To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is the impact on rural communities in the United Kingdom of the withdrawal of public and private services.

The debate which I am fortunate enough to introduce today is about the withdrawal of public and private services from rural areas. I owe Members an apology, because this debate should have taken place before Easter. Unfortunately, the husband of our Lord Lieutenant, Bill Legge Bourke, died, and I was unable to come to the debate on that date because of his memorial service. I happen to be a deputy lieutenant in the county of Powys.

The market town of Talgarth, where I was brought up, was a busy place. Its population in the days of the Second World War and later was around 2,000. Apart from the livestock market, many worked in one of its two hospitals. Others worked on the railway; an artery which joined north with south Wales, mid-Wales with Hereford and Oswestry and beyond, to say nothing of lines to Merthyr Tydfil and Swansea. Indeed, you could travel to London and back in a day from my home town. Situated in the then county of Breconshire in the heart of the Black Mountains on the Welsh borders, it was very well connected, transport-wise.

There were 45 retail and business premises, mainly shops, including three banks, two garages, a bus and haulage company, two branches of farmers’ co-ops, and a police station with three policemen. When I returned after working for ICI and other businesses for 25 years, I found the following in comparison: there were 16 retail premises, no railway after the Beeching cuts, one slimmed-down hospital, one bank, no bus company, one garage, no farmers’ co-ops, no police station and no policemen. There was one councillor, instead of the previous two. The town seemed to have been partly abandoned, with a massive loss of services. This sort of demise has hit rural communities all over the UK, and that is why I feel so strongly about it and want to see the Government provide the means and the technical know-how, along with the business entrepreneurs in the private sector, to stem the tide of depopulation and outward migration of young people.

At this point, I must declare interests. First, I am vice-president of the Brecknock Federation of Young Farmers Clubs, at the younger end of the local community. Secondly, I am an adviser to the board of the Prince of Wales outfit called Prime Cymru, a Prince’s Charity that enables over-50 year-olds into business start-ups in Wales. We have started 1,500 new businesses as a result of that over the past five years. Thirdly, I am a member of the Campaign for the Protection of Rural Wales. I will later demonstrate how some of these bodies help to regenerate rural communities.

At the start, I am duty-bound to describe and identify the degree of devastation that has hit many of our rural areas through the withdrawal of both public and private services. Rural areas have often suffered most from the closure of local shops, services and facilities, which also act as the hub of a community. These services also create local jobs for the communities that they serve and are a vital part of vibrant, sustainable communities. Local communities are suffering from the following: the closure of local independent shops; the closure of local post offices; the closure of local bank branches; the decline of local street markets; the closure of local pubs; the closure of local services, such as health centres; green spaces being built on; more traffic, and fewer people walking on the streets; and fewer public transport services.

The impact of all that can be quantified as follows: 70 per cent of rural parishes have no general store; 75 per cent have no daily bus service; 83 per cent have no general practitioner; and 43 per cent have no post office. That information has been supplied by the Countryside Agency. Some 3,700 post offices have closed—a 21 per cent decline; 8,000 independent grocery stores have closed—a 25 per cent decline; 3,757 bank branches have closed—a 23 per cent decline; and 13,000 independent newsagents have closed.

I realise that I am already running against the clock, but my colleague Tim Farron MP, in his role as Liberal Democrat spokesman on this subject in the House of Commons, has quantified the following. Under the Conservative Government, rural post offices shut at a rate of up to 200 a year. Since Labour came to power, the relentless pace of closures has continued, with 1,200 axed since the millennium. There is a crisis in affordable rural housing and, indeed, there is unfair competition in relation to food prices, with a continuing decline in the agricultural industry and in the number of rural shops. Fuel poverty is twice as bad in rural areas as in urban areas. When one starts to compare all those facts with the situation in metropolitan areas, one can see a huge imbalance between the two. Less than half of the residents in villages and hamlets live within 13 minutes of their nearest bus stop, for example, and there are other statistics of that kind that one can pray in aid in setting out the impact of the reduction of services on rural areas.

I have far too much material here, so I am motoring through it. There are a number of factors which I should like to underline regarding how we might be able to tackle some of these issues, but I know from personal experience that it is very hard going. One of the latest things to have happened is that HMRC has decided to close a large number of tax offices. That is causing a lot of hardship for small businesses in rural areas and is quite a problem.

What do we have to do to try to tackle these problems? I can tell noble Lords what we have done in my local community. For the past 20 years, we have had to lobby for a relief road because the lorries were literally knocking down the shops, and we have finally got it. We have had to restore retail shops, as there is no provision for this, and we have managed to scrape together £2,500 to paint them and make them more attractive. We had to make video films of traffic congestion and lorries to convince the powers that be that we needed a relief road—not a bypass, just a relief road. We have had to create a regeneration group, of which I can claim to be the first chairman. We have also had to acquire business starter units, some of which have been successful. However, we have very few funds, although we now have a project to convert a mill for electricity generation from the river that runs through the town, and somehow or other we have managed to find £60,000 for that from various grant-making sources.

The problem is that the situation is very uneven. Some rural communities seem to get support, while others are in the doldrums. In our area, I have been involved in the start-up of the Hay Festival, which is coming up soon and in past years has been very successful. I have been chairman of the Brecon jazz festival, which also has been very successful.

However, my poor old hometown does not seem to have the sparkle because there is a lack of active people who can fill in forms in a professional way and lobby. We have had to do a number of extraordinary things in the area. We were threatened with a bank branch closure in Llanwrtyd Wells and the only way we saved it was to take a busload of residents down to Cardiff to the regional board meeting and hammer home the fact that it was the only bank branch within 14 miles and we saved it. We had to take 200 people to the regional health authority 50 miles away to save eight community hospitals. Recently we have had to come to HMRC in London to try to save 140 jobs in our tax office. As we have an almost non-existent bus service, we have set up a dial-a-ride service and it does 100,000 miles a year with five buses. We have managed to do all those things in our community, but the latest thing to hit us is that they want to close our local voluntary centre for want of £1,000 to promote tourism, for example.

How will the Minister join up government and ensure that sufficient money and panache, particularly entrepreneurial panache, are put into local areas to increase employment? The Home Office has come down on us like a ton of bricks because it wants to close as many of the magistrates' courts as possible. Six have already been closed in the past seven years and it wants to close the one in Llandrindod. We have had a seven-year campaign, including debates in the House of Commons and lobbying of the Minister to save one magistrates’ court. The next one is 40 miles away and witnesses cannot travel there because there is no proper public transport.

I have explained the impact which we face in rural areas. We need an enormous amount of help in such areas, where the GDP per head is only three-quarters of the UK average. The need for young people, and indeed older people who are the majority of the population, is immense. A little money would go a long way.

I am privileged to follow my noble friend Lord Livsey. Much the same story will emerge. We are both from Wales and so this could be considered the upper House of the Welsh Senedd; perhaps they should form one. As we are the House of Lords for the whole of the UK we can, at least, venture into Welsh territory.

This problem relates to the background of the past century and a half. I have been looking at the census records. We have an increasing concentration of population in urban areas. In 1851, just over half the population, 50.2 per cent, lived in urban areas; in 1951, 80.7 per cent of the population lived in urban areas. We have seen a decline from nearly half the population living in rural areas to just one in five today. Urbanisation continues and it is against that background that we have the problems which we face.

My noble friend Lord Livsey has mentioned Talgarth in mid-Wales and adjoining towns. I want to take you to a valley in north Wales which is composed of two little villages, one larger than the other. Over the past 50 years, something has happened there: there were two quarries and both have closed; there was a woollen mill and that has gone; and we are chapel-going people in Wales and there were six chapels and now there is only one, which is not particularly well attended. Both the churches have gone and the Church in Wales premises have gone. One was the most historic in Wales because it was near there that the Bible was translated into Welsh in 1588. One of the two schools has gone and the present school is threatened: it has only 20 pupils. Forty years ago, 120 people attended the Sunday school, but that has gone completely. This is a spiral of decline.

One of the two pubs has gone. One remains, but that is run by volunteers and we are not sure how much longer that can continue. These villages are at the end of the valley. It is a cul-de-sac so there is no passing trade and there are probably more attractive premises in the renowned tourist villages in that locality. The fish and chip shop has gone. It was run by one of my family, so I feel very sad about that. Both post offices have gone and now 39 shops have gone. In those villages where there were 39 shops 30 years ago, today there is no post office and no shop at all. There is no minister or vicar. There is no doctor's surgery. There is no policeman. There is no football team or band or choir. The hills are no longer alive with the sound of music.

This spiral of decline affects us in so many ways. We cannot reclaim yesterday, but with the emphasis on a need for vibrant communities, it is vital that we support and maintain the villages that we do have. In the cities now we hear about dreadful crimes such as knife crimes and so forth in parts of London and we say that what we need are good communities. In the villages in the valleys and rural areas of the UK we have those communities. They need more support than they are getting at the present time.

I was looking at the police statistics in Wales. The most law-abiding places are the most rural places, where there is a sense of community. We now need to look at a way of stopping that decline. First of all, communities need people who are active members of their local community. We welcome visitors who come and stay for a weekend or even a couple of months in the summer, but we need locally based people to run the community councils. We need people to be in charge of the parochial councils. Communities need people with a wide range of ages and interests.

People need affordable housing. That is one of the main problems. I was speaking only half an hour ago to the leader of the Liberal Democrats in the Welsh Assembly, Kirsty Williams. She was telling me that they were still trying to get—we might see it happening here before very long—the right for the Welsh Assembly Government not to sell housing if they see that areas are in special need. I am sure that when the measure comes before the House, we will be able to support that particular measure to keep people within their villages. Housing is crucial. With housing comes families, and with families come children, and with children come schools. The circle does not have to be a downward spiral: it can be an upward spiral.

Even though we would like to, we cannot justify the retention of all village schools. There is a limit when there are only half a dozen children and you cannot justify it. But with the proposed growth in the number of housing schemes for local families we might see changes in the population of young people in the near future. I suggest a halt in many places on the closure of village schools to see how the future develops. That might mean extra money from somewhere—as education is a devolved matter I have an idea that that will be from Cardiff—to maintain those schools through their education authorities for the foreseeable future.

We also need to experiment with different proposals to keep the commercial life of the community going. The Prince of Wales started a scheme to “make the pub a hub”. As a teetotaller, I was not sure how to support it, but I do support it, because if we can use one building for postal services, as a village shop and for use by the community, we will restore facilities in places where they have been in decline for many years.

Let us encourage pilot schemes and request local communities and parish councils to bring forward schemes of their own that can be embraced by the larger council and even in some way by ourselves. We need new vision. We need to be people with a bit of venture in our souls to bring new life to many of our rural communities.

I refer noble Lords to my declaration of interests on the register. My law firm has a large planning practice that serves rural areas in the West Country, particularly in Cornwall, Devon, Somerset and Dorset. I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Livsey for securing this debate; it is high time that we had a chance to debate the problems of rural England.

There is a frequently held misconception that all rural areas are affluent. It is apparent that the Government hold that view in the way that they allocate central government spending. However, the Government can see for themselves in the statistics that they gather that there is considerable poverty in rural areas and that has increased over recent years.

In my former constituency of Torridge and West Devon, there were areas in north-west Devon in and around Bideford that contained some of the poorest wards in the country. The official indices of deprivation for those wards showed greater poverty than in the major cities in the north-east and north-west of England. It is, unfortunately, unlikely that this Government, in probably their last year of office, will do anything to change that.

The briefing for this debate by the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England refers to the specific protection given to post offices in urban deprived areas. The briefing goes on to say that the Government have neglected to introduce similar provisions for rural deprived areas. Will the Minister, when responding to the debate, justify that appalling discrimination? The Government should understand that for many in rural areas, as my noble friend Lord Livsey eloquently stated, the post office is a lifeline. Many people in villages and country parishes do not have cars and need a post office to access their pensions and other services. In addition, post offices are a focal point for rural villages and parishes and often provide an essential retail function for both convenience and comparison goods.

I should like to dwell in this debate, and seize this opportunity to concentrate on, affordable rural housing. The problems have been eloquently described by both my noble friends Lord Livsey and Lord Roberts. David Orr, the chief executive of the National Housing Federation, has stated that waiting lists for affordable housing in rural areas have risen by 40 per cent in the past five years. The waiting lists now comprise 700,000 people. That is a colossal number of individuals and the figure disguises considerable sadness and unhappiness. The National Housing Federation predicts that 103,000 people aged between 24 and 35 are now expected to migrate from the rural areas to towns and cities over the next three years. Without young people and young families, the heart will be removed from country villages and parishes. Schools will close, much parish activity will diminish and there will not be a pool of workers for all the necessary rural jobs, including agriculture and horticulture.

This exodus should be reversed, and it requires urgent action. It would be helpful if the Minister, in winding up, would provide details of national house-building starts for 2006, 2007 and 2008, together with a breakdown of how many of these starts were in rural areas. It would also be interesting to have a similar breakdown for the first quarters of 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009. The first quarter of 2009 should now be available. I believe that these figures will throw up a huge contraction in house-building—and house-building in rural areas—in recent months and over this past year.

It is no good the Minister saying that this is all a matter for local planning authorities. The Government give guidance to those authorities and create considerable and needless further bureaucracy and administration in planning matters. I make one suggestion in an endeavour to alleviate the problem of the shortage of affordable housing in rural areas. There used to be, and probably still is, an exceptions policy. It was possible to promote a site for affordable rural residential property on the outskirts of villages. It was the sort of site that would in no other circumstances get planning permission for any open market residential development. The Government could give planning guidance to local authorities to the effect that there was a presumption to grant planning permission in certain circumstances, and these could be as follows.

First, it would be only for affordable housing, conditioned under Section 106 of the Planning Act to that effect. Secondly, it must be over an area of land as near as possible to the centre of a village, or even a hamlet. A sequential test would be relatively easy to devise. Thirdly, the amount of housing consented should reasonably accord with an affordable housing needs survey, conducted on behalf of the promoter and agreed with the local authority. There may, of course, be other conditions relating to topography, highways, and so on. Nevertheless, the Government could make these ambitions clear to local authorities and, effectively, give them the green light to start to reverse this decline in rural affordable housing. The Government should not just sit back and wait for something to happen. The Government should take the lead and empower local authorities to regenerate their villages and parishes. There is much work to be done.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Livsey, for securing this debate and, indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Roberts of Llandudno, who, along with his namesake, the noble Lord, Lord Roberts of Conwy, guarantees that the Welsh voice is rarely silent in our House. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Burnett, for his contribution. In talking about rural housing, he hits on one of the major issues that any policy on rural communities needs to address. I am delighted to have by my side the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, and I am sorry that her engagements meant that she could not participate in this debate. All noble Lords will know that she is a champion of this issue.

I declare an interest; I am a farmer and grower. I come from a place called Holbeach, where I was born, and I live in the house that I was brought up in, so I have a sense of place. When we talk about changes in rural communities, I know of what I speak because it is my life experience. My wife has been a county councillor for Holbeach for the past 20 years, although she is not seeking re-election; I think she wants to enjoy life in London while I am here during the week. It certainly means that I am reasonably informed about the politics of local communities.

I have been involved in a project. When Holbeach Hospital closed, 20 years ago, a group of friends and colleagues formed a charitable trust. I was chairman of that hospital for 18 years, running it as a community hospital with a contract with the National Health Service. There are practical ways in which communities can still cover deficiencies which occur simply because of government policies.

I will not pretend that this problem has arisen just because there is a Labour Government now, or that there were no problems under Conservative Governments. That is not the tenor of this debate. The phenomenon of which we talk is a process of change that has been fairly relentless. We need to find a consensus on how we can address it. We who live in rural areas do so in very changed communities. Not all the changes are negative; we must remember that. We are all better off, but the differentials remain, and those between urban facilities and affluence, and rural facilities and affluence, are growing rather than diminishing. I come from the district of South Holland. With its neighbour, the Fenland District Council, it is pretty low down any measure of general education attainment, healthcare standards and all the rest of it; it is always low on those indices.

Of course, the biggest change has perhaps been one of the reasons that has accelerated the decline: the increased number of car owners in rural areas. Car- owning is a mixed blessing. One in three households in rural areas have two cars—it is only one in 12 in an urban area—but that is not surprising. If both husband and wife are working, they both need a car to get to work. In fact, a car has become essential in rural areas. There was a local garage that specialised in buying cars from hire car companies and selling them, because they were so heavily discounted, to people in my part of the world. They were not old bangers, but they were on the way to becoming old bangers. They are essential: you need a pair of wheels to keep your job, to go shopping and to access services.

As soon as that happens, you create the mobility that can lead to the decline of services because people are capable of moving. We have the peculiar contrast that petrol stations in rural areas are in decline and yet there are more cars in rural areas than ever before. Why is that? It is because people are going to the supermarket pump in the out-of-town shopping centre rather than shopping and buying their petrol at the garage where it is that much more expensive. It may not be that much more expensive, but it is sufficient for people to go elsewhere.

I will talk later about those who are left behind. A lot of the problems with rural communities stem not from the people with the cars, but those without them. However, it has proved to be the death knell of the village shop, post office and many other rural services now that people commute from villages to towns and, indeed, from market towns to the cities for their shopping and services.

There is a changed pattern of employment in rural areas. The number of people employed in agriculture in the field has declined enormously. Most people engaged in rural employment and occupations now work in pack houses. The crops are harvested mechanically—their processing and marketing actually provide the new employment.

There are changed demographics. We all know about the rise of commuting, the gentrification of rural villages and the second holiday home. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Burnett, in talking about rural housing gave the impression that we could perhaps have a whole debate on rural housing itself, which is a complex issue. The whole business of finding rural housing at a reasonable price and securing it for indigenous people is complex and not easy.

In addition, of course, affluence has meant that people have different ways of spending their leisure time. The decline of the rural pub is perhaps only partially due to Chancellors taxing beer; it is more likely due to the fact that people have other things to do with their leisure time. They do not necessarily want to spend their evenings in the village pub; there may be other things on which they wish to spend their time.

I hesitate to mention this point because it might sound party political—I hope noble Lords appreciate that I am not approaching this debate from a party political point of view—but one of the difficulties the Government have had in their relationship with rural areas is that the new Labour project failed to engage with rural England. It is one of the items on the agenda that was never fulfilled and it has been damaging to rural England and agriculture.

In particular, in rural communities the Labour Party effectively has no locus; there are very few Labour Party activists and the NUAW—which, when I was young, was a power in the land, along with the NFU—has more or less disappeared, subsumed by the Transport and General Workers Union, now part of Unite. There is no longer that sense whereby the Labour Party feels that it has a political locus in the countryside. That has given the impression on occasions that rural communities perhaps do not matter as much as they might do. I hesitate to make that point because I do not want to destroy the consensus I might be building, but it is a valid observation on one of the difficulties that we have had recently.

All parties need to make a conscious effort to listen to and act on the concerns of the rural population. I think we would all agree with that. The appointment of Dr Stuart Burgess has been a positive development and, as rural advocate, he has used the commission’s resources to evidence the challenges that the Government face in these areas and has utilised his contacts with local authorities to maintain critical services and access to them. The current crisis is hitting rural communities particularly hard. What assessment have the Government made of the impact that the recession might have on rural communities?

The Commission for Rural Communities report into the state of the countryside noted how access to services such as banks, job centres and petrol stations, which I have mentioned before, is becoming increasingly difficult. We can all think of post offices, village shops, schools and healthcare facilities which are, in many cases, directly affected by government policies. What assessment do the Government make of the impact of policy decisions on rural services?

Finally, the InterConnect system in Lincolnshire, which I know Stuart Burgess has looked at, is being funded by the Government. It is a successful system which works in partnership with Lincolnshire County Council, and I have made clear my interest. This system ensures that there is now a transport system for people who do not have cars. Even people with cars sometimes cannot drive them when they get older, and they need an alternative method of getting to services. That is never going to come cheap—we have to appreciate that it is bound to be a cost on the community as a whole—but it is essential if we are not to see a proportion of our rural population with no access to the vital services they need. It is beholden on all parties and political activists to look, listen and act with rural communities in mind.

I, too, welcome the opportunity to debate rural affairs and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Livsey, for initiating the debate and for the breadth of his opening speech, which was very helpful. It gave a very interesting insight into the challenges and changes in rural Wales which he has experienced over the years.

I was also impressed by the work that he and his colleagues have done in his local community. He seems to have been very active and very successful. If one were to draw conclusions on what could be done to help rural communities to develop in the future, they could do very much worse than to follow his example. I found some of the initiatives which he spoke about extremely interesting.

As someone who lives in Birmingham and works in London, it might be thought that I am not the best person to comment on issues concerning rurality, particularly when all other noble Lords in the Grand Committee today clearly have a great deal of experience. Birmingham is very close to Warwickshire, which is an outstanding county and one with which we enjoy very good relationships. Like many Brummies, we always spend our holidays in mid-Wales. The noble Lord talked about the lack of access to services, but it is quite remarkable that at any time of the year in Aberdyfi one can always get a copy of the Birmingham Post, which says something.

I am responding to the debate because Defra has the lead responsibility within the Government for rural issues and monitoring rural affairs, and that situation also applies to England. I know that the noble Lords, Lord Livsey and Lord Roberts, made the point that although they were mainly talking about the situation in Wales, their points are applicable to the rest of the UK. My department has very good contacts with the devolved Administrations and on a number of occasions during the year we discuss rural issues. I shall ensure that the contents of this debate are shared with colleagues, particularly those in the Welsh Assembly, so that they have an understanding of the points that we have discussed.

Clearly, because of food and farming issues, Defra has a major area of work within rural affairs, but its other area of work is to monitor and co-ordinate the work of other government departments. If I take a message from the debate, it is that noble Lords are saying that the department needs to ensure that it is making the most of that co-ordinating role. I fully accept that it is important that we take it seriously, and we cannot be complacent. Of course, we have to monitor progress on rural issues across government in order to meet one of our most important departmental strategic objectives.

When looking at the outcomes, it is interesting to see that, in general, fewer people live in poverty in rural areas; there are fewer victims of crime in rural areas; and proportionately more people in rural areas are employed than in urban areas. Quite remarkable statistics which I have been given show—I assume this is from polling—that of people living in the countryside, 89 per cent would prefer to continue to do so, whereas 21 per cent of those living in inner cities would prefer to continue living there. Although we have heard some very apposite comments about some of the challenges and problems of maintaining rural communities, none the less, many people see living in rural areas as an asset and very much to be desired.

The problem that we face is the dispersed nature of rural communities and the greater distances between settlements and services. I suppose that is the root cause of why service-deliverers in rural areas have considerable challenges. Each of the public services that noble Lords have mentioned faces that particular problem. I was very interested in what the noble Lord, Lord Livsey, had to say about the closure of rural services, including post offices, pubs, shops and petrol stations. I do not think that he mentioned jobcentres, but that is obviously an example of where there has been some consolidation. Then there are doctors’ surgeries and even tax offices—although I suspect that not everyone is as concerned about that as they are about the loss of other services.

I do not seek to ignore those issues or to deny them. There is no doubt that there is a tension between the drive to make public service provision more efficient, which is with us and ever present, and the issue of how you do that—by forcing collocation of services and increasing the distances that people have to travel, which has been a feature of many of our public services. Magistrates’ courts are another example. In my previous role as Minister responsible for legal aid, it was a concern raised by some groups concerned about legal aid services that it was more difficult for rural solicitors to win legal aid contracts, resulting in it being difficult sometimes for people in rural areas to gain access to legal aid services.

There are many examples of particular problems being faced, but it is not a totally bleak picture. Although the number of banks and building societies in rural areas has decreased by 2.6 per cent in 2007-08, the number of rural people living within four kilometres of a cashpoint is increasing and now stands at 90 per cent. The number of job centres in rural areas has fallen by nearly 20 per cent, but the number of rural supermarkets, dentists and pubs—interestingly enough, in view of what the noble Lord said—has increased over that period. Those are statistics from the State of the Countryside report from the Commission for Rural Communities, so I think they are pretty authoritative.

To come on to post offices, the number of rural post offices declined in that year by a smaller percentage than the number of urban ones. The number of rural people within four kilometres of GP surgeries and secondary schools has stayed roughly the same, as has the number of rural people living within two kilometres of primary schools. The percentage of rural households within 30 minutes of an hourly or better bus service has increased significantly since 1997. There are some positive signs amid the general problem that we are discussing.

The Post Office is an important issue. We are seeing investment of considerable sums of money to support restructuring and modernisation of the network. In the proposals that have nearly left your Lordships' House, or will soon be going, we are guaranteeing the integrity of the network as a whole, which is a very important component of post office services. On the point raised about access criteria and the potential discrimination against rural issues, my understanding is that the criteria that the Government designed were to allow Post Office Limited the necessary freedom to modernise service delivery. Ninety-five per cent of the total rural population throughout the UK must be within three miles of the nearest post office outlet and, to protect the population in isolated and sparsely populated areas, 95 per cent of the population of every postcode district must be within six miles of the nearest post office outlet. In drawing up implementation plans, Post Office Ltd was required to take into account any obvious geographical constraints that could prevent the spirit of the access criteria being applied. I do not think that there is evidence of discrimination against rural areas.

On transport, the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, made the point that for many people, if they live in the countryside, having a car is essential. That has reduced the viability of public transport services.

I am extremely grateful to the Minister for giving way. Is he, in his point on post offices, contradicting the brief, from which I am now reading and to which I refer, from the Campaign to Protect Rural England? It states:

“The Government criteria have given specific protection to post offices in urban deprived areas, but they neglected to introduce a similar provision for rural deprived areas”.

Is that correct or incorrect?

I do not have the information that has been published by the CPRE. I will certainly look into it and respond. My point is that, from the access criteria that the Government have laid down for Post Office Ltd, the requirements that I have read out make it clear that, in general policy, the Government have sought to protect the rural network of post offices. I am very happy to respond to the noble Lord in detail on the specific point that he raises.

Regarding rural post offices, say that your village is in the Conwy Valley and the post office is open for two hours a week. A neighbouring village might be three miles away, but your village only has a facility for two hours’ post office services every week. Does the Minister really think that that is a satisfactory criterion?

Obviously, given the tremendous pressure on it, the Post Office is seeking to have an outlet that is at least open for a limited time. It is better for it to be open for a limited time than not at all. One has to be realistic. I readily acknowledge that there will be concerns about access to public services in rural areas. Equally, it has to be accepted that any solution must be imaginative. We must make the best use of our resources.

I make another point, coming back to the question of legal aid. One of the matters that we were discussing at the Ministry of Justice was the question of using video facilities so that people can have communication and probably set it up in the pub. I agree with the noble Lord about the use of the pub and other community areas. With some imagination, it is perfectly easy to set up video conferencing facilities, which can then enable people in rural areas to communicate with different public services. I do not know the details of the two-hour post office, but if it is a sign of flexibility and imagination, I am all for it. There is a balance here. It is clear that no Government could afford to provide an all-singing, all-dancing network of public services, open at all times, in each part of the rural economy. Equally, we need to make sure that, as far as possible, people have appropriate access. We need to be imaginative, just as we need to be about transport.

Of course, we have put more money into rural transport. It is fair to say that local transport authorities are responsible for ensuring that there is a network of rural transport services. It is the same with health, which is something that I know a little more about than rural areas. There is a tension in health, where the trend over 20 or 30 years has been towards a greater concentration of services. The reason for that is very clear. The evidence from health professionals is that health outcomes and clinical effectiveness are better where there is greater co-ordination and centralisation of health services. Again, the test here is being imaginative in solutions.

I think that my time is coming to an end, but I want to turn to the issue of housing. I agree with the noble Lords, Lord Burnett and Lord Roberts, about the importance of housing and social housing in rural areas. I accept what the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, said about an “upward cycle”, which was a very good way of putting it. If young people have access to housing in rural areas, that inevitably leads to babies and children and a demand for schools.

We have a target of 10,300 affordable homes being provided in settlements of less than 3,000 inhabitants between 2008 and 2011. In our response to the Taylor review of the rural economy and affordable housing, we made it clear that we understood that the long-term gap between supply and demand had led to an affordability problem. We referred to the need to increase the supply housing, and we also said:

“The downturn does not fundamentally affect our analysis of why the demand for housing will continue to rise”.

I am very happy to pass the noble Lord’s interesting suggestions on planning consent to the relevant government department. It is worth noting that new proposals for a planning policy statement were issued for consultation last week. I do not know whether the noble Lord has seen it but I should welcome his input into that. As I said, I should be very happy to ensure that the point that he raised is considered.

Obviously I cannot commit my noble friend Lady Andrews, but I shall certainly talk to her about the idea of a debate on rural housing because it seems that there would be a great deal of interest in it. I am sure she will be ever-anxious to come to your Lordships’ House to debate those matters.

I was asked by the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, and others to comment on rural poverty. I shall be happy to write to noble Lords with the information that I have but, in the one minute that I have left, I can say that our understanding is that the impacts of the current recession on rural areas are very similar to those in urban areas.

In conclusion, this has been a very interesting debate and a lot of very good ideas have been put forward. The Government are not complacent on this matter; we have put more resources into our support for rural areas. However, because this issue embraces many government departments, I shall ensure that the points raised are put to the relevant Ministers. I am sure that we are all grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Livsey, for instituting the debate and for the excellence of his contribution.