Sustainable Communities Bill

The point that derives from that is that it is easy for people on higher incomes to travel to purchase the goods that they would otherwise have bought from those shops, while people on lower incomes suffer. Too often in modern life it is tougher to be poor, sick, old or mentally ill in relatively prosperous areas such as parts of the hon. Gentleman’s constituency and parts of mine than it is in more deprived areas. In talking about ghost town Britain, we often, rightly, refer to the loss of shops and post offices, but it is also about services. That has recently been brought home to me in my constituency. The local magistrates bench used to sit in Lambourn and in Hungerford as well as in Newbury but, perhaps for entirely proper reasons, it no longer sits in Lambourn—where the accused and everyone else used to help to set the chairs up, which was probably not the best way of running a court—but has withdrawn to Newbury. Now, there is pressure from above—from central Government—to move that court service from Newbury to an all-purpose court in Reading. That is probably at a more beneficial cost to the taxpayer, but it is symptomatic of the problem addressed in the Bill. Not only does the community in Newbury suffer the loss of a civic entity, and the proportionate loss of a sense of self-worth, but, more importantly, the people of that community are much more remote from access to that service. Where does that leave, for example, a victim of crime living in a remote village in my constituency who currently has to travel to Newbury to give evidence but in future, under the proposals that are being pushed forward, will have to travel a great distance to Reading?