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Rural Communities (Recession)

The hon. Gentleman must have extraordinary prescience, because I was about to come to that very point. Support for jobless people in remote areas is crucial, yet nearly one fifth of rural jobcentres were closed in the past two years, when the number nationally has been increasing. I wonder whether the Minister would like to say something about that or about its impact on people in the countryside who have lost their jobs and are now seeking work. Citizens Advice reports that the increase in debt cases among people living in rural areas in the second half of last year was more than twice the increase in urban areas, with a 20 per cent. rise in cases among people in sparsely populated rural villages. In the final quarter of last year, insolvencies and bankruptcies were higher in regions with predominantly rural populations. The Country Land and Business Association's latest rural economy index survey has found that confidence is improving, but half of the respondents still lacked confidence in the outlook for the rural economy. In the Secretary of State's response to the rural advocate's report on the economic potential of the rural economy, he said that there was""no such thing as a separate 'rural economy'"." Of course I understand his point, and there are links between the urban and rural economies, but the danger of such remarks is that they suggest that Ministers do not appreciate the realities of rural life. The simple fact is that, in a rural area, people's work and services are often further away from where they live. Government measures such as increasing fuel duty and the tax on 4x4 vehicles can therefore hit rural workers, particularly the low paid, disproportionately hard. The Commission for Rural Communities has noted that fewer than half the residents in villages and hamlets live within 13 minutes of a bus stop with a service at least once an hour, compared with 95 per cent. of urban residents. For rural small businesses and people working from home, access to the internet is crucial. We are told that the vast majority of the population can get some form of broadband, with 97.9 per cent. of households currently getting a speed of at least 1 megabyte a second. That sounds good, but the truth is that half a million households cannot obtain those speeds, and more than half of those get no acceptable level of internet connection at all, as I know from my rural constituency and I am sure many of my hon. Friends will know from theirs. Only last week, at the South of England show, one of my constituents in the south downs area—which is less than 50 miles from London—told me that he had been paying £11,000 a year for a 2 megabyte connection to his converted farm buildings. Such costs for a poor connection, which would be cheaply available in an urban area, are undermining farm diversification and the potential for rural development. For businesses in the future, broadband speed will really matter, so the Government's commitment to making 2 megabyte broadband available to "virtually everyone" is welcome. However, we will await Lord Carter's final report later this week to find out what "virtually everyone" really means. There is a risk that the digital divide between cities and rural areas will grow wider still, when super-fast fibre-optic broadband is rolled out to cities and large towns, but not to rural areas.