Natural Environment and Rural Communities Bill

This is a large group of amendments which go to the kernel of the Bill, so I apologise in advance for the length of my intervention. I have four amendments to speak to in the group—and I shall come to those—but first I wish to deal with the stand part debate initiated by the noble Baroness, Lady Miller. In doing so, I shall speak to all the other amendments in the group that she has tabled in regard to Part 2. I believe most strongly that we need the CRC. The problems of rural life still go unnoticed and unheeded by a large number of policy makers, whether they be in Whitehall—including Defra, perhaps—certainly the RDAs and even county halls. In several local authorities which have an urban kernel and a doughnut of rural area around them, a great deal of policy making is focused on the urban centre and the rural doughnut gets ignored. It is important to have rural-proofing and an eye must be kept on some of the county halls—the local authorities in general—as well. Secondly, there is huge ignorance about the countryside, especially the problems of deprivation, the need for businesses and the lack of thought given to both the rural young and rural old. We need to keep driving up standards of delivery. These are national not local standards of rural delivery, involving the police, the ambulance service, social services, business links, the skills agenda, and so on. A body that is looking at the delivery of services to rural areas will be more important now, as I said on Second Reading, with all the change taking place in the police force, the Department of Health and education. The tendency is that the police, business links and other services should be regionalised—in other words, that they should get further and further away from the man in the country lane, if not the man in the street. It is important to have an organisation standing up for those people. Rather than calling for the abandonment of the proposals for the CRC, I say we strengthen its remit and its ability to be effective. I hope that the amendments, which I shall come to shortly, will achieve that. There is no doubt that the rural social agenda needs a strong voice in today’s national and regional politics and I have yet to hear of a better suggestion than the CRC. We need a national body. It cannot be Defra—it has to be independent, with the ability to criticise all parts of government. No civil servant from Defra will put his career on the line by criticising other departments. It just will not happen in the Civil Service. We need an independent voice that can be a critical friend of government but which can do the authoritative research on a national basis and then use it on a national scale to goad and prod all levels of government. If you care about the lives of the poor, the young, the old and the deprived people in rural England, you need a CRC. Being quite new here, and a learner driver when it comes to Bill amendments, I realise that I probably do not have the wording of Amendment No. 225 quite right. Nevertheless, I believe that the principles still hold good. It is crucial that the voice of the countryside—or rural England, in this case—is heard loud and clear throughout all levels of government. I have been trying to achieve this for the whole of my political career, the past 20 or so years. The major breakthrough in this agenda was when we managed to get the concept of rural-proofing introduced into the rural White Paper in November 2000. If one is trying to raise the quality of life in rural areas, one should probably start at the Department of Health or perhaps the Department for Education and Skills; it was not in those days MAFF and it is not necessarily Defra now. I never cease to be amazed at the level of ignorance about rural living among most officials outside Defra and sometimes, I am afraid, within it. In my time, I came across a whole range of unrecognised issues. For instance, there is the problem of kids at school not being able to take part in sport, drama or music because there is not a second car in their family and they have to get the school bus back home at 3.30 because the family car—every family, virtually, has to have one—has been taken to work. DCMS officials were unaware that any promotion of sports had to take this into consideration in the countryside. There is the problem of rural youngsters who cannot take part in training or get a job because they have no transport. That would be dealt with very simply by a Wheels to Work scheme but I cannot get the DWP to pick up on that idea, even now. What about rural businesses, which struggle to get recognition of their needs? I was asked by one DTI official, ““What does manufacturing have to do with the countryside?””. ““Actually, there are more manufacturing businesses per head in the countryside than in the towns; did you not know that?””, I asked. ““Oh, no,”” was the reply. There is also the problem of how rural participants will take part in the proceedings of magistrates courts when those courts get fewer and more inaccessible. I once jokingly remarked that stealing a car might be the only option. All those are examples not only of ignorance but of lack of thought about rural issues, the main problem being a lack of recognition that the countryside is not just a picture postcard existence, but that real deprivation exists and solutions to it are inevitably different from those used in the towns. I do not want to go into all the rural social problems, but there is no doubt that in order to get central, regional and even local government to make the effort to take account of the rural dimension, there has to be someone with clout. That clout must come from someone at the very top of government who can break down doors and demand responses from the top of Whitehall departments to the RDAs, local authorities and leaders of government agencies whose staff, one hopes, are working on the ground in rural areas but all too often restricting their efforts to the towns. As I said, the clout or authority for this advocate for rural life has to come from the top. With no disrespect to our current Defra Secretary of State, other Whitehall departments, Ministers and other Secretaries of State tend to resent interference in their way of doing things from merely another department. But if that authority came from Downing Street they would have to wake up and listen. Some officials involved in these changes have been reluctant to accept the need for a rural advocate. Such a person might create waves, which the Sir Humphreys of this world might abhor. But that is precisely what is needed—now more than ever before. Defra might be worried that a rural advocate with authority emanating from Downing Street rather than from its own Secretary of State might even feel empowered to criticise Defra. With the Government dictating change and with all the delivery organisations, it is vital that we have a rural advocate in there behind the scenes—very often, it is best to achieve things by working behind the scenes—fighting the rural corner. The Commission for Rural Communities will be doing the research and will have the expertise to make a national case for people living in rural areas, covering all aspects of rural life—health, education, transport and so forth. It must also have a secret weapon with the strength or clout to get in there and make a difference—an Exocet, as it were. It must have the Government’s, not just Defra’s, rural advocate at its head. I apologise for going on, but this grouping is very long and I now turn to my Amendments Nos. 242, 247 and 255, which relate to rural-proofing. I realise that to many people the phrase in the current Clause 18(1) about the general purposes of the CRC being to promote,"““awareness among relevant persons and the public of rural needs””," might be synonymous with rural-proofing, but it most definitely is not. As we have described in our Amendment No. 247,"““‘rural proofing’ means the systematic””," which I emphasise,"““assessment of rural needs and circumstances in order that they may be taken into account . . . in policy development and””," more importantly, in the implementation of policy. Again, it is a typical cautious Whitehall approach. Creating ““awareness among relevant persons”” is all very well, but do not create waves. That is tantamount to saying, ““Do not make a difference””. What is needed is for the CRC to be able to go to a department. Let us take the Home Office, which in my day tended to be one that needed telling—I am sure that is different now and I apologise in advance if I am being unfair to it. But you need to be able to say to a department, ““Have you got the systems in place to properly monitor the effects of all your policies and initiatives in rural areas—not just one or two policies, which you as an official who might live in London might think could be relevant to the countryside, but all your policies, because, believe me, they are pretty well all relevant? Who is checking the effects of what your police reforms will mean for rural communities? Who will check on asylum centres?””, which might easily be put in rural areas. What effect might they have as a drain on local medical or educational services if they are placed in rural areas? You need to say, ““That initiative that you have got going fighting the drug culture among the young—what are you doing to make it reach out to the rural young? Do you not know that in some rural communities there are more drugs per head of population among the young than in some of the worst London boroughs?””, et cetera, et cetera. It is all very well to create awareness among these solid citizens in Whitehall—and again I apologise to the Home Office for using it as an example, as this could apply to any of the departments—but ultimately the CRC must have the ability to provoke action and to name and shame a department, an RDA or a government agency in a report to Parliament. That is why our final amendment in this group, Amendment No. 255, inserts as Clause 19(d) a provision about,"““monitoring and making reports to Parliament on rural-proofing””." Noble Lords might have gathered, not only from my Second Reading speech but from what I have said today, that I am passionate about the need for the CRC, but I admit to a small degree of sympathy with some of the voices from the opposite Benches that are in effect saying, ““Where’s the beef?””. Is the CRC going to make a difference? I would not like to say that our amendments necessarily constitute the hamburger between the white flour of the Government’s buns, but my hope is that they will at least give the CRC some crunch.