Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)

My Lords, I support these amendments. I am absolutely fascinated by this debate. For most of my life I have lived in a city, and most of my friends think I am a city slicker. The truth is, however, that I was brought up in a rural community in a fairly remote part of north-east Essex in a rather lovely village called Great Bentley. In the time that has elapsed since I was brought up there over 50 years ago, the village has grown but it has also changed. Over that period, there has been a gradual removal—or a gradual eradication—of local services. There is a doctor and a primary school, but we used to have a very regular bus service, a whole range of small retailers, a chip shop, access to a bank and all the rest of it. Now, however, they have been in retreat and have disappeared. A few years ago, I chaired a Co-op Party commission on restoring rural services and what we needed to do to reimagine what modern reality would look like, because you cannot just reflect on the past and say that was a glorious time; you have to look to the future in planning services. The noble Lord, Lord Best, made a really powerful argument about rural housing. I was lucky enough to be brought up in a council house in my village, and now very few people in that village have access to social housing. The percentage of the population that has is much reduced, probably 4% or 5%, and there are many people who are excluded from the jobs market because of that fact. We need to address that imbalance.