Lee Pitcher

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Murrison, and I congratulate the hon. Member for South Devon (Caroline Voaden) on securing this debate. Representing a rural area and having spent a lot of my career working with rural communities and the land, I am keenly aware of the challenges that the communities in my constituency face. When services fail, it is our rural communities that are hit first and hit hardest. Because of their size, small rural schools and doctor’s surgeries are already working with smaller margins than their urban cousins. When budgets have been cut, those cuts have gone straight to the bone. Rural broadband and phone services lag behind, making it more challenging to set up businesses to work from those areas. I have seen areas where rural bus services have been reduced to almost nothing—when they have not disappeared completely—cutting off communities and massively affecting the lives of elderly and disabled people. The big bus companies have pulled out of many of our rural areas, but I know that those routes can work. Hornsby Travel, a local family company in the Isle of Axholme, is doing amazing work in finding ways to provide vital connections for rural villages. Even roads, the one lifeline to country villages, are falling deeper and deeper into disrepair, as squeezed budgets force local authorities to focus on only the busiest roads. I recently visited Wroot Travis primary school, which has fewer than 30 pupils. The children had sat down and worked out the one thing that they wanted to speak to me, their MP, about: they wanted a sign outside their school, warning drivers about children crossing the road. I was happy to write to the local council to champion their cause, but I cannot help but feel that a school in a town or city would not even have had to ask; it would have been done automatically. That is such a small thing, but it is symbolic of the way that rural communities have been treated as an afterthought or not even thought of at all. If that street sign is a symbol of how things have been, I hope that the steps this Government are taking are symbolic of a new relationship with rural communities. The rural England prosperity fund is one such step, helping to support local businesses to establish, grow or diversify and supporting charities and community groups to enrich their areas. Another is the additional funding brought by the rural community assets fund, which will help to preserve and improve cherished local community facilities. Finally, the Action with Communities in Rural England grant will help rural community groups and others to offer social inclusion activities. I am sure that the Minister will talk about many of those measures and more, but I welcome them, and especially their focus on empowering and developing capacity within our rural communities and working with people to give them the tools they need to make their communities flourish. The knowledge and expertise of generations that have worked and bring great value to our local communities need to be recognised, particularly as we start to meet the challenges that climate change brings. New blue-green engineering will be a huge and vital part—