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Finance Bill

I shall be brief. We on the Scottish national party Benches will support the amendment tonight, despite the disgraceful failure of the Liberals to support our excellent amendment on the previous vote. We are very forgiving people. The hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) made a good speech and very good points about public transport. When I travel on the train from London to Montrose, I can get a bus from Montrose to Brechin, where I live. That is relatively easy. Recently, my trusty old Honda—that should be rusty old Honda now; I shall certainly go for the Government's scrappage scheme—was in the garage, and I found myself having to get from my home to my offices, which I found difficult. One of my assistants who lives in Brechin travels to my office in Arbroath. He cannot get in for 9 am, despite those being two of the larger towns in the county. He has to go via Montrose on the bus to Angus college because that is the only public transport available. It is extremely difficult for people to travel around by public transport, even within the main towns. Outwith the main towns, if one goes up to the glens of Angus—I am sure it is the same elsewhere—there is little or no bus service. Even the intercity buses that travel between the cities will not stop in many of these areas, so one has to make several connections to get to, say, Dundee or Aberdeen. There is a real problem of alternatives to public transport, which is why cars are so important in rural areas. The hon. Member for Somerton and Frome also made an important point about the price of petrol and about petrol stations. In Brechin, there is now only one petrol station, which is attached to a small Tesco store. On the main road that runs from Dundee to Aberdeen, there is another petrol station, but its prices are astronomical because it has a captive audience, so to speak. The map that the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (John Thurso) produced is very interesting and shows the area that the scheme would cover. Very little of my constituency—only the remoter glens—falls into that area, but that in turn produces another problem. People living in those glens require the benefit of the proposed scheme, but there are no petrol stations. One point that has not come out of the debate so far is that petrol stations have disappeared from many rural areas. People have to get in their cars not only to go to supermarkets and to commute to work, but to find a petrol station, because they simply do not exist in many areas any more. Many small, independent rural petrol stations have gone—effectively driven out of business by the majors. In my constituency, one will be lucky to find a petrol station that is not run either by Shell or Esso. I believe that there is one Mobil station left, but that is it; the independents have gone. Even under the proposed scheme, there would be a potential difficulty with persuading petrol stations to become involved. The proposed scheme is good and important, but I have some queries about the wording of the amendment and, for the first time in my life, agree with the hon. Member for South-West Hertfordshire (Mr. Gauke), because proposed new section 14G(5)(c) states that regulations will "define 'remote rural areas'". I understand that point, and papers may be available elsewhere, but I have a horrible memory of serving on the Committee that scrutinised what became the Energy Act 2004. In it, there was a wonderful power defining the area where it would be possible to cap charges for renewable energy. Everybody assumed that that area was the highlands and islands of Scotland and gaily passed the legislation, but we then found that it was not; it was only some of the islands of Scotland. That has been a source of contention ever since, so there is a danger in not defining exactly what one means by "remote rural areas". I must accept that, apart from the glens, most of my constituency does not constitute a remote rural area. There are difficulties, however, and people in those areas would have to go to other areas to find petrol in the first place. Defining "qualifying retail outlets" would also be a problem because of the lack of such outlets in the remote rural areas that form part of my constituency. The outlets that people use are not in remote areas but in the more populated, coastal area, because that is the only place where one can get petrol in Angus. There are difficulties with the amendment, but that does not mean that we will not support it, because we will. We have heard a lot about how the situation affects individuals and families, and goods going into the area, and it is true, because the lack of an alternative to road transport means that the price of fuel feeds through to the price of everything. Everything in rural areas costs more because it costs more to transport it there, but, when intervening on the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey (Danny Alexander), I made the point that it also affects businesses that are based in, and try to transport goods out of, rural areas. Many are food-based, farming or food-processing businesses, and their products have a relatively short shelf life, so they have to move them quickly and pay the costs of doing so. The situation impacts on people's ability to set up, run and maintain rural businesses, which are important in this period of recession, as employment in rural areas is under considerable pressure. We must maintain that employment, so anything that creates greater costs and increased pressure for such businesses is wrong. It is wrong that they face the discriminatory fuel cost before us. For all those reasons, we will support the amendment. Things are slightly better, however. My hon. Friend the Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr. MacNeil) discussed the Scottish Government's wonderful scheme for road-equivalent transport, which is doing great things for the western isles. The hon. Member for Argyll and Bute (Mr. Reid) was a bit sniffy about it, but I should remind him that while his party and the Labour party were in power for eight years in Scotland, there was no road-equivalent tariff and no attempt to do anything for any island. The SNP Government have made a real start, and we are making progress. For all those reasons, we will support the amendment, despite our differences with our Liberal friends.