Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment his Department has made of the implications for its policies of the recommendations of the all-party Parliamentary group on rural health and social care's report on rural health provision in England.

I welcome the all-party Parliamentary group’s report on rural health provision. There are two recommendations that make direct reference to Defra: recommendation 1 on defining rurality and recommendation 2 on identifying health inequalities.

The official rural definition is strictly a statistical one – the rural-urban classification. Working with the Office for National Statistics (ONS), Ordnance Survey and other relevant departments this will be revised once data from the 2021 Census become available. The classification is not prescriptive, and departments have always been able to define rurality flexibly as appropriate for the policy or budgetary context, taking account of relevant factors.

On identifying health inequalities, one of the pillars of the Levelling Up White Paper published on 2 February is that the Government will transform its approach to data. As part of this, the Government Statistical Service Subnational Data Strategy aims to improve the UK’s subnational data, mapping local geographies and helping improve transparency and accountability to the public. Defra will be working with the ONS and other departments to implement this strategy.