Rural Economy

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer for this interesting and wide-ranging debate on the rural economy. I intervene to bring to the House my experiences of living in a rural area; they follow on nicely from the closing comments of the noble Lord, Lord Harrison. I now live in Northumberland, but I have spent most of my life living in the south-east, which is a crowded area. For a great deal of that time, I lived in a city. I am now living in one of the sparsely populated areas of this country, a long way from the centre of gravity in Britain, which I consider to be London and the south-east. It has been an interesting time. I am now also a county councillor in Northumberland and married to my local MP. Being married to the local MP involves once a year visiting all the villages in his constituency, which is 50 miles north to south. That takes us eight days; most days we drive something like 120 miles. I am not only the chauffeur but the clerk in this arrangement. It has certainly given me a great insight into not only the problems of rural Northumberland, but, of course, the beauty of the landscape. My reflections this afternoon are therefore personal. I have become aware of the extra hurdles involved in running an economy in a rural area, some of which have been mentioned this morning. I illustrated the distances that one has to deal with, particularly when one is accessing health and education. There are also the distances from some of the major networks. For example, very few people in my area are on the mains gas supply. My noble friend Lady Miller talked about other reliable infrastructure, such as broadband and digital. We do not have digital. Broadband is improving—we might receive it—but we have some areas where the electricity supply is not always reliable because some of the lines are overhead. The situation is improving, but it is not perfect. Historically, the whole area is a low-wage economy. Another main factor—it has certainly affected us and people coming to us—is the problem with delivering emergency services in rural areas. The police, ambulance and fire services have to travel long distances over slow roads. From my experience in the Houses of Parliament, having been a Front Bencher for a number of years considering national legislation, it has become obvious to me that many central government policies add to the problems that we have. It is not necessarily deliberate, but our whole system is very urban-centric. I have been able to see the huge difference in the years that I have now spent in Northumberland—which, I have to say, is only five years. I want to highlight one or two problems that have come to my notice in recent weeks. One of those is transport. With many things such as transport, housing and planning, the Government wanted to have a regional agenda and regional government, and I supported them. Unfortunately it did not happen, but we still have part of it. Whichever side of the argument you come from, the problem is that, if you are stuck with the present arrangements, you have policies handed down from above. That is causing several problems for us. One of the most recent problems has been the thorny issue of what we see as the strategic A1 through Northumberland. It is the main line up to Edinburgh from Newcastle and for many years people have been fighting to get it dualled. Recently, we discovered that under the new arrangements from the Government the A1 is no longer a strategic road but is shoved in with all the other decisions that we have to make in our area within the meagre budget that has been handed down. I was at the county council yesterday. We are desperately trying to get the Government to look at the road and say, ““Yes, we need a strategic arterial road in Northumberland, as it’s of national importance””. Only the day before yesterday I was reading about the problems of congestion. All the traffic to Scotland on the roads goes up the west side and through the central part of Scotland. The main railway is up the east side. It seems to me sensible to have good road and rail up both sides. In Northumberland, we used to have the Rural Transport Partnership, but now our regional development agency, One NorthEast, has taken away the money funding an officer that had helped to produce good results in the area. Another problem we have had—not necessarily regional—is rail services. We have excellent main line rail services—I would not be able to do what I do if we did not—but on the stopping stations in-between the service is not quite so good. There is a train that goes from Newcastle up to various places, with its final station at Chathill, which is in rural north Northumberland; the train then goes a little further to Belford, where it turns round, but there is no station there anymore. That is an extraordinary situation. For five or six years or more, people have been trying to get the station open. The train goes there—it is not a problem—but health and safety has said that the driver might not know on which side to open the doors. With all the changes that have happened in running the railways, this is a big issue. We hope that at last the new authority will look at that issue, but such matters are simple and should not arise. Other noble Lords have mentioned housing. This is another problem. The figures for the number of houses that can be built in the area come down from central Government through the region and they are based on urban policies. We have been told that, in an area such as ours, we must preserve the countryside and therefore can build only 60 houses per year in Berwick borough. But if that is what you do, as the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, said, your villages and towns become unsustainable. If you go just across the border into Scotland, you will see that in the Borders region a completely different attitude has been taken to development in the smaller towns and to the provision of transport links: the A1 is dualled for most of the way on the other side of the border. Will the Minister look at the policies that have been implemented in the Scottish Borders, because we are just next door and we could benefit from similar policies? When making policy, the Government should always be thinking about what effect it is going to have on rural areas. We have suffered from the change to out-of-hours provision by doctors. The decision was disastrous; it was made by people living in cities who had no idea what would happen in our area. I do not have time to go into it. Similarly, the decision to make people apply for a passport in person is another issue—we can perhaps go to Edinburgh or Newcastle. Can civil servants think about rural areas when they are drawing up policies? What has happened to rural-proofing? I would like the Minister to talk to us about that. I also ask him to look again at the regional administration agenda, which is not working in our interests at the moment.