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4.53 pm

The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Rooker): My Lords, I start by quoting a speech on this issue made some time ago:

That was a flavour of the speech that I made on 5 April 1990 in a debate that I initiated in the other place. I gave all the problems and not the answers. I freely admit that I have refreshed my memory on that. It is my undying credential that as an urban person—not now so much; far from it—in 1990 I was concerned that those issues needed to be raised. Things have improved in some ways, but in other ways they have just got worse. As the noble Lord, Lord Dear, said, it is the force of economics and society that have made those changes. What you do not use, you lose. It is not always the case that local people are in control.

I will break the habit of a lifetime in this House by saying to noble Lords that I will ask officials to prepare a letter for me covering the points that I do not answer today. I know that a lot of work is involved in a Minister making that commitment, but with the range of issues raised today there is no way I can do justice to what noble Lords have said. I will briefly respond to some of the detailed points. I have a standard government text here, which does not say that everything is fine and dandy, but it gives a flavour of the changes in recent years.

It is true that, if one takes a survey, one finds that most people living in the countryside would prefer to do so and many people living in the cities would prefer to live in the countryside. There is no question about that. Some people are trapped in one and some are trapped in the other. The forces of economics and our electoral system mean that sometimes their voices are not heard. In the inner cities, some votes are taken for granted, and in rural areas other votes are taken for granted, which means that there is a group in both areas that is not listened to. There are some serious issues here, and change is going on all the while. I will attempt to respond to some of the points that have been raised in the debate, rather than give the standard government spiel, and I will respond to other points in a letter afterwards.

The noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, said that he was making a general speech as an introduction to the debate. It is important to set the scene. He talked about agriculture and forestry and he mentioned the RDAs. He also made the point, which has been a flavour through a lot of speeches, that this is not about a single factor; it is about a connection. The post offices, hospitals and transport are all inter-related. You might be okay for one, but if you do not have the other you have a problem. Therefore, you have to look at it as a whole.

The noble Lord rightly raised the point about housing for local people. There are detailed programmes for restrictions for new build for affordable housing that mean that the housing has to be passed on to local people and cannot go out into the market. It is a serious issue, and many people have taken account of that. When I was at the ODPM, I was at a meeting called by the Duke of Westminster at his base. He summoned every landowner in the country at 10 o’clock on a Monday morning to read the riot act about releasing small bits of land for half a dozen developments here and half a dozen there—not big developments—because the vibrancy of the villages needs to be maintained. That is serious and there are programmes. I pay tribute to the CLA and all the others involved.

I am not going down this route, but the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, made the point about hearts and minds. He touched on a point about the impression given from 1997 about what happened afterwards in the handling of foot and mouth and hunting. Perhaps I was elected in 1997 in favour of the ban, but before I got here I changed my mind anyway, born out of my experience in MAFF. It is as simple as that. It was a question of oppressiveness and not giving enough local choice, but that is another story.

The noble Lord, Lord Livsey, talked about post offices and about local food. Later this year there will be the launch of the year of food and farming. I hope that that can be used by industry—it is industry-led but government-supported across several departments—to try to make the connections between the production and provenance of food, linking up the areas where the food is produced and where most of it is consumed, which by definition will be in urban areas.

The noble Earl, Lord Erroll, started off by saying that he would keep away from the RPA, and I was very grateful for that, although the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, came back to it at the end. I will not be able to go down that road today. My regrets and apologies if the noble Earl thinks that he has come across a confrontational issue. I get distressed about rigid adherence to some of the EU regulations, and sometimes I have to adjudicate on some of the appeals. The panel says one thing and the lawyers say that one cannot accept the panel. On one or two recent occasions, we have been confrontationally oppressive and I am seeking to have the decisions changed. There is rigidity in the system, which should be loosened up to take account of people’s personal and sometimes tragic circumstances.

I think that we can overcome what the noble Earl said about waste and fly-tipping from the cities. I certainly hope that we can, given what was said earlier today, by planning to be proactive about it. He also mentioned broadband, as did someone else. I am a bit concerned, because I need to ensure that we have got this right: my information is that the availability of broadband in the UK is now 99.7 per cent, with rural coverage at 98.6 per cent. I shall check whether that refers to geography or people—I assume that it is people—but that figure is substantial and, frankly, if there are problems in specific areas I would like to know about them. As a Minister, when I am given those kinds of figures, I have to ask: where is the problem for the vast majority of the country?

The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester made several points and I understand what he said regarding foot and mouth and the fact that the livestock sector has a worse time than the arable sector. The county of Cheshire has 20 per cent of our milking herd, so it is incredibly important for our dairy industry.

The right reverend Prelate mentioned something that struck a chord, because I found it in my brief. When I read it, I thought, “I haven’t heard of this”. I asked about it yesterday—the Pub is the Hub scheme. It relates to the demise of public houses. There are approximately 50,000 in England, of which 15,000 are in rural areas. In the past five years, 300 pubs nationally have been transformed to include a wide range of facilities, including—wait for it—gyms, post offices, school dinners, bakeries, church services and pharmacy collection points. That is as a result of the Pub is the Hub initiative, supported by the department. It is obviously a small scratch on the surface, but there is an attempt to realise the use of the pub as the hub of the community to ensure that, with the changes in society, we can make use of these facilities—whether they are pharmacies or whatever. The churches have different rules about what type of pubs people can go into. As a former Methodist Boys’ Brigade boy I realise that there is a problem in some areas. I shall not go down that road, but noble Lords will appreciate my point.

I should tell the noble Duke, the Duke of Montrose, that, while I speak for the Government, I do not speak for Scotland. I appreciate that there is a difference between the single farm payments for Scotland and England. He mentioned nitrate-sensitive zones and the fact that one of the directors at Defra has been raising that issue. I assure the noble Duke that that director is not the only person who has been challenging some of the assertions about covering the whole country with nitrate-sensitive zones. We are in negotiations with Brussels. I have to say that we have a Rottweiler, who is supposed to be there to deregulate not to regulate. He may be called the director of regulation, but I look at it the other way around. His instinct is to go for minimum regulation and I encourage him in that.

The issue of the closed period and the amount of storage is very serious—there is no question about that. We do not want to poison the water. No one wants to do that and I have never found a farmer who wants to poison the streams. To listen to some people, you would think that all farmers want to do is poison all the streams and not bother about what they put on the land and when they put it on. Farmers obviously care about this issue, but we are governed by these regulations. We have taken such a long time to introduce them—10 years or more, I understand—that we are under threat of infraction proceedings, which is why we need to come to an arrangement with the Commission.

The noble Lord, Lord Roberts of Llandudno, painted a picture that I recognise of villages that have closed over time. There has been no single reason for that; changes in technology and other aspects of society cause different factors to change. The rigidity of our planning laws probably does not allow new things to start up in a village to maintain its vibrancy, and you end up with exactly what I said in 1990: you get single, detached pieces of suburbia surrounded by fields. That is the direct result of the planners’ rigidity in not allowing changes to buildings that have been created for one purpose and not allowing a new business to come in and flourish in order to maintain the vibrancy of a village.

That is a serious issue but we must also take into account the fact that what you do not use, you lose. Although I do not blame anyone for it, people were moving away from collecting benefits and incomes from the post office long before the Government ever thought of going for automatic cash transfers. When I discovered that 10 per cent of people on income support were having their money paid directly into their bank, that told me that something was changing substantially. When I was at the DSS, 50 per cent of pensioners were already choosing, voluntarily and without any pressure, to be paid in that way, but when the poorest people in the country on the lowest income—means-tested income support—chose to have their income paid into the bank, that indicated that a substantial change was afoot.

One could conceive of a situation whereby, if nothing was done to manage the post office network—at one time it consisted of 18,000 independent businesses—the lot could be lost overnight and people would wonder what had happened to it. Therefore, we have to manage the network. I obviously regret the closures but we want to maintain as many rural post offices as possible, and we have tried to get government departments to use new services in post offices.

The situation was just as bad in rural areas. An assessment, by constituency, of who had money paid into the bank was carried out long before there was any element of compulsion, when the system was purely voluntary. People were asked how they wanted their pension or maternity benefits to be paid. To start with, income support was not available through the bank—it was available only as cash—but when people were given a choice, they moved to having payments made into the bank.

Baroness Byford: My Lords, I know of evidence of enormous pressure having been put on individuals to go down that route. The choice was not as free as the noble Lord suggests.

Lord Rooker: My Lords, I assure the noble Baroness that, long before the present situation, I was at the DSS headquarters in Newcastle when people were asked over the telephone how they wanted their pension to be paid. I was wearing earphones when people phoned in and, when they gave their address, the first thing to come up on the screen in front of the civil servant was information on the 10 nearest post offices, which was displayed automatically. The civil servant knew exactly which post office the pensioner would need to go to, if that was what he wanted. The people who phoned in were given choices. Obviously the situation has changed now, but then it cost 89p for an order to be paid at the post office and 1p for an automatic cash transfer. The enormous amount of fraud and benefit book theft that occurred in the post office system put pressure on the Government to adopt a more modern system. However, I repeat that people were moving away from post office payments long before the element of compulsion had a bearing. I do not blame people but that is the reality.

I do not want to pick out particular speeches but, because of the issues raised and the positive way in which they were raised, I would have felt privileged to make those delivered by the noble Lords, Lord Cameron and Lord Dear.

There is a real problem in balancing urban regeneration grants because they target only 10 per cent of the worst areas. Therefore, 90 per cent of those areas are not included in the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund. When I was at the ODPM, I visited what appeared to be leafy and prosperous small market towns. I shall not mention them because that would be unfair. But occasionally you see another side. I remember coming back from one such visit and saying to officials, “How on Earth can we have allowed this to happen in this place? It is as bad as any urban area I have seen in terms of unemployment, dereliction and the nature of the estate”. The officials almost laughed at me. They said, “If you look at the numbers involved, you’ll see that this place is listed at about number 3,000”. In other words, there is not enough money. We are targeting only 10 per cent of the worst places, so we are bound to miss out both urban and rural areas.

In addition, the calculations are made differently today. When they were made on the basis of wards and constituencies—particularly wards, as there is variation around the country—there was unfairness. Now officials use—and I am damned if I can remember what the zone is called—pockets of 3,000 people around the country to make up areas of deprivation, so they are more equal than ever before. Nevertheless, there is bound to be unfairness in the system, simply because we are targeting not 100 per cent, but only the worst 10 per cent.

The noble Lord, Lord Dear, raised a point which struck a chord with me—and an answer came through on a note—about people living in rural areas needing more than one car, which meant that the system was unfair. He is absolutely right, but that was identified and dealt with. In fact, the index of deprivation does not have a motor car ownership issue now, simply because the noble Lord’s point was identified and something was done about it. There is obviously a high dependency on rural transport.

I think that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, was basically calling for freedom and choice with some degree of economic independence in rural areas. He said that people there would be able to better use resources than having resources planted on them on a one-size-fits-all basis. That was the basic issue, as well as there not being enough money. It may be that the planning freedoms and some of the loosening up can assist with this. A report commissioned by me and David Miliband about barriers to diversification was put up on the department’s website a couple of weeks ago, without much fuss. While it was essentially for farmers, it was very rurally focused, asking what the barriers are. The two key barriers relate to planning and business skills. The report has about 22 recommendations, and we are going to try some across government. The noble Earl, Lord Erroll, used the term “silos”. We have to go “silo busting”—a jargon phrase I discovered the other day in a Foresight research programme. We must “silo bust” across government to implement planning; Defra must obviously work with other government departments on that.

The noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, has answered a question. When I flicked through a newspaper this morning, I could not figure out why on Earth someone had done a diary piece about how many times I have mentioned the word “squirrels” in the past six months. I thought, “Blimey, someone’s calculated this”. It was only seven times; the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, is apparently on 200. With the reshuffle coming, the piece said, I do not have much time to make up my count of mentioning squirrels. Well, squirrels are actually very important. Red squirrels are more important than grey squirrels. I now realise why someone has been alerted to the fact that squirrels need a mention. Natural England, as noble Lords know, is supported by the House in the different bodies coming together. The point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, was whether there was an issue with single-species wildlife trusts not being able to carry on. If that is an issue, we must clearly look at it, along with the others.

The noble Lord raised another issue of which I am conscious. The health situation presents special challenges in relation to scarcity and transport. You cannot have a maternity unit or brain surgeon on every street corner, whether in an urban or rural area. The issue of medical facilities in rural hospitals is a constant. I could quote statistics and figures, but I will save that for the letter. On the noble Lord’s example, women who have already been picked up in the ambulance may have to go further than originally planned, and not to the nearest hospital—but to be picked up when the driver does not know where they are going to go is quite unacceptable in the 21st century. I will be happy to give a better response on that, I hope.

The noble Baroness, Lady Byford, mentioned ATMs. How many of those 4,000 are going to be in rural areas is for local consultation. I do not have the figure for her, but I will come back on that. The Post Office has already started local consultations on the restructuring to determine where the subsidy is going to go. The real problem in a situation like this is controlling which offices close. Sometimes it is like voluntary redundancy where the good people go and the others have to be kept. We do not want that with the post offices. We need to keep the ones that are more vital than others. That consultation has already started.

There is less regulation. If I were to give a block answer about statutory instruments, the numbers would look great, but we will be able to show that we are cutting back on regulation. We have a programme to do that, and we will be up before the Select Committee on the annual report to show what we are doing.

I will have to come back on the point about the precepts on the parishes because, by definition, they are the third tier of government. One assumes that the services that the parish council is providing are not coming from the district council; therefore the district council is saving the money. It is not as though it is an extra, and it does mean more local control. It means that the parish council has a bit of control over the way it does things. It is not a great deal, but it is not simply an add-on.

On the noble Baroness’s central point about the RPA, we have paid up to 82 per cent of the money. Our target is 96.14 per cent of the money by 30 June. I explained the reasons for the delays, so I shall not go into great detail. We are going to come back to the 2005 people. It is an incredibly complicated scheme, far more complicated than it needs to be. As was said, it is more sophisticated than the others, but therein lies the problem. We are now dealing with three years’ payments. We have plans that are being operated and implemented as I speak to try to achieve that target, but we need to close down 2005 and deal with 2006 as quickly as possible so that we can start to pay the money for 2007 earlier in the year than we did for the 2006 money. We paid earlier in 2006 than in 2005, but I fully admit that we are now behind where we were last year in terms of the totality of the money, although the cash-flow situation has been vastly improved, as shown by the Bank of England figures that I gave at Question Time.

I am very grateful for this debate. It is a pity that it was only two hours, but the other debate was quite important. The business managers do the split, not me. I will make sure that I send a note on the points that I have covered inadequately or not at all. I shall send it to all noble Lords, and I shall make sure that a copy is placed in the Library.

5.17 pm

Lord Inglewood: My Lords, time is up. We have had a good debate, and I thank all noble Lords who have taken part. I particularly thank the Minister for his light-touch, non-prescriptive wind-up speech. We look forward to hearing from him in due course. Unlike us, he probably has a bit of work to do next week. I also congratulate him on his prescience in 1990 in making a speech that enabled him to endorse his credentials today. I beg leave to withdraw the Motion for Papers.

Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

Mobile Phone Charges: EUC Report

5.18 pm

Lord Freeman rose to move, That this House takes note of the report of the European Union Committee on Mobile Phone Charges in the EU: Curbing the Excesses (17th report, HL Paper 79).

The noble Lord said: My Lords, I speak as chairman of European Union Committee Sub-Committee B: Internal Market. I thank for their support—both speaking and moral—in this debate the noble Lords, Lord Mitchell, Lord Dykes and Lord Lee of Trafford, and my noble friend Lady Eccles.

The sub-committee reported through the Select Committee to the House of Lords on 23 April. I pay tribute to the retiring Clerk of the sub-committee, Duncan Sagar, who has distinguished himself in his service to Sub-Committee B. He is moving on to perhaps higher things in the Government Whips Office. He will doubtless be able to help facilitate debates on interesting reports coming from this committee in future. I also thank our special adviser, Chris Williams.

Our report dealt with international mobile phone calls within the European Union. There has undoubtedly been market abuse over the past five years in terms of the level of charges made to consumers. It has been estimated, among others by Commissioner Reding, that the charges could have been up to four times the rate of domestic mobile phone charges. The industry has reacted to criticism over the years, but in the judgment of the committee it has not done enough. Charges have not come down fast enough.

In the United Kingdom, and indeed in certain other nations, we regulate domestic charges, but until now there has been no method of controlling charges on an international level or within the European Union. I pay tribute to Ofcom, which is regarded within Europe as one of the better, if not the best, regulators in the telecommunications industry. However, its writ does not run to control the costs of charges coming from within the European Union back home to the United Kingdom.

In our judgment, there is justification for the European Union authorities to act. The high level of charges is a barrier to developing effectively a single market. The charge levels affect businesses, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises. We believe that it is in the clear interests of European consumers for the European authorities to act.

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