Debate on the Address

I think that if the hon. Gentleman bothered to look at what DEFRA has been doing in the last 12 months—leaving aside the wicked, incompetent destruction of farmers during the foot and mouth debacle—he would not make any comment about farmers having been overpaid subsidies. We should look at what Europe does, and at what Scotland and Wales do. They manage to pay their farmers in time. It is only in England that the incompetent DEFRA and the Rural Payments Agency fail to make payments to British farmers. Every other country in Europe, including the other countries of the United Kingdom—Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales—is able to pay up on time. There is more to rural areas than farm payments, however. I have mentioned the lack of buses. More bus subsidy will go to pensioners, of whom most will be in city areas. My constituency is under a massive onslaught from the Government. Four of my community hospitals are threatened with closure. One of the problems is the funding formula, which does not include a rural sparsity factor: it, too, discriminates against rural areas. The police funding formula, which does include a rural sparsity factor, happens to be one that I incorporated in 1996, and I pay tribute to the Government for retaining it. The rest of the local government funding formula takes some account of rural sparsity, but not the NHS formula. One way of determining whether an area is poor in health terms is to establish whether it contains cars or buses. As city areas have more buses, it is concluded that people must be slightly poorer. My area is discriminated against because more people have cars. The Government’s formula assumes that an area where people have cars must be a wealthy middle-class area, and we are therefore given less money for health. In Cumbria, if people do not have a car, they go nowhere. We have rural poverty in Cumbria and in other rural areas, but it is not in clusters that one might spot more easily in inner-city areas. We have rural poverty worse than in some cities but it is scattered and sporadic. It is individual houses among plush-looking countryside. It is not noticed but, goodness me, it exists. We need an anti-discrimination Bill for rural areas to save our post offices. The latest survey shows that the Penrith and The Border constituency, one of many rural constituencies, is top of the hit list for removal of our rural post offices. Is it any co-incidence that the areas that are most likely to lose their post offices, bus services and hospitals in the latest hit list happen to be in the constituencies of Conservative Members of Parliament? There is a deliberate, two-phased attack on those areas—Conservative areas and rural areas—by this Government. Where the Government are not deliberately attacking them, by neglect, ignorance and inadvertence, they are letting our services fall. The Government talk about social inclusion. Many of my rural constituents feel terribly excluded.