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Rural Communities (Recession)

May I start by properly welcoming both new Ministers to the Department? The hon. Member for Poplar and Canning Town (Jim Fitzpatrick) has a hard act to follow. The right hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Jane Kennedy) was in the Chamber a few minutes ago but, sadly, she has left her place. I wanted to commend her because despite the fact that, like the new Minister, she came into the Department with a self-confessed complete lack of knowledge of the issues she was facing, she applied herself willingly to a steep learning curve and in a short space of time persuaded the farming industry and the rest of the rural community that she was very much aware of their issues and very much on their side. Nevertheless, I wish the new Ministers well in their posts. In his response to my hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert), the Minister made a great deal of the rural development programme for England. I must say, as an aside, that his words rang truer when he moved off his script and said what he really felt, rather than what he had been told to say. When he has had a chance to travel the length and breadth of England—it is not his fault that he has not yet had the chance to do so—to talk to farmers and to rural communities, he will not find much support for the way in which the regional development agencies have operated in the rural sphere. They have contributed far more sums of more than £1 million than smaller sums of £100,000 or less, which would be much more relevant to small businesses wishing to improve their productivity, to diversify and so on. Everywhere I am told about this, I find that the schemes devised—they are all different—by each RDA are bureaucratic and very difficult to access. At last week's cereals event—I went the day after the Minister—I went to the RDA stand, where an official told me, with some apology, about a farmer who had just been in wanting to see whether he could apply for a grant of about £40,000 for a meat-cutting plant, only to be told that he was not eligible. That had nothing to do with the rights and wrongs of the scheme. I have no idea whether it was a good or bad scheme, but he was told that there was no scheme that suited his needs—that is laughable, because that is precisely what the rural development programme for England was designed to produce. I hope that when the Minister has had the opportunity that I mentioned, he will look again at the way in which that programme is working. The Minister also trotted out a litany of statistics. I intervened on him on the issue of poverty, which is a huge issue in rural areas, not least because it is less obvious there than in big urban areas, where often whole blocks of flats or areas of communities all live in poverty. In rural areas, because of the lower population density, one often finds only one or two people living in poverty and they may live next door to someone who is clearly quite affluent, so this is a much more hidden form of poverty, but it is there. I hope that the Minister who winds up will address poverty issues and the spending plans of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. I was astonished to find that last year DEFRA actually cut spending on "strong rural communities" by 35 per cent. The Government have also failed to mention the real-terms cut in DEFRA's budget. It has been cut by £200 million since last autumn's pre-Budget report, yet they have the nerve to criticise our proposals in their amendment to our motion. A number of hon. Members rightly referred to the catastrophe of the demise of Dairy Farmers of Britain, in particular my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mr. Timpson), in whose constituency it is based. Of course I welcome the measures being taken by the receivers and by other milk buyers, and I am pleased that DEFRA officials have been involved in negotiations to try to find other buyers. However, it is very important that the banks, and indeed the merchant trade, take a generous approach to those farmers who have lost a month's milk cheque. Very few businesses in any sector of life could withstand losing one twelfth of their income unexpectedly, just like that, with no time in which to plan. If the Government had introduced the national loan guarantee scheme proposed by my Conservative colleagues, there would be some opportunity to assist. I am anxious to ensure that some of the smaller and more remote producers find outlets for their milk, because they are the ones who will find it hardest to survive. I hope that Ministers will also agree that what has gone wrong at DFOB—its previous and present management both have many questions to answer—does not relate to the fact that it is, or was, a co-operative. I was pleased that in the same week, Milk Link, another co-operative, reported increased profits—that is good news. What happened at DFOB was about business management and control, rather than simply about the fact that it was a co-operative, although I have no doubt that there will be those who will try to paint this as an inevitable problem that one gets with co-operatives. Some hon. Members mentioned a number of other agricultural issues, but I shall resist the temptation to launch into those, because we can do so at great length during Thursday's debate. In passing, I should point out that the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) trotted out almost everything he could think of on this subject—that may or may not mean that the House is relieved of the task of listening to him again on Thursday. This evening, we have heard a wealth of experience from a number of hon. Members—sadly, it has come only from those on the Conservative Benches—who have spoken about the importance of the rural economy. They have spoken of its huge breadth, covering not only farming and the food industry, but manufacturing—traditional craft manufacturing right through to high-tech manufacturing—a lot of research, small businesses, telecommunications and so on. A number of my Conservative colleagues have discussed specific issues. My hon. Friend the Member for North Dorset (Mr. Walter) referred to the Government's failure to understand the scale of issues in rural areas. It would be completely wrong to suggest that losing one's job is not a crisis for any individual, but, as he said, whereas it is bad news when half a dozen jobs go when a business closes in a large urban area, when a business loses the same amount of jobs in rural area that can be a complete catastrophe for the village in which it happens. It can wipe out the employment prospects for a large proportion of the people in the area. My hon. Friend also raised issues relating to the village pub—and not only alcohol duty, on which we have our own proposals. Like my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Norfolk (Christopher Fraser) and others, he rightly referred to other issues relating to business rates. I know that a debate is taking place later on that matter, but I wish to mention something that, unusually, I had raised in my constituency. As a result of the recent rate revaluation, the business rates of someone from a village pub had rocketed up by £4,000—that is a lot of money for a small village pub. He could not understand the situation until we looked into it. He had been on a transitional process since the previous revaluation. The trouble is that the Government had designed a transitional process that did not get him to where he should have been at the previous revaluation, so he lost out there and then had to go to the new revaluation, which meant a substantial percentage increase in his rates. My hon. Friend the Member for South-West Norfolk also referred to the reality on the ground of businesses trying to get loans to see them through the current crisis. He motioned rural crime, but he did not mention—so I shall do so now—that violent crime has increased by some 20 per cent. in rural areas since the recession set in. A number of hon. Members have referred to housing, as my hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs did in his opening remarks. Even Labour Members have said, in interventions, that a figure of only 10,000 planned homes in rural areas is wholly inadequate. I stress the need to address what has gone wrong. It is not, despite what the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale suggested, all the fault of the Conservative Governments who sold all the council houses. The problem was that the money raised stopped being recycled. Part of the big advantage of selling council houses was that that money would be recycled to build new social housing in those areas. It was the present Government who stopped that and confiscated the money to give to other local authorities. We need to get rid of the ridiculous top-down planning strategy—we will abolish the regional spatial strategies—and give power to local communities to decide what low-cost housing they need and where to put it. We will also use the exception site policy, introduced by the Government of which I was proud to be a member—