Natural Environment and Rural Communities Bill

My Lords, I am glad to have the opportunity to add my congratulations to my friend and colleague, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Exeter, on his excellent maiden speech. Between us we have, by my calculation, over 1,000 parishes in our two dioceses. That is a sign of just how many distinct rural communities exist, as well as the still unparalleled scale and reach of the Church of England as a rural organisation. That is the experience we heard reflected in the maiden speech of the right reverend Prelate and I am sure that his clarity of mind will be of great benefit to this House. I must declare an interest as for almost five years I have been a board member of the Countryside Agency. As the passage of the Bill will result in the abolition of that agency, it is an interest that is in the final stages of terminal care. The agency and its staff have been in the departure lounge of quango life for a long time now, a fact to which the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, referred. I wish to pay tribute to those staff who have continued to do their jobs with remarkable dedication and commitment during a long period of uncertainty. As we shift the pieces of the rural jigsaw around, it is easy to forget that people’s lives, families and relationships are being affected. I believe that the staff of the Countryside Agency—and I am sure this is true for the staff of English Nature and the Rural Development Service as well—deserve public gratitude for the way in which they have stuck to their task and prepared for a future in which some of them may not have employment at all. That being said, I support the general aims of the Bill. My plea, however, is that once this restructuring is complete, the Government and any successor to them, may leave it in place long enough to do its work. I have previously commented from these Benches on the itch to restructure that has characterised the Government in their rural policy in recent years. What we have before us today is the consequence of the Government’s rural strategy, announced in July last year, itself a response to the rural delivery review, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Haskins, set up three years ago. By the time Natural England, or whatever it will be called—I suppose it could have been called English Nature, really, but that was probably impolitic—and the Commission for Rural Communities are vested, four years will have passed since the rural delivery review was established. That is precisely how long the Countryside Agency existed before its foundations started to be examined—and it came into being, of course, only as a result of an earlier restructuring whereby the Countryside Commission and the Rural Development Commission were brought together. Having planted quite a few trees in recent years, I am advised that it is not always a good policy to dig them up, examine the roots, leave them lying around for a year or two and then replant them again if you want them to grow strong and healthy. The itch to restructure and the longing to legislate seem to be regarded nowadays as marks of reforming, dynamic government. But mature institutions that serve the needs of people rather than desperately seeking to prove their own utility are not produced overnight. Rural England needs continuity and stability in rural policy. It needs a policy that brings together social, economic and environmental issues to deliver sustainable development, and the Bill goes a long way, through the creation of Natural England, towards providing an appropriate structure. But I doubt we are ever going to achieve that much-vaunted sustainable development if the bodies charged with delivering such a goal are themselves fragile and short term. I can think of nothing worse than the suggestion in another place that the CRC should have a five-year guillotine hanging over it. I ask the Minister to assure the House that the structures will be left in place for a decent length of time once our work on the Bill is complete. In the remainder of the time that I have left, I wish to refer to the Commission for Rural Communities as I find it hard to understand the objections to it. It certainly exists in shadow form already as a division of the Countryside Agency, but that is not because it is some kind of survival of what that agency presently is. It will have less than a tenth, I suspect, of the budget of the Countryside Agency at present, and, of course, the Haskins review suggested that policy and delivery should be separated. Everything that the Countryside Agency does is still reckoned to be necessary. It is simply that the jobs are being parcelled up and delivered elsewhere. But there will be a big hole in the rural strategy without the Commission. It is the Commission that will take forward the work already done in rural proofing, which in fact needs strengthening. I hope the Commission will continue to publish the State of the Countryside report. This provides a wealth of information, which sometimes, I suspect, is insufficiently used. I note, for example, in this year’s report, that the richest 40 per cent of English households provide 75 per cent of the residents of our villages, hamlets and isolated dwellings. When that is coupled with the disparity in rural areas between local income levels and house prices, it shows how the less well off in rural England are becoming more disadvantaged or forced to move into urban settlements. That raises some very serious questions about the growing spatial separation of the rich and the poor in our society. The proposed SIPPs pension arrangements may only make this worse unless something is done to enable the rural housing supply to grow. We all look forward to whatever the Affordable Rural Housing Commission will have to say in March next year. Rural England is a place where the law of unintended consequences is powerful, and we need an independent and robust commission concentrating on rural disadvantage. It needs to be independent not only of policy makers—or, indeed, of those who deliver policy—but also independent of single-issue lobby groups, for which rural England provides such fertile soil. The chair of the commission will, of course, be the rural advocate, with direct access to the Prime Minister and Secretaries of State. I hope that no one in the House will think that that is a position which ought to be abolished in the interests of rural England. If anyone is to be really effective in the job it is imperative that he or she has the expertise, the networks and the logistical support that the proposed commission would provide. If there was no commission, I wonder who would monitor the new regional delivery of rural policy, especially through the RDAs, and who would speak out if that proved inadequate. If government policies for public service reform overlooked the rural dimension, who would say so authoritatively if we had no national body to do that work? Those who make and deliver policies—whether government departments, local councils, primary care trusts or RDAs—almost always have mixed rural and urban constituencies, and usually they are dominated by the urban mindset. The case for a body whose remit is solely rural and focused especially on the most disadvantaged in our rural communities, is very strong. In the hope that it may indeed both take root and be robustly independent, I wish it and the Bill well.