Clause 1 - Mandatory rate relief onformer agricultural premises
Rating (Agricultural Premises and Rural Shops) Bill
10:30 am
Mr David Heath (Somerton and Frome, Liberal Democrat)
I beg to move amendment No. 7, in page 1, line 5, at beginning insert—
`(A1) Section 42A(3) of the Local Government Finance Act 1988 (rural settlement list) is amended, by leaving out paragraph (c).'.
The amendment takes advantage of the fact that the Bill amends the Local Government and Rating Act 1997—which amended the Local Government Finance Act 1988—in order to make a necessary adjustment to the present arrangements.
The present Act stipulates three conditions for qualification as a rural settlement. First, a settlement should be wholly or partly within the area of the authority making the rural settlement list. Secondly, it must appear to the authority to have had a population of not more than 3,000 on the last 31 December before the beginning of the chargeable financial year in question. Thirdly, in that financial year the settlement must be wholly or partly in an area designated by the Secretary of State by order as a rural area for the purposes of the section.
Thus there is a triple qualification that depends not only on the size and position of the settlement—the geographic or demographic components of rurality—but on the political decision of a particular Secretary of State who, not entirely randomly, I hope, designates particular local authority areas. The result is an anomaly: settlements that cannot possibly be construed as other than rural—small villages surrounded by green fields, farming communities—but that have the misfortune to be in a district council or borough council area that is not considered rural by the Secretary of State, fall through the net.
That happened in relation to the original rate relief and to the hardship relief for foot and mouth. Why should a village not be a village simply because the Local Government Commission has chosen to draw a sufficiently wide boundary line around a conurbation or major town in order to declare it to be non-rural? My hon. Friend the Member for Northavon (Mr. Webb) illustrated that, as I mentioned on Second Reading, by drawing my attention to the position of villages in south Gloucestershire, which is not considered to be rural. His constituency is not considered to be rural—the villages are not villages under the terms of the Act—solely because a Secretary of State decided that the suburban elements of the district cancelled out the size of the settlements that fell outside of those areas.