Rural Fuel Duty Relief

Charlie Maynard Excerpts

Wednesday 7th January 2026 Westminster Hall

[Charlie Maynard (Witney) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Furniss. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Ian Roome) for securing this important debate and everybody who has spoken in it. There is a very strong message coming through about how much rural communities need this relief and how much they suffer.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Honiton and Sidmouth (Richard Foord) mentioned, rural life is more expensive, and that is because of the friction of distance and the scale of distance. This relief goes a long way to offsetting that expense, and it has been a huge help to communities, but it is becoming less and less of a help because it has not gone up with inflation or anything else, and that sits on top of all the additional pressures that our communities are under that are really stretching household budgets and causing a lot of trouble. That is the root cause, so we ask the Minister, in responding to this debate, to address whether the Government will consider uprating the scheme in line with inflation.

Secondly, if we look at the state of public transport infrastructure in this country after years of under-investment by the last Conservative Government, it is quite clear that there are many more areas, as many of my colleagues have pointed out, where people have no real alternative but to use cars for day-to-day journeys. That is far more widespread than just the 21 areas that currently benefit from the scheme.

Research published by the County Councils Network in 2024 found that the frequency of rural bus services in England had reached a historic low, with more than a quarter of rural routes having been lost in the preceding decade. In remote areas of Scotland, some of which benefit from the rural fuel duty relief scheme, low connectivity is having a clear negative impact on the population, as my hon. Friend the Member for Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire (Mr MacDonald) mentioned earlier today in this debate and in the Chamber.

National Records of Scotland’s “Population estimates by urban rural classification”, which covered 2001 to 2021, showed a population decrease by 1% between 2011 and 2020, compared with increases of 3.1% nationwide and 8.4% in accessible rural areas. The population of rural small towns decreased by 3.6% over the same period. The implication is that the lack of connectivity and affordable transport is hollowing out those communities, and the reduction in real-terms value of the relief scheme is playing a part in that.

The Government’s Bus Services Act 2025 will make some positive change, and I support the aim of revitalising rural bus services, but with the best will in the world we cannot turn this situation around overnight. New transport infrastructure takes months and years to create—my colleagues and I are trying to bring back a rail link in west Oxfordshire—and rural drivers up and down the country are struggling with this problem now.

To address the problem, the Liberal Democrats have called for the number of areas covered by the scheme to be doubled, so an additional 21 areas across the UK would benefit from the relief. That expansion should be supported by a clear consultation and evidence base to determine the areas that could receive the new relief: perhaps Devon, Cornwall, Cumbria, East Anglia, Yorkshire and Shropshire could benefit, alongside rural Wales, more of rural Scotland and, of course, Northern Ireland.