The Countryside

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 4:15 pm on 12 July 2001.

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Photo of Tim Yeo Tim Yeo Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs 4:15, 12 July 2001

The hon. Gentleman is right. The inquiry will have to be wide ranging. It will not have to be lengthy, because the science is relatively simple, compared, for example, to that involved with BSE. The inquiry should indeed deal with the aspect to which the hon. Gentleman refers.

The country needs to know just how many millions of animals could have been saved if the delays and mistakes by Ministers had not occurred. How many businesses might have been preserved? How much money might the taxpayer have saved? The Secretary of State should announce today the Government's commitment to holding an inquiry, even if she is unable to set a date for it to start. Any continued refusal to acknowledge the need for a full independent inquiry will suggest that Ministers are hoping to get away with a whitewash.

I shall now move on to other aspects of the crisis in the countryside. While the decline in agriculture is weakening the whole rural economy, services are also disappearing or being run down as a direct result of Government policy. Let us take the example of post offices. I recognise that village post offices have been closing for many years, but the closure rate has accelerated alarmingly in recent times. Up to 350 post offices a year closed during Labour's first term of office. That rate has increased to more than 500 in the past 12 months. According to figures supplied by the Countryside Alliance, 333 post offices have closed in the past six months alone. That is more than a dozen every week.

The viability of up to 8,000 post offices now depends on the business generated by the payment of social security benefits. However, the Government's decision to axe the previous Government's benefit payment card project has now jeopardised the future of every one of those post offices, and postmasters and postmistresses have made it clear that the Government's proposal for a universal bank is simply no substitute.

We welcome the business rate reductions announced in the last Parliament, but we believe that the threat to the remaining shops, pubs and post offices is so acute that further rate reductions are needed, and that another £1,000 a year off the business rate for vulnerable enterprises in rural areas should be funded by central Government. Equestrian businesses, too, should be exempted from business rates. The Labour party continues its obsession with its wish to ban hunting, but one in 12 of our riding schools closed down in 1999.

It is not only services that are in decline. Rural areas also suffer discrimination over funding. Shire counties lost an estimated £700 million in taxpayer support during the last Parliament because of changes to the local government funding formula made by the Labour Government. As the Labour group of rural MPs pointed out, country people

"are now paying disproportionately more in tax for less services."

The council tax for band D taxpayers in the shire counties rose by an average of £234 a year over the past four years. Inner-London local authorities spend £1,326 per head of population, compared with only £787 per head in the shire counties.

Transport is another source of acute difficulty. Reliance on high fuel taxes as the main instrument of transport policy is uniquely damaging in rural areas, where there is no alternative to using cars for normal social, domestic and business life. As the AA has pointed out, three out of four rural journeys are made by car. As for the Government's much vaunted integrated transport policy, it simply ignores the countryside altogether. Ministers boast of £180 billion in transport spending over the next 10 years, but as the Countryside Alliance has pointed out, of every £1,000 of that spending, just 16p will go to the rural transport fund for expanding rural bus services. That is another reflection of the appallingly low priority that Labour attaches to helping the countryside in its time of need.