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Rural Communities (Recession)

The 1980s are a subject for another day, but I assure the hon. Gentleman that I probably have a much better recollection of them than he has, as I presume he was doing his GCSEs at the time. The point is that if local decision making is given to local communities, they will be much more amenable to allowing houses to be built in their communities, instead of having them imposed from the top down and being told that they must have a lot of extra houses. Rural transport has also been mentioned several times. The Minister waxed lyrical about how much money the Government have poured into bus services, but let me quote from the Commission for Integrated Transport—the Government's own body. It says:""Rural bus provision has declined steadily over the past twenty years as bus operators focus on more lucrative urban markets. Combined with this has been a move away from local service provision—the closure of post offices, shops and garages in particular—resulting in poor access to many facilities"." That underlines the Government's failure to understand the importance of access to services. It is often very difficult for people in a rural community to gain access to services. The bus service is at best sporadic, and is completely absent in many areas. When schools, post offices, pubs, village shops, police stations and dispensaries in GPs' surgeries close—as many have in recent years—it not only disfranchises the community, but makes it much harder to recover from any pressures put on it. My hon. Friends the Members for Ludlow (Mr. Dunne) and for Hexham (Mr. Atkinson) also made pertinent points, especially on the issue of empty properties rate relief, which has hit a huge number of rural businesses and farms that have invested in property—as the Government and all politicians encouraged them to do to benefit the local economy—and have, with difficulty, persuaded the planners to agree, only to find that they cannot let that property because of the recession and are stuck having to pay rates on them. I am sure that the Government did not intend the measure to hit such businesses, but that is the law of unintended consequences. There is no list of figures or litany of all the things that the Government have done that will persuade people who live in rural communities that all is well there. People who live in those areas and understand the realities cannot be convinced by listening to a Minister trotting them out. I would have hoped that the Minister would not have followed the practice of the Prime Minister, who seems to respond to any challenge by trotting out another litany of statistics, but the fact is that the Conservatives—as displayed in the debate and in our motion—know that there are real examples of difficulty. We have real knowledge of the problems of rural areas. I am proud to have been born and brought up—and now to represent—a rural area. That is my history and I am passionately proud of it. We have not had a single speech from a Government Back Bencher in support of their amendment, and there can be no better testament to the veracity of our motion, which I commend to the House.