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What has happened as a result of this is that infection has spread through the department. I know of an instance when, despite having had the proper information for two years, it is simply not possible to get hold of the proper digital map. The public are entitled to expect competent delivery of public policy, but is it happening? No. The European Commission, in agreeing to the form of the common agricultural policy in this country, will expect it to be delivered effectively. Is that happening? No, it is not. Finally, those directly affected in their livelihoods by the system, for better or worse, whatever the details of the policy, are entitled to a degree of competence in its delivery. It is not happening. We have a course of systemic maladministration.

As I and other noble Lords will have heard the Minister say, the system that we have for delivering the single farm payment in England is intellectually superior to the model employed in the other home countries. I concur with that. The problem is that we have been too clever by half—it is as simple as that. As I have said before, in the department it is a case of lions being led by donkeys. But it goes wider than the straightforward agricultural problem. All the other public goods coming through agricultural policy, such as environmental activities, climate change issues, landscape considerations and as a framework for tourism are all affected as a consequence.

When I look back to the Second World War, I believe that one of the great mistakes made in this country was in the thinking inherent in the 1949 planning legislation. The vision of the future was that the countryside would be for agriculture and forestry and almost every other activity was going to take place in the built-up areas. That historically had never been the case, but the effect has been to see an elimination from the countryside of all kinds of industrial, semi-industrial and commercial activities, which had traditionally been there. Now, as the world has moved on, we are trying to see—and I think rightly—a shift back. One problem that we face in this regard is that much of the move back is in practice being driven by the rural development agencies, which are essentially emanations of central government. They are the contemporary successors of Oliver Cromwell’s rule of the Major Generals. We know that the underlying framework in which they were originally conceived has not come into being because of a change of tack in regional policy, but it is a problem for those intended as the beneficiaries of the policy that it has been delivered in a very corporate and dirigiste way.

The other difficulty that is damaging the impact of the move back is that we are always looking for a bolt-on series of social outcomes, which in turn are getting in the way of getting things done on the ground. I also make a plea for the Country Land and Business Association’s proposal that in its treatment of rural activities it should look at the revenue from the perspective of rural business use. That would make it infinitely easier for those who are business people in the countryside to diversify their activities. That contrasts with the market-driven approach that we adopted in government, in things like the enterprise zones and the initiatives of my noble friend Lord Heseltine. When public money is involved we need to pump-prime businesses which of their own volition and with their own energy will then become sustainable. That is crucial; we must have a light touch. What we must not do is micro-manage.

With services in the countryside, we would all agree that we want equivalence between the town and country and rich and poor. Things cannot be identical: some things are going to be more expensive and some cheaper, depending on where one is. That is why things like calculations about sparsity are so important—and my local authority, Eden District Council, felt very hard done by in that regard. Post offices, public transport and hospitals are networks; each relate to the other. Public transport is self-evidently important with regard to hospitals and post offices. If everyone has a post office within three miles of them, for example, it is fine; but if you are 80 years old, it also matters whether there is public transport. Where I lived as a child, if you wanted to go to Carlisle by bus you could go on a Tuesday but you could not get back until the following Friday, which was not very helpful.

When you are thinking about hospitals it is important to realise that it is not only the patient who is important, but also his family—both sides of the equation. People want to see their families and friends if the latter are ill, just as the people who are ill want to see their families and friends to be encouraged by them. What you cannot do is salami cut pieces off networks because that goes to the very heart of the network itself.

I should like to spend a moment or two talking about housing. Much earlier in my life I had the good fortune to be on what was then called the Lake District Special Planning Board. I became aware of the housing problems of local people, or affordable housing as it is rather unattractively known. I have been interested in and concerned about that for a long time. One of the mistakes we have made in this country in looking at this has been to try to look at it too much from the demand side and not enough from the supply side. The thing that strikes me very forcefully in the Lake District is not the shortage of houses but the shortage of houses that can satisfy the particular needs which need filling. As the Minister may know, I have talked to his colleague, the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, about this. In a world where owner occupation is becoming increasingly accepted as a norm, we must try to find ways to put conditions on existing houses—what I might call second-hand houses—so that they remain available for people who are normally perceived as falling within the scope of affordable housing. We ought to be much more imaginative in looking at vehicles such as building preservation trusts. I know that the Government are working on shared equity. In the longer run there is much more advantage in trying to unlock the problem through utilising existing houses than through building more and more new houses, which over time only marginally reduces the price of second homes.

As regards letting, we must try to find ways of getting existing housing stock into the hands of forms of social landlords. I am president of the Lakeland Housing Trust, a very small charity, which has been doing this now for 70 years on its own terms. It is run by professional volunteers—a tradition which goes back originally to Mrs Rawnsley, the wife of Canon Rawnsley who founded the National Trust. If you keep the organisation small and local you can do a lot of good.

As a person who is active in public life, I always keep an eye on the party political weathervane. I ask the Minister to cast his mind back to a memory which I should think is rather happier for him than it is for me; namely, the general election of 1997. It struck me then that for the first time in my adult life the Labour Party had made real inroads into the rural vote. But since then—I cannot say that I am entirely unhappy about this but it is a concern—it seems to me that it has lost an awful lot of support. Part of that was caused by the foot and mouth outbreak and part of it was to do with the hunting ban. Not everybody likes hunting. I have never hunted to hounds with a horse although I have done a bit of fell hunting in the Lake District. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the legislation, it seems to me that the argument behind the change in the law has not commanded the hearts and minds of much of the rural population. The only argument that they really understand that is left is a metaphysical one—that somehow it is wrong to hunt foxes with hounds. Yet in almost every other aspect of contemporary life we are being told to be tolerant and that we must understand and accept other people’s way of doing things. Country people ask, “Why have we been singled out to be treated differently?”

Country people are tolerant, albeit they are often politically incorrect. It is very important to understand that because if people feel generally unwanted, unloved and on the defensive, they will become alienated. With alienation there is a risk of fragmentation in society. We have seen in Scotland how that is beginning to put tension on the union. In the north of England my party has had problems because apparently real Northerners do not vote Tory. We have seen problems and pressures and stresses and strains in the immigrant communities. I am not the only one who has noticed this. On the countryside march an apparently respectable young man was handing out newspapers, but when you looked at the bottom of them you found the imprint of the British National Party.

Some years ago I went to the annual Asian Businessmen’s Dinner in Blackburn organised by the noble Lord, Lord Patel of Blackburn, shortly after a BNP breakthrough. One of my hosts told me that he understood why people vote for the BNP. He said, “They need it more than we do. We get all that is on offer”.

If we are trying to take this country forward in a one-nation way, we need to have everyone bound into that. If that does not happen, and people do not get a fair crack at the whip, we will get fragmentation. There is a real risk of that in the countryside. I beg to move for Papers.

3.35 pm

Lord Livsey of Talgarth: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, for initiating this debate, which I regard as extremely important, even though it is on a Thursday before we break up for the Recess. It is an interesting topic:

“the state of the countryside and ... the provision of public services in rural areas”.

I will try to analyse how one assesses the state of the countryside at present. First, it is connected with the quality and sustainability of the environment. Secondly, it is to do with the economic viability of rural communities, and that includes the state of agriculture, to which the noble Lord referred. Thirdly, it is about the social cohesion of rural communities and, fourthly, it is related to the availability of rural services, both public and private, which are provided by local councils, the development agencies, transport networks, private enterprise and the voluntary sector, which in some rural areas plays a very important part.

The quality of the environment seriously deteriorated in the 40 years between 1960 and 2000. Since then, there is no doubt that environmental schemes have kicked in, such as the planting of deciduous trees, river clean-ups, hedge reinstatement, CAP farm environmental support schemes, set-aside and many other issues, which have improved, over the past five or six years in particular, the quality of the environment. We have had a huge loss, which is seen most acutely in our rivers and streams. Ecological damage has reduced fish life, and crayfish is practically unknown these days. Fly life in freshwaters has declined, and industrial pollution has played its part, as has run-off from agricultural land, pesticides, sheep dip and so on. The Environment Agency is addressing many of those problems, but there is much more acute awareness than there used to be of the insidiousness of some of those chemicals. We used to get grants for drainage, and now we have rivers with half the summer flow that they used to have. There must be some relationship between the two, and that has to be put right.

We are changing our forestry from soft wood to more hard wood, and that needs to accelerate. The impact of climate change is accelerating, and it is already overtaking many of those developments. In 2006, in the area that I live in, central Wales, we got 70 per cent of the average rainfall of the previous 20 years. In April 2007, only a month or so ago, we had only 1 per cent of our normal rainfall for April. Those are very serious matters.

Is the countryside sustainable to withstand climate change? My answer would be, “Not yet”. We must, for example, monitor the water table, which in many rural areas has a serious deficit. This week’s EFRA Select Committee report on the Government’s vision for the CAP, which I have here, is a constructive analysis of the future of CAP reform, and it provides some of the answers. For example, before any attempt is made to abandon by 2013 Pillar 1 of the CAP, which is basically single farm payments, the Treasury must, in conjunction with the EU, provide certainty. The EFRA committee report states:

“The only long-term justification for future expenditure of taxpayers’ money in the agricultural sector is the provision of ... public ‘goods’—environmental, rural, social—it wishes to enjoy”.

This philosophy must be backed by hard cash to produce a sustainable rural policy. It is no good attacking Pillar 1 if you do not have a proper Pillar 2 for the CAP that can concentrate on rural development. The record is not good. Just over a year ago the British Government lobbied the EU presidency to reduce Pillar 2. I know that money was in short supply, but that was not the right way to go about it.

The economic viability of many rural communities is seriously in decline. Shops, post offices, even pubs and garages have closed without replacement. Small farms have vanished and some 2,500 post offices are now threatened with closure. They should not be closed, but converted into community resource centres for business start-ups, information technology and innovation, and there should be initiatives in marketing co-operatives for the community, community regeneration and promotion of tourism. If the post offices are to be closed, the buildings should be used for something that would benefit the communities.

Our rural areas need assistance, training and capital for young entrepreneurs. For example, it would be helpful if younger people could receive business rate discounts for business start-ups. Agriculture and local food production must be incentivised to produce greater self-sufficiency, as must the outlets for it. On social cohesion, the demography of many rural communities has been stood on its head. There are far too many older people compared with the young. The demise of council housing is of particular regret to me, because I was brought up next to a large council estate, which in those days contained families with 10, 12 or 14 children. One such child was Geoff Lewis, the jockey who won the Derby on Mill Reef. He was in my school form; good luck to him.

The sale of those council houses has been a disaster for the demography of our rural areas. We need affordable homes, and councils must be able, not necessarily as providers, to allocate land, initiate shared equity schemes and provide houses to rent for younger members of the community. Councils used to be able to provide for much more measured communities in terms of age. Younger families lived in many of the houses and the village schools automatically stayed open because there were many children. That very much needs to be encouraged.

We need to concentrate on many issues of this kind, because we must be positive about rural areas. At present, not enough resources are provided to support them.

3.43 pm

The Earl of Erroll: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, for providing an opportunity to debate this matter. Instead of starting with my usual tirade against the Rural Payments Agency, I shall consider other people in the countryside and other issues.

Everyone seems to think in terms of the urban proletariat and the country peasant, or whatever, but there is a huge mix of people in the countryside. Who will use these rural services? There is a mixture of old people, young people, some very well paid executives and some poor people. Their main common characteristic is that they are more spread out than in towns, which gives rise to infrastructure problems. Some commute to cities and towns, others work locally, but they probably need to commute for some distance in some way.

What is our objective as government in the broadest sense in looking at this? Is it administrative efficiency or are we trying to create the right environment for people to live there? I refer not only to the environment at the Natural England end of the spectrum but also to the infrastructure and how that affects people who live and work in the countryside.

One characteristic of people being more spread out is that they end up driving more because there is no easy method of getting from A to B using public transport. It is probably totally uneconomical to provide widespread public transport in rural areas because, nowadays, people have more freedom of choice. Unless we go back to having a centrally controlled, Communist-style authoritarian Government who say, “You will work there and do it efficiently”, people will criss-cross all over the place. So individual transport solutions will be required, certainly for the local links.

People commute and the ideal solution is to get them to use public transport, such as trains, when travelling longer distances. However, one problem there is capacity. In many areas, trains are already operating well over capacity. For example, in the north, it all comes down to two tracks that run over a big viaduct—it may be the Watford viaduct. There is a limit to how much that can be expanded. Then you have to leave your local form of transport at the station, because it is likely that on the way back a bus will not run from the station to get you home at the end of the day.

You can probably predict how you will get to where you are going but you cannot always predict when your work will end. Therefore, you take your car, but where are you going to leave it? If you leave it in a side street, the neighbours get very cross because there are never enough parking spaces. The spaces that are available are overpriced, because parking is privatised and a profit has to be made. No one is looking at the problem globally and asking what the greater benefit entails. Perhaps we should provide free parking, as happens in Biggleswade, to stop people parking outside other people’s houses and to encourage them to travel by train.

It is all very well giving pensioners free bus passes, but that is not much good if there are no buses available when they want to travel. I am not sure that that is viable. I remember the African taxis running around Nigeria and Kenya. They were Peugeots that held about nine passengers, and people piled in and out all over the place. It was all very entrepreneurial, but that would never be allowed here. It would be considered too risky on health and safety grounds; the Department for Transport would say that it could not be done; and someone else would point out the insurance consequences of running such a business. We are so regulated that it is impossible to do anything to tackle most of these problems.

Then there is the question of distances—for example, how far is the nearest hospital or post office? The post office is not just somewhere to post letters. You can now download stamps from the internet. You just print them out, stick them on your letters and post them. We can obtain a lot of things without visiting the post office, but in the countryside post offices are part of the social infrastructure and social environment. When the departments said, “I can deliver my departmental silo more efficiently by doing something else”, no one thought to say on behalf of UK plc, “You have nibbled away at all the bits of the thing that we really wanted to keep—the post office—until it is no longer viable”. That was a huge mistake. No one had the guts to say to all the departmental silos, “Sorry, there is a bigger social issue here, so don’t all go off and do your own thing”. Anyway, it is too late now, and I do not know what we are going to do about it. It is a terribly sad situation and I think that there will be huge social costs and social services costs as a result.

Then we get to the towns, where people have been packed in efficiently. A lot of rubbish is generated because the Food Standards Agency insists that the supermarkets wrap items to a certain standard. Whether people like it or not, they have to take home a lot of waste, but we do not want them to put it in their bins, so we charge them by the amount they dispose of. Therefore, we have a problem. What will you do if you live in a council house in the middle of a town and you have too much rubbish? You will put it into a plastic bag, which will be banned by then, and take it to the nearest bit of the countryside and heave it over a hedge. At that point, it becomes the responsibility of the local farmer or someone else to clear it up.

Of course, that farmer may not have registered an exemption for that type of rubbish under the new waste regulations because it is someone else’s rubbish and, unless he has permission to move it and has registered an exemption to do so, some other agency will come along and fine him. That may seem a ridiculous statement but it is the sort of thinking that goes on and an example of the confrontational approach between those who live in, and try to manage, the countryside and those who try to tell them what to do.

Some of the people who commute to London by train are highly paid executives. When people make lots of money, they like to get away from the towns and buy somewhere out in the countryside. Some young people in the countryside also want to start up local businesses, and rely on a critical local infrastructure. Lots of people think about critical national infrastructure for broadband and communications, but we need to get high-speed services out, reliably, all over the countryside. There are huge EU finds for this: look at what Barcelona is doing. Are we doing it? No, it goes through an RDA. I do not know; I am trying to find out how you get the paperwork together to put a business case to the RDA to get EU money—which is sitting there, waiting for us to apply for it—to get some mesh radio, wireless or other technologies across the countryside, allowing people to work from home rather than commute into London the whole time. You get a green benefit from that, because people are sitting at home or working in a local office instead of having to commute to a population centre.

This comes down to people: the sort of people who stay in the country and live and work there, such as farmers. I know a little about farmers because I married one—that is my declaration of interest. The average farmer farms because they hate paperwork. What are we doing now? We are making them farm paperwork. No longer can they use their judgment about anything. Everything is process-driven. It is not a factory out there; you do not know what the weather is going to be like or if the season is going to be early. You know that if you do not cut your hedges for three years, they will get leggy and the English partridge, a biodiversity action species, will be wiped out trying to nest under them. But the environmentalists do not know that, so they want you to grow your hedges tall for some other songbird. It is all balance and judgment, and you must work it out.

You now need quite a seriously high education standard to fill in all these forms. What are we going to do with all the people who live in the country who do not want to be educated to that standard? Presumably they have their 10 per cent adult illiteracy rate like everyone else. How do you deal with deadlines when you are ill? The real problems come with the confrontational approach of the RPA and others. Instead of ringing up and saying that there is a 0.4 discrepancy—to which the response would be, “Oh God. I am sorry, I wrote 0.7 and not 0.3, but the net area is correct”—they say “We are going to fine you if we can under the penalties in section P”, when you know that they do not even have the right to do so. It is the wrong approach; it leads to mistakes, confrontation and disaster. I leave noble Lords with that thought.

Baroness Royall of Blaisdon: My Lords, I remind noble Lords that when it says “8” on the clock, they are in their ninth minute.

3.53 pm

The Lord Bishop of Chester: My Lords, I welcome this debate. Britain is a relatively crowded country, and the state of our country areas is a vital subject for town and countryside dwellers alike. The great majority of our people who live in urban areas value the contrasting amenities that the countryside provides, and those who live in the countryside easily feel the pressure of nearby urban areas. The countryside itself has changed greatly with the impact of technology, leading to fewer people working on the land and fewer who do so being directly employed.

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