---

Rural Communities (Recession)

I am grateful to have been called slightly earlier than I expected. It is a pleasure to participate in such an important debate. As others have said this evening, it is a long time since we have had the opportunity to discuss the impact of the recession on the rural economy, and I am pleased that my colleagues selected the topic for an Opposition day debate. I think that one of the reasons why we have so little opportunity to discuss such issues in Government time is that the Government simply do not get it. That is not entirely their fault. Although there are far more Labour than Conservative Members, very few of them represent rural constituencies. The hon. Member for North-West Leicestershire (David Taylor) is a regular Labour champion of rural affairs, but he is a pretty lonely voice. As for local government, following last week's election results there is not a single Labour-controlled rural shire authority. Indeed, many such authorities have no Labour representative. In a number of our constituencies, Labour representation has been all but blown away at local level: my constituency has only one Labour councillor. It is therefore not surprising that Labour representatives are not willing to put rural affairs at the top of their agenda. I represent one of the most sparsely populated rural areas. I should add that I have the pleasure of chairing the all-party parliamentary group on rural services, which exists to champion, in particular, the least well-populated parts of the country, where the cost of supplying services—whether in the public or the private sector—is highest. I find it very depressing that such an important sector of the economy receives so little attention in this place. Part of the attention that it does receive, along with the focus of Government efforts to help the rural economy, is strongly driven by a perception that rural areas serve as the playground of the nation. However, although tourism is an increasingly important diversification for those who have engaged in more traditional primary activities in rural areas, it is not the be-all and end-all. It is not the only activity that Government should seek to encourage. Many areas of active industry in the rural economy are now perceived by Government as there to provide entertainment for the masses. Forestry is an example. The second largest landowner—after Her Majesty the Queen—is the Forestry Commission, which under the current Government has been transformed from a primary producer of timber products whose purpose was to provide construction materials and other building products for the nation to, essentially, a playground. There has been an appalling failure to accept that responsibility for the nation's forests lies with the Government. The forests owned by the Government are seen as being there purely to divert the people. That is all very well in one sense: we should be encouraging access to our forests. However, if we do so at the expense of the industry itself, in a few decades' time we will no longer have forests. Instead, we will have scrubland areas which will not be attractive places to visit, and which will not provide the biodiversity that is at the heart of the Government's argument for allowing forestry to regenerate naturally rather than being planted.