Rural Communities

Rory Stewart Excerpts

Tuesday 17th April 2012 Westminster Hall

[Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)]

I join everyone in congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire (Simon Hart) on securing this important debate. The enormous number of people here is testimony to the importance of the subject.

Speaking on behalf of Cumbria, I want to say that we need to recognise, when we talk about Government support for rural areas, that there is already significant Government support for them. We cannot start the debate pretending that rural areas are somehow entirely neglected or forgotten. It is correct that there should be Government support for them, but we should recognise that in per capita terms—and of course, it is driven by our need—Government support can be considerable. In our part of Cumbria, for example, we run two district hospitals for a population of 300,000 people. We have the smallest high school and the smallest sixth form in England. That means that the per capita costs of running those services are high. That is a form of cross-subsidy from other parts of the country.

Therefore, we should not over-push the argument. We should not stand up again and again in the House of Commons and present ourselves as victims. To do so is dangerous. If we present ourselves as victims and demand more and more transfer payments, and start to take on board the arguments about productivity and the connection between rural areas and the City of London, for example, we will create unpleasant tensions. We will end up with people in London saying “Why should we subsidise rural areas?” We do not want to get into that conversation. We will, in short, find that we are having the same conversation that we are now having with Scotland, which has become poisoned by the question of how much money is moving north of the border, and how much is moving south.

Nor should rural areas try to imitate cities. One of the most dangerous things that we have been doing in Cumbria has been to pursue industrialisation policies that are entirely unsuitable for rural areas. Of course it is true, as my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood (Mr Spencer) said, that we need to be sure that the economy flourishes in rural areas. However, that does not mean going into an area such as Penrith and The Border, where currently we have close to full employment, and building businesses for which we have no workers, shipping them in from other parts of the country, then saying we have a housing shortage and building another 400 houses, and then saying we do not have jobs for the people in those 400 houses, and building more businesses. That may be convenient for district councils that could generate money from that kind of operation, but it is not what is demanded by our area, our population, or our economy.

Instead, we need to look at the country as a single complementary unit—complementary in the sense that city and rural needs are different, but also in the sense that we are one community, one country and one nation. We are not about transfer payments. We cannot allow people in London to see themselves as some city state that is paying for the rest of the country. We must understand that our contribution is valuable.

[Gloria De Piero (Ashfield) (Lab)]

I suspect that many people in London would, however, be surprised to find out that in rural areas such as mine people cannot get a school bus. I am thinking specifically of the 7.55 am bus from Sutton in Ashfield to Tibshelf, which has been removed, throwing mums’ lives into chaos. Would the hon. Gentleman agree that getting a school bus is not just desirable but essential?

[Rory Stewart]

Absolutely, and I thank the hon. Lady for raising that point.

With the caveat that we do not want to present ourselves as victims, it is essential to demand the basic services that other people in the country take for granted. Those could be buses, or access to hospitals or schools.

[Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)]

I am so pleased that my hon. Friend is happy with the funding of education in Cumbria. As a Leicestershire MP I am not happy with the funding settlement for Leicestershire, which is the lowest-funded county, per capita, in the whole of Great Britain. We are in the bizarre situation, with no indication of any movement by the Government to repair the damage, in which the education of every pupil in the city of Leicester is valued at a stunning £800 a year more than that of every pupil in Leicestershire. That is untenable and cannot be perpetuated. To say that is not to plead poverty: there is a clear disparity between the education funding for rural areas such as Leicestershire and that for cities.

[Rory Stewart]

I am certainly not going to stand up in the House of Commons and say that I am happy with Government funding for education in Cumbria. There is not a single person in this Chamber who would say that they feel happy with the funding for their local area, but we need to strike a balance that is sustainable for the nation. There are two things that we need to do. Instead of focusing on money we should consider what the Government can provide—above all, I am thinking about infrastructure and getting the broadband in the ground and sufficient mobile coverage—and we must understand that Government could provide a lot more for rural areas if they gave space to rural communities to fill in the gaps. In our case, for example, the first responders enormously help the ambulance service, but they are not allowed to deal with children, which takes out a whole chunk of the population who could be served by volunteers within our communities.

In relation to our air ambulance service, the Government could do an enormous amount by exempting VAT on fuel. However, in relation to broadband, which is the most exciting area of all, it is about assigning responsibility. It is about the Government saying to communities, “This is what you ought to do and this is what the Government will not do.”

We should see rural communities not as victims but as the vanguard of Britain; as miraculous places that produce things that other parts of the country do not. In Cumbria, we have a magic alchemy that turns wet grass into productive protein, which we can sell around the world. If we get the broadband right, small and medium-sized enterprises from rural communities can challenge the rest of the world, but that involves education, focus and confidence. Importantly, we can provide an image for the 21st century on how to live in rural areas, and we no longer need to present ourselves as victims.