My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, for introducing his amendment—this is a really important amendment going forward. I also thank him for mentioning the work of the Rural Services Network; its report is incredibly important in informing the approach that the Government need to take and the work they need to do to reduce the disparities faced by rural areas. The Government would do well to take notice and account of what the Rural Service Network does as they continue to move forward with their levelling-up missions.
I have one amendment in this group, Amendment 488, and my noble friend Lady Taylor of Stevenage has Amendment 53 in this group. I thank the noble Earl, Lord Devon, for his support for my noble friend’s amendment. I very much agree with him that the environmental emissions targets need to be included in this, if we are to have any chance of meeting what is laid out in the Environment Act.
The noble Earl also very clearly laid out many of the concerns that face both our rural and coastal communities, including that they constantly feel missed out and left behind. They will be concerned that this is what will happen to them again. It is really important that we consider this properly. As the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, said, rural poverty is so often missed and underestimated; often it is not as in your face as urban poverty, and we need to ensure we take full account of it.
My noble friend’s Amendment 53
“is to probe whether the metrics are suitable for rural and coastal communities, and whether alternative metrics should be considered.”
Here is an example from the document that was published on the mission and metrics—the technical annexe. I remind noble Lords of the metric that accompanies mission 3:
“By 2030, local public transport connectivity across the country will be significantly closer to the standards of London, with improved services, simpler fares and integrated ticketing.”
The metrics that will be used to assess progress in achieving that mission are
“method of travel to work by region of workplace … The other headline metric is the average journey time to centres of employment, with the data broken down by modes of transport and at lower tier local authority level in England.”
What they do not do is tell us how much public transport exists in the first place.
I live in an area where we have one bus a week—that is not one bus that comes and goes during that day, but one bus that goes to one place on one day of the week—and it gives us a couple of hours in the place it arrives before we have to come home again. I genuinely do not understand how, in the area where I live, these metrics will deliver transport connectivity that is
“significantly closer” to the standards of London. I genuinely have no concept of how these metrics will achieve that.
My other concern is that the principal objective is “growing the private sector”. Again, I cannot see how growing the private sector in the area I live, or in the areas that surround it, will suddenly bring me a really good bus service. The one thing that might help is if the Government reintroduced the rural bus grant fund that they took away. That led to dozens and dozens in my area losing their services—I know this because I was a county councillor at the time—because they were simply no longer profitable. Looking at the metrics from a rural perspective is incredibly important, if we are genuinely going to drive change in this area.
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My Amendment 488 would mean that
“ a Minister must publish an assessment of infrastructure levels in coastal and rural communities.”
Look at coastal communities: for a start, their very geography means that they are right at the end of the line. If they have lost industry and there is bad transport connectivity, it is difficult for investment in infrastructure to be made in those coastal communities. This means that many have continued to go downhill—I guess that is the expression. It is important that we assess what infrastructure we have in those coastal areas, and in rural areas, so that we have a baseline—a starting point—that we can move on from. Perhaps the Government are already considering doing this. It would be good to have further information on that and on how they intend to take it forward.
The noble Lords, Lord Foster of Bath and Lord Carrington, both talked about rural-proofing. It has been mentioned already that, if these missions are to be successful, they have to be across every department, and certain departments will have to take control in order to deliver. However, the rural-proofing agenda has been very much Defra’s agenda and has never been grasped properly, or funded properly, by other departments. Again, how will we ensure that these outcomes will be properly realised in rural areas, when Defra itself acknowledged that rural areas have remained behind the rest of the country on a whole host of important metrics, despite rural-proofing supposedly having been in place for many years? We know it has not been working. There are three major reasons why it has not worked in its current form: the lack of leadership, vision and co-ordination from central government; often, a lack of knowledge and understanding of rural areas from central government; and the basic lack of resources. How will these missions challenge this, take this into account and change that approach? That is what we need if we are to see a real change in our rural and coastal communities as part of these missions.
Will the Minister ask her colleagues in different departments to ask themselves, when they are creating policy that would impact on these missions, how it would work in a rural area and what effect it would have on rural communities, so that that is properly taken into consideration? We need to make sure that policies are adjusted as needed, to ensure that any intended outcomes can be realised in rural areas. For
example, funding formulas may need to be adjusted to take account of how it would be delivered in a rural area, or we may need to look at an alternative method of service provision. Too often, rural and coastal communities have felt like an afterthought in Whitehall and Westminster. This is an opportunity to put them back at the centre, along with other communities that need levelling up, for the sake of a better expression.
We have already heard about the importance of no community being left behind. Rural communities therefore need to be much more explicitly assessed to ensure that they are central to the Government’s levelling-up missions, so that they can believe they are being taken seriously and there is a change in the future of their potential. I live in a very rural area; it is a blessing in many ways to live in a rural area, but it also comes with many challenges, and I wonder if, often, we do not shout about them quite enough.
We heard that rural communities struggle to access high-speed broadband and that housing is becoming increasingly unaffordable. I live in Cumbria, and it is particularly difficult when there is a large number of second homes. Airbnb has not helped, from a rental point of view. Amendments were put down in the other place by Tim Farron MP on this issue, and when we come to discuss the housing section of the Bill, we really need to think about the rural aspect as well. It is not just about building homes; it is about who owns them, who lives in them and who they are accessible to. That is a very important aspect of the rural approach.
The top issues for countryside and coastal communities are very similar to those for urban areas, but with added—or perhaps a different kind of—complexity. Distance, for example, is hugely important. Much smaller communities have higher prices, as we have heard, but they often also have lower wages, as well as work that is potentially seasonal. The amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, which was well introduced by the noble Duke, addresses this. Delivering public services in large rural areas is simply more expensive, but that is not taken into account in government funding calculations. It is really difficult to deliver social care effectively in large rural areas when, for example, the distance time is not always included in someone’s wages. How do you deliver a really good service under those circumstances?
Again, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Foster, for this debate. It is extremely important, and I hope the Minister has some positive things to say to us.