Joe Morris

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Jardine. I genuinely want to thank the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds), who, until the last election, was my aunt’s MP, so I always get a letter when I speak in debates with him. I think this debate is less about rural housing targets and more about rural homes. I grew up in the largest constituency in England, as the right hon. Gentleman indicated, and now have the privilege to serve as the MP for it. It regularly hits me, as I walk down the street or go to my surgeries, that I am far more likely to bump into my mates’ grandparents or parents than I am to bump into them because they have had to move out to Newcastle, down south or out to Manchester. It is one of the great sadnesses of the job that I do not see communities thrive as much as they could because young people are forced to leave. Communities need those young people, frankly. I am frequently contacted by parents from across west Northumberland because Northumberland county council is trying to force some of our smaller schools to become two-form entry, rather than three-form entry. Rural depopulation is a major concern that transcends party politics, so I hope we can have a genuinely grown-up conversation about how we do better policy making for rural areas to support those communities. When I go out into the north Tyne, where I live at the moment, or go into the central town of Hexham, or Prudhoe, I am often asked about my views on specific developments. I genuinely always try to approach these things by saying that we need to make sure there are places for people to grow up, and for businesses to invest in their employees. I spoke to one medium-sized employer in Hexham that spends a lot of time training its apprentices, who cannot afford to live in Hexham so move to a rival firm in Blyth, on the coast, which therefore gets all the benefit of that employee’s wisdom and experience, and the investment the company put into them, at none of the cost. We really need to look at how to generate vibrancy in our rural economies. I have a slight issue with the definition of “rurality” given in a few documents I saw while drawing up this speech. “Rurality” is often defined as applying to settlements of fewer than 10,000 people. By the latest figures, Prudhoe has 10,288 and Hexham has 10,941 but no one walking down the street in either place would think of them as urban. Today, I received news of bank branch closures in my constituency and was incredibly disappointed to see that the branches were considered urban, despite the common-sense test of walking outside them and seeing the Tyne valley in all its beauty—it is possible to see right down to the north Tyne from Hexham. Prudhoe and Hexham are not urban communities. They are bigger than Barrasford, Wark, Humshaugh and plenty of other communities but they are not urban. Any great advances in house building and housing targets must come with improved infrastructure. I hope to see much-needed investment in the Tyne valley line. My staff said to me that if I could get the Tyne valley line improved, certain villages in my constituency would build a statue of me. I do not hope for that and I am not lobbying for that—the county council probably has enough against me before I start lobbying for monuments —but we need to make sure that that infrastructure runs on time. I also want to put on record that the limit in housing is driving the social housing waiting list crisis. Some of the main drivers of the cases coming into my inbox for my case workers are the special educational needs and disabilities crisis and the crisis in social housing in rural areas. I do not expect any hon. Members in this room to have a huge working knowledge of the diversity of Northumberland, but people are being rehomed from Ashington to Allendale, which are extremely different.