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England Rural Development Programme (Closure of Project-Based Schemes) Regulations 2006

I thank the Minister. He has replied with his normal courtesy and frankness to the questions to which he was able to reply. As he said, some of this is completely out of his hands. I very much enjoyed his description of Rural Development Agency projects as live projects. I hope that he will bear that phrase in mind when he sees the members who carry the rural brief from the boards. That was one of the most interesting parts of his reply, and I am very glad that he has taken that initiative. I hope he will be able to discuss with them the outcomes from projects, as opposed to the tick-box mentality, which has run how they have acted until now. Also, how they allocate projects should be closely tied to rural areas of deprivation—not necessarily where it is easiest to develop projects, but where they need to happen. I refer to some projects that do not necessarily apply to farming but are critical, such as childcare and ICT. They need to consider the hard-to-tackle areas. I congratulate him on the initiative of getting in those board members because, as he rightly says, much responsibility stops with them to bring those issues to the attention of the board. Given that there will be that hiatus in rural development programming, the other important message must be that, once the funding comes on-stream again, they must be ready to get up and running quickly with the programmes and that staff have not drifted off in other directions and are no longer thinking about rural development. I look forward to further developments on this front. On Question, Motion agreed to.