broadly accepted in the middle east because it was based on the relevant Security Council resolutions. The preamble to the declaration of principles of September 1993 reads:
"The aim of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations within the current Middle East peace process is . . . to establish a Palestinian Interim Self-Government Authority . . . Leading to a permanent settlement based on Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338."
In other words, people were willing to be patient in the belief that trust could, incrementally over a period, be built up--so long as the process worked towards the return of occupied Arab land, including southern Lebanon and the Golan heights, an end to military occupation of the west bank and Gaza, and the right to self-determination for the Palestinian people.
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