Local Government Funding: Rural Areas — House of Commons, 2016-01-11
Topic: Mixed Topics
Sue Hayman (Labour, Centre-left): I thank the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart) for securing this debate. I was absolutely delighted when he asked me to co-sponsor it, because this matter is so important for many, many rural communities, including my own in Cumbria This debate is about fairness. It is about local authorities in rural areas receiving fair funding. Wherever we live, we pay a fair amount of council tax, from which we as a resident or a business in that community expect to receive decent, accessible services. Currently, rural communities tend to pay higher council tax bills, receive fewer Government grants and have access to fewer services than communities in urban areas. One thing I have always thought is that those of us who have been brought up in rural communities have lower expectations about what services we are entitled to, and we should not have; we should demand what we pay for Cumbria, where I live, is a truly rural area. Aside from the small cathedral city of Carlisle, it is the market towns that grow our economy. Some 95% of our businesses are small and medium-sized enterprises, most of which employ fewer than 20 people. Other rural economies are hinterlands to city regions and they have very different expectations, problems and challenges to the ones that we face in Cumbria Cumbria has one of the largest land mass areas in the country. To illustrate my point, I ask Members here to imagine a map of London and its surrounding areas. If we laid Cumbria over that map, it would cover an area from Cambridge in the north, all the way down to Hampshire in the south, across to Oxfordshire in the west and over to Essex in the east. I do not think that many people really appreciate the size of the county. Given that alongside that we have a population of only 500,000, delivering services for our local authorities is a real challenge The real difficulty for Cumbria is that the business rates retention model is based on growth in business premises. I have already mentioned the number of SMEs and the small number of people they employ, and because of that many of them are based at home; they are residential businesses. Many, for example, are bed and breakfasts. We have only a limited amount of business growth that will be reflected in an increase in business rates income. To put it simply, we cannot increase our income from business rates in the way that can be done in urban areas; we simply do not have the capacity. As I am sure many Members will agree, it is also more problematic for those areas that have two-tier authorities, such as Cumbria Let me focus on some of the challenges. First, there is transport, which has already been discussed today. In Cumbria, we have 7,000 miles of roads, and that does not include all the footpaths that the local authority has to maintain. The geography and our weather conditions mean that a huge amount of resources are required to maintain those networks. The large number of visitors we receive also puts a lot of pressure both on the roads and the footpaths. In fact, under the current funding formula, Cumbria does not get any extra money for dealing with its visitors, who increase the population hugely during the summer We also need to think about the weather. Everyone has seen the recent flooding in Cumbria. Our roads always suffer very, very badly from the weather, which again puts increased pressure on the council’s funding. We now have huge problems to resolve. I know that we get extra funding from Government for the flooding, but it does not come close to what we need, particularly given the recent council cuts. Our transport budget has been cut by a third, so the roads are already in dire need of extra help.