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Rural Communities (Recession)

First, may I congratulate the Minister of State on his appointment to his new job? We have over the years come across each other from time to time in this House, and normally our encounters have been good-humoured, and I hope that continues. His predecessor the right hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Jane Kennedy) has just left the Chamber, but I want to thank her as well. She managed finally to solve one of the most complex problems arising from the single farm payment. Almost the last thing that she did was sign off that problem and as a result a farmer in my constituency has been promised the money under the single farm payment. I suspect that the right hon. Lady will get into trouble from Europe as a consequence, but I would like to place on record my gratitude to her for doing that. I am also grateful for the update on Dairy Farmers of Britain. The processing plant in Blaydon has closed, leaving a considerable problem for the few remaining dairy farmers in the north-east of England. Most of them have now found contracts, but there is a long-term problem: because the processing plants for milk are now so distant from the north-east, longer transportation distances of milk will lead to higher costs, which will increasingly affect the viability of the few remaining dairy farmers in that region. That brings me to the problem of the beef industry as a whole. I appreciate that we will have a debate on agriculture on Thursday, but the recession has touched this industry as much as any other, and, of course, a recession in the dairy industry also affects the amount of beef that is available for consumption. That will mean that our degree of self-sufficiency in beef will decline even further than it already has—from more than 100 per cent. in 1997 to only 80 per cent. currently. We have to import the rest, often from countries whose welfare standards are far less reliable than those of the United Kingdom. I wish also to pick up on a point that my hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) made in his opening speech. The most important lesson to come out of this debate is that we must devolve power as far as possible. It is very difficult to pin down exactly what a rural community is. A rural community in my Northumberland constituency is very different from one in Suffolk or Surrey, or one in Sussex, where my hon. Friend's constituency is. Each has its own set of problems, and each requires individual attention and local determination in order to solve them. The housing issue provides an example of that. In rural Surrey, huge housing demand is what causes real problems, but in parts of Northumberland, particularly those rural areas which were formerly coalfield areas, local people want more properties to be built, because that makes their communities more sustainable. Such communities have declined because the coal industry left the area, and new houses and people, often coming from the towns, bring life back to them. We therefore want more properties in those areas, yet we live under the dread hand of the regional spatial strategy, which imposes things from above. For instance, in the part of Northumberland that I represent, we can build only 157 new houses over the next five years, which is ridiculous. According to the spatial strategy, we should all move into the city of Newcastle, and not live in the rural communities, which is what we want. The main lesson, therefore, is that we should devolve decision making to its lowest possible level, and deregulate and decentralise. That is how rural communities will be able to fight the recession.