Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Appendices to the Minutes of Evidence


APPENDIX 1

Memorandum submitted by the Future of Rural Society (A2)

RURAL WHITE PAPER—OUR COUNTRYSIDE?

  It is with due respect to your Committee that the convenor of Rural Society, now aged 60 and remaining without the basic or material effects with which to further such a life, having made his family contribution to "Social Enterprise" and subjected to the previous Member State's deplorable and negative representation when the winter of 1981-82, frozen up and snow bound from mid December 1981 until the following February.

  The subsequent hailstones which added to the displacement and wiping out of his enterprise which was fully in keeping with the Member State's Rural Development Plans legislated in October 1980 when the convenor purchased a neglected smallholding with his three young daughters, he relates that given the continuous statements made by Minister's "I do not wish to see the Countryside turned into a museum—but a working Countryside" (John Gummer MP when Environment Minister) and now with a Labour Member State "A Living & Working Countryside".

  Since the tragic and stressful period of that time, he has never been idle for one day, he has researched more of the rural and English Countryside in the past 18 years, has conveyed reports to the former Department of the Environment Transport and the Regions, refused to recognise the victimising and incompatible Jobseekers Allowance and now, at such an age has been left since October 1996 destitute via the "competence" of the Member State.

  He relates to the Chairman, to the Honourable Members that given the loss of such Rights and Freedoms whilst Minister's and their Civil Servants abuse and ridicule his life, he also faces the loss of his basic pension, is this what this Committee wish to further as the wholesale exodus of aged and ruined farmers also have to face, he urges this Committee to review the Rural White Paper, let those within Rural Society be left with some financial and human dignity rather than left to the fiscal obscenity that the convenor cites as the precedence via his own experience.

  To the Chairman and Hon. Members as another winter descends, there must be a vision for the continuing change, rural development will fail as the elements of market forces across the rural property market dictate otherwise, less pretence and more realism on the part of this Committee is what is called for and more than justified.

Future of Rural Society

24 October 2001



 
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