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“the market can remain illogical for longer than you can remain solvent.”
Those words ring painfully true for dairy farmers right now. They ring true for every rural community that has lost its post office; for every community that has seen its permanent population disappear due to the loss of social rented properties and excessive second-home ownership; and for every rural community that is isolated and cut off thanks to the deregulation of public transport and the subsequent loss of vital bus and rail links.
In my constituency, and in many others no doubt, too, the number of people registering for jobseeker’s allowance has risen significantly. It has tripled in the past year. We do not have many huge employers in our area; our eggs are in many baskets. I would say that that is a blessing, but some of those baskets have come crashing down, bringing heartache and hardship to decent local business people, their employees and their families. The impact of the recession has become tangible. Like many hon. Members, I am seeing in constituency surgeries a huge increase in the number of families in danger of defaulting on their mortgages or private rental agreements, an increase in demand for social rented housing and a rocketing in the number of families being squeezed into inadequate hostel accommodation. There is rising unemployment and the hours or wages of workers in employment are being cut; the downturn has begun to take effect.
Two weeks ago, a young mum came to see me in my surgery. That weekend, she had to make the choice between paying her electricity bill and feeding her family. It is against that backdrop that the scandal of MPs’ allowances has been played out; it has been juxtaposed with rising hardship, so no wonder there is such visceral anger out there, especially in impoverished rural communities. That economic hardship, coupled with the discrediting of the political class, is a toxic cocktail; I hardly need to remind hon. Members that such a cocktail brought Hitler to power in the 1930s. Shamefully, the same toxic cocktail led to the election of two Nazis to the European Parliament last week.
The answer to the crisis is not to wring our hands or chuck eggs at people, but to offer real, tangible hope. To do that, we need to give rural Britain a new deal. We need to invest in our countryside and ensure that we have communities. Let us start with housing.
Mr. Atkinson: The hon. Gentleman has been talking about investing in sustainable and rural communities. Northumberland county council, which covers one of the most sparse rural counties in England, is now run by the Liberal Democrats. Can the hon. Gentleman explain why it is closing all old people’s day centres there?
Tim Farron: I am not directly familiar with the case, but I am sure that like all local authorities, Northumberland county council has to make difficult choices because of a variety of things such as the decline in return on investments and the reduction in local government funds. The hon. Gentleman will have to forgive me, however, as I do not know the detail of the issue; I promise to find out.
If we are to try to solve the problems faced by rural communities, we have to start with housing. According to the Government’s own Commission for Rural Communities, 100,000 young people are set to leave such areas in the next three years, principally because of a lack of affordable housing. There is therefore a desperate need to create homes that will enable those young people to stay and their communities to thrive. We must scrap the Government’s remote, counter-productive and undemocratic regional spatial strategy and instead empower local communities to build homes with community backing.
Michael Heseltine once referred to the planning and development policy of the 1980s as DADA—“decide, announce, defend, abandon”. The regional spatial strategy is clearly a recipe for more DADA. Let us give communities the power to create the homes that they need in the places where they are needed. Why not follow in the footsteps of the Liberal Democrat-controlled South Lakeland district council, which has adopted the “home on the farm” initiative? That could see hundreds of unused or underused farm buildings converted into affordable homes for local families. Homes could be built in the back yards of people who actually want them there.
Dan Rogerson (North Cornwall) (LD): I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his exposition of the problems that all our rural communities are facing. Does he agree that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs needs to co-ordinate with the rest of the Government across the whole range of policy initiatives? That could ensure, for example, that the banks that are now effectively publicly owned supported housing initiatives. In my constituency, there is a community land trust, but people hoping to buy the homes are facing difficulties because the banks are being obstructive. Does my hon. Friend feel that Ministers across all Government Departments should play their part in resolving such issues?
Tim Farron: My hon. Friend has made an excellent and incredibly important point. Another issue in my constituency and other rural areas is how partially publicly owned banks have pulled the plug on providing mortgages for affordable homes. Tragically, in my constituency—and others too, no doubt—homes are standing empty because people are asked to come up with 30 per cent. deposits. People with such deposits would not be in the market for an affordable home. The banks need to play ball. In many respects, it seems that we have the worst of both worlds: we spend money on the banks, but we appear to have little control over how they relate to our rural economy and other parts of the economy.
The lack of affordable housing in rural areas is only half of the problem: the other half is a lack of well-paid work. The Government need to look to rural Britain as an engine room of creativity on many fronts. The former Minister with responsibility for renewable energy, the right hon. and learned Member for North Warwickshire (Mr. O’Brien), kindly met me and representatives of the business community in Cumbria to discuss our attempt to create a new business park for the renewable energy sector, which will create 900 jobs in south Cumbria if we are successful. The Government need to get behind such schemes across the country and to be imaginative about the ways in which we can support hydro-energy, for example, in our rural areas. We can protect our environment and create well-paid jobs through the same action.
The drain of young people from our communities is crippling rural Britain. As they leave to seek affordable homes and decent work, they leave behind them communities who desperately need them and families who are unnecessarily separated from them, and they take with them their energy and creativity—and, of course, their fertility. My hon. Friend the Member for South-East Cornwall (Mr. Breed), who was in his place a moment or two ago, once stood on an election slogan
of “Breed for Cornwall”. Joking aside, there is a great need to breed for rural Britain. My wife and I are doing our bit, but there is a limit.
Tim Farron: As is the hon. Gentleman.
Mr. Reed: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, and how dare he?
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the real and pressing problems of rural Britain are mirrored in the problems facing urban Britain, and that the exodus of people from rural communities only exacerbates those problems in urban communities?
Tim Farron: The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. I look at my own constituency as a microcosm. Rising prices eject people from the Lake district and dales parts of my constituency, so they move to Kendal, then that becomes unaffordable, so they move to Milnthorpe and Flookburgh, and then even those become unaffordable, so they move even further away. The impact on housing and other parts of the economy is palpable and seriously damaging.
Let us have a renewal in agriculture, too. With farm incomes under threat as never before, and with the challenge of climate change facing every one of us, we must ensure that the new deal for the countryside has an unmistakably green tinge. We could extend carbon trading to enable large corporations to offset their carbon emissions by paying our farmers for work to extend carbon sequestration further in the countryside. In the uplands, especially, that could mean that our hill farmers finally get the rewards they deserve for their role as the stewards of our environment and our landscapes.
Let us be ambitious about fusing the environmental imperative with the fightback against recession. For example, there should be a far-reaching scheme to ensure that farmers can choose to host anaerobic digesters with Government start-up funding to enable whole communities to recycle organic waste and to create renewable energy.
Christopher Fraser (South-West Norfolk) (Con): As in “The Archers”.
Tim Farron: Indeed, “The Archers” is doing a great job in popularising that technology. However, this country is way behind in deploying it—for example, about 70 times more anaerobic digesters exist in Germany—despite the clear engagement of the farming community and their willingness to lead the way.
On rural services, let us give a commitment that we will not see the provision of key services—especially health services—as “one size fits all”. Let us acknowledge that whatever rules apply to the provision of hospital services in urban areas, there are overriding concerns in rural areas. It cannot be right for heart and stroke services at rural hospitals such as Westmorland general hospital to be removed to places such as Lancaster, leaving patients in emergency need up to an hour and a half away from their nearest acute hospital. Neither can it be right to force cancer patients in rural areas to make daily three-hour round trips for life-saving treatment. That is why we are committed to returning acute services and to creating new cancer services at our rural hospitals. That is right not only because people in rural communities
deserve the same standards of health care as those in urban communities but because the development of, for example, a new £15 million cancer treatment unit at my local hospital in Kendal, and at others, would be a significant economic driver.
Tourism is central to the economies of many rural areas. The Cumbrian tourism economy alone is worth £1.2 billion each year. This year, there are some signs, in the lakes and dales at least, that businesses in the tourism industry are faring better than expected. I suspect that the weakness of the pound and the strength of the product have helped us, but times are still challenging. Although much of tourism’s revenue goes back to the Exchequer, there is little attempt by the Government to nurture that investment. Small bed-and-breakfast establishments are forced to abide by the same regulations and rules as huge hotel chains. They are hampered by ridiculous cut-off rules on VAT, which limit their ability to grow and take custom.
The support for marketing of our tourism industry is dismal. We have a premier league tourism product in this country, but especially in England we have non-league levels of marketing funding. The Government must acknowledge the importance of our tourism industry if they are to help the rural economy fight its way out of recession.
In all of that, it is essential that local communities are in control of their own destiny. As we have seen from the loss of post offices, the decline of many communities and the cuts to rural health services, there is an overwhelming sense of anger at things being done to us without our consent. We are sometimes offered consultations, but that has become a meaningless word under this Labour Government. Never have we been more consulted and less listened to. The top-down decisions to close jobcentres in rural areas, rob our rural communities of post offices, take away rural tax offices, force through the reduction in social housing stock and remove acute hospital services have all damaged our rural communities, but we were given no say in them.
Mr. Heath: Does that not bespeak a complete failure of the principle of rural proofing, which the Government enunciated clearly a few years ago when they set up the new Department? It was supposed to ensure that every policy that flowed from the Government was examined for its effect on rural communities and amended to ensure that it was either positive or, at worst, neutral for them. In fact, we have had policy after policy that has done damage to the fabric of rural society.
Tim Farron: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I referred earlier to acute hospital services, which are probably one of the best—or rather worst—examples of that failure. We are told that we need all bells and whistles when it comes to new heart services, for example. Absolutely—I want the best possible health care available to my constituents and those of all the Members who are present. But what is the point of a state-of-the-art, cutting-edge, all-bells-and-whistles heart unit to someone who is dead on arrival because it took them an hour and a half to get there? Rural proofing appears to mean absolutely nothing in practice, and that failure must come to an end.
Mr. Eric Martlew (Carlisle) (Lab): Sometime, when the hon. Gentleman has time, I will tell him the history of Kendal general hospital.
The reality is that we cannot get consultants with the necessary skills to come to many of our small hospitals. My hon. Friend the Member for Copeland (Mr. Reed) knows that to some extent. Without the size, we will not get the skilled consultants. We can build a hospital, but we will not get people to work there.
Tim Farron: I appreciate that in many rural areas it is more difficult to attract a certain number of applicants for positions, but at Westmorland general hospital there were consultants available and the unit was operating. It was a life-saving service, and many hundreds of people owe their lives to it. It would have continued had the trust allowed it to do so, and had the trust been accountable it would never have got away with closing it.
Julia Goldsworthy: To give a perspective from the other end of the country, upper gastrointestinal cancer services have been transferred out of Treliske, and the surgeon now has to travel up to Derriford to undertake surgery. Although it might be necessary to centralise services, in Cornwall we are seeing the salami-slicing of services that are going up the line. Why cannot rural areas have a centre of excellence too? That is the frustration.
Tim Farron: My hon. Friend makes a tremendous point. Surely the point is that we have put an awful lot of money into the NHS in recent years. This party supported the Government on that, but we want to get something for that money. It is galling for people in rural areas who see more money going to the NHS but then see the closure of heart units, stroke units and other services. We are paying consultants a lot of money, and we should be able to determine where they practise. That must be within the competence of the Government.
To strengthen rural communities, we should start by using the Sustainable Communities Act 2007, which was mentioned earlier, to give them the right to preserve key services. We need elected local health boards, so that those who threaten to close key services such as the ones that we have been talking about can be directly held to account. We need to ensure also that the boards of the national parks that do so much good for our national environmental heritage, which are largely unaccountable to the communities that live within them, contain directly elected members.
We in Cumbria pride ourselves on being a microclimate meteorologically, politically and economically. The ability of the rural communities of Britain to be economic microclimates, and in turn to be an engine room for economic recovery, is clear. We are determined to make our own luck. The strength of our rural economy centres on the creativity and resourcefulness of our communities. I look at ways in which communities have fought back in my area, such as the Witherslack community shop, the Storth community co-op post office and the Greyhound community-run pub at Grizebeck. Those are wonderful examples of communities providing social glue and economic impetus in defiance of economic hardship. All those things, I should add, have been done despite Government policy.
So let us have a new deal for rural Britain that will ensure sustainable, vibrant communities and a countryside for everyone, young and old, irrespective of financial background, that is equipped not just to beat the recession but to be renewed and to prosper in the decades ahead.
5.55 pm
Mr. Robert Walter (North Dorset) (Con): I am grateful to you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for calling me early in this debate. I have some regret, however, that that is as a consequence of the face that not a single Labour Back Bencher is rising to make a substantive contribution. That is symptomatic of this Government’s attitude to rural communities and the effects of the recession on them. That may be the reason why, after the European elections in the south-west of England, Labour now has no representation among the six Members of the European Parliament, and why after the elections to Dorset county council there is now not a single Labour county councillor, despite the fact that Labour still holds one parliamentary seat in the county, South Dorset—for the time being.
Mr. Deputy Speaker, you and many other Members will be aware that I have a picturesque constituency that offers some of the best rural land in Britain. We have some of the best dairy farmers in the country, and each year the area offers visitors great hospitality. We have many small and medium-sized businesses that keep the economy afloat. Having a constituency of 350 square miles, with no large towns or cities, gives me the ability to speak about rural communities.
The statistics show that across the country an average of 10 per cent. of non-agricultural employees are in manufacturing, but in my constituency that figure is 17.5 per cent. according to the latest business inquiry. In fact, this morning I visited one manufacturing business there. It is an international company, and I suspect that during the day virtually all Members have sat on one of its products. It makes the springs that go in the seats of most cars manufactured in Europe, among a number of other spring-like products. The company is called William Hughes and it is in Stallbridge, a small town in my constituency.
Later this week I will be visiting another business in my constituency, a big international business that is one of the FTSE 100 companies. It is Cobham plc, which will be exhibiting at the Paris air show. It makes the fuel systems and antennae that go on most aircraft produced in the world, whether by Airbus, Boeing or a number of other manufacturers. There are a multitude of other businesses in my constituency, including a leading paint maker, a company that makes probably the majority of trolleys and cabinets found in hospitals and health centres across the country, and many companies that are involved in food manufacturing.
However, my constituency is not the industrial heartland of Britain, or one of the great metropolitan areas, as the Government see it. It is a local economy that is under unbearable strain. It is squeezed by the recession and unsupported by Government action.
I want to discuss three main subjects: unemployment as it affects my constituency and the impact on it of the closure of jobcentres; the closure of post offices and its detrimental effect, along with the absence of broadband in many areas of my constituency, when people need access to services; and the closure of rural businesses, particularly rural pubs.
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