It is a great pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Robert Courts). He has been such a powerful campaigner for improvements to the quality of water in our rivers and in his West Oxfordshire constituency, so it is great to hear him speak about the subject. My constituency neighbour, the hon. Member for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan), also made a powerful speech.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby), who is a member of the all-party parliamentary group on rural services, which I chair, on securing the debate. It will not surprise the House that I will focus my brief remarks on the role that the Government have to play in improving the allocation of funding to rural areas.
The metrics for measuring rural deprivation in the funding formula are regrettably flawed, as the Prime Minister recognised when he toured the country this summer. He was roundly criticised for pointing out that even in seemingly more affluent areas of the countryside, there is real rural deprivation. Our political opponents tried to make fun of him for being out of touch, but he represents one of the largest rural constituencies in England and what he said revealed that he is completely in touch with what is going on in real rural Britain. At present, the indices used to measure multiple deprivation do not adequately take his point into account. The Rural Services Network, which supports the all-party group I chair, has provided a useful briefing on this debate for colleagues. It has found that rural areas receive 37%—£105—less per head in Government funding than their urban counterparts.
Rural communities not only receive poorer services, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon pointed out, but suffer as a result of lower wages—£2,500 less per head, on average—and face significantly higher costs.
Rural residents pay 21%, or some £104, more per head in council tax bills than their urban counterparts because the Government grant is distributed in favour of urban areas. Weekly transport costs are about £40 higher; rural families spend 4% more of their disposable income on transport each week. In many larger rural areas, and particularly in Shropshire, public transport is very thin on the ground, so people have to rely on cars. The way energy prices have been going, the £40 figure, which predates the energy crisis, will be an underestimate.
Nowhere are these issues more apparent than in my constituency. Ludlow is geographically the sixth largest constituency in England; following the proposals announced yesterday by the Boundary Commission, it will become the fifth largest by gaining 100 square miles from my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski), whom I am pleased to see supporting the debate. Rural areas have their own inherent beauty, and the lack of people—the sparsity of population—is one of the reasons why they are pleasant places to live and why people choose to live there. However, population density is a fundamental problem because the allocation of funding from central Government is based on people. With just 56 people per square kilometre, Ludlow has one of the lowest population densities of any constituency in England.