It is a pleasure to follow my friend and neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax), and I congratulate and thank my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby) on instigating this welcome debate. As several hon. Members have noted—I do not mean this as knocking copy—the only Labour voice that we will hear is from the Front Bench, although I have no doubt it will be able and articulate. I gently make the point to the Minister—hon. Members will recognise this—that Conservative Members and our party cannot forever take for granted the support of our rural communities. We need to pay back their support.
Levelling up is of course welcome, but it needs to be broken into digestible chunks. We need a set of levelling-up initiatives for post-industrial urban areas and a set that features the coastal areas that my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset mentioned and the rural areas that are clearly the kernel of the debate. I also strongly echo the cri de coeur of my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon that it is time the Minister’s
Department put in place regulations whereby town and parish councillors can be removed from office if they are not doing their job. I have a case in my constituency that is a perpetual headache and the council can do nothing about it.
As hon. Members have said, many people visiting rural areas across our country would be forgiven for thinking that all is well. We do have deprivation and need but it is not located in one area or ward, and because we cannot do that—we cannot take people to one place—it makes the delivery of improvements harder. We need some sort of rural tsar, or perhaps a rural squire might be better, to co-ordinate cross-Government rural proofing.
On the funding formula, this is not a rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul debate. It was Mr Blair’s Government who took money away from the county shires and gave it to the urban areas. We need additional funds, a fairer formula or a rural proof formula to ensure that my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset gets the slice of chocolate cake that he desires; I must say that seed cake is my favourite and I would like a large slice. We need a review of the funding rubric and of the assessment of rural deprivation. We must strive for parity or equality—who could be against that? A child educated in my constituency requires as much money to be spent on their primary or secondary education as one in central Manchester, Bristol, Birmingham or Southampton, because education is a UK plc initiative.
I turn briefly to the Dorset Council area. Some 29.4% of its population is over 65, compared with 18.5% across England. One in 12 of the population are over 80 and that is due to increase by 10% by 2032. Being rural, as many hon. Members have mentioned, the cost of delivering services, such as school and care travel, is higher than in urban areas. Some 46% of its residents live in the most-deprived areas for access to services in England.
Despite all that, Dorset Council receives only £2.5 million a year in the rural services delivery grant. Some 85% of the council’s expenditure is generated directly by council tax, compared with the average unitary authority, which has to find only 65%. It receives no revenue support grant where others get 4%. In 2019, the adult social care costs of hospital discharges were £4.1 million; this year, they are £15 million with no concomitant increase.
It is not just in local government that we need to take rurality more into account; the rubrics for the Environment Agency, road funding, the police and, as I have mentioned, schools also need to be refreshed. To take the Environment Agency, it is easy to make the business case stand up for spending £200,000 on a flood relief project that will benefit 10,000 people in the community. A scheme that has the same costs and delivers the same qualitative benefits for a community, albeit a much smaller or more sparsely populated and further flung one, however, will never pass the rubric assessment because it has been written in Whitehall by people who—dare I say?—have experience of living only in and around central London.
Many have mentioned that rural plc needs broadband and phone signal. We also need grid capacity. If anything is holding up development, it is the grid. It is a sad indictment that there is not a single consented business park in the Dorset Council area that could be fully developed out today, only because there is not capacity in the grid to provide electricity. Sturminster Newton in
my constituency would like some sustainable new housing, but it cannot be delivered because of an absence of electricity.
Finally, probably the thorniest issue—I do not touch on it now because I am in my last few seconds and no one can intervene—is access to workforce. I have already said that we have an older workforce. We have virtually zero unemployment in North Dorset; fortunately, that has been the case for many years. Will the Minister make sure that, when the Home Office is sculpting immigration policy, over which we perfectly properly have control in this place, it has a focus on the needs of the rural economy, to ensure that farming, innovation and the entrepreneurs of our rural areas can create investment, make jobs, pay into the Exchequer, create the opportunity of aspiration, and therefore level up rural Britain?
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