Rural Policies

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 10:20 am on 16 July 1997.

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Photo of Mrs Diana Organ Mrs Diana Organ Labour, Forest of Dean 10:20, 16 July 1997

Forest of Dean district council holds capital receipts of about £11.4 million, and we can deploy that money in all sort of projects, involving co-operatives, maintenance and grants to projects such as Anchor "Stay Put" to increase housing stock quality.

We need access not only to affordable social housing and transport, but to new technology—information technology. We do not want rural areas to become information poor. Labour's plans for putting ports and outlets through telecottages, schools, libraries, hospitals and colleges, and for access to cable and the super-highway, will enable rural areas to end their marginalisation and to be at the centre of the information revolution in Britain. That is important because such a revolution, through the training and the access that it offers, means that it will not matter whether you live in a small rural hamlet or in the centre of the metropolis. You will be equal with one another: you will shall have equal access to training and equal opportunity.

We must develop and sustain rural areas. In the past, it has been considered that large-scale private housing developments would be a way to provide sustainable economic growth to rural areas. I totally refute that. That is not the way forward. We are left in Gloucestershire with a vestige of Tory planning. There are plans to build estates of 1,000, 1,500 and 2,000 homes in areas of Gloucestershire such as Painswick, Sedbury and Tutshill. That is wholly inappropriate to those small villages. It is not the way forward and we are fighting to ensure that those plans do not go through.

Instead, we need to build on all the opportunities that the countryside offers. There is a strong arts and crafts heritage in the Forest of Dean. Indeed, in the British economy, the money deployed from culture is greater than that from manufacturing. There are many examples of rural areas being regenerated and revitalised through the growth of small-scale arts and crafts business that grow into large ones, such as Laura Ashley, Robert Walsh in Chipping Campden and Dartington in south Devon. Lottery money should be used to encourage the arts and crafts heritage in rural areas so that we can build sustainable small and medium-sized enterprises.