My Lords, I thank the Minister for his introduction to this, and his team for providing the explanatory document about the different ways in which consultation will take place with rural groups such as the Rural and Farming Network, ECO and its sub-groups, the Rural Coalition, local economic partnerships, the Rural Service Network and the LEADER exchange group. I know that LEADER is an initiative to do with the delivery of the Rural Development Programme for England, but the word made me think. These groups, or leaders of groups, such as farmers, businessmen and local councils, are all stakeholders—to use the Minister’s word—in the countryside.
Who is going to represent the deprived of rural England—those who sometimes go with only one meal a day because they know that they have to spend their money on a car to get to their valuable work, or to have any of form of life there? Who is going to speak up for the countryside’s young, who cannot get a job because they have not got the transport to get to one and cannot get the transport to get to a job because they have not got a job to pay for the transport. Who is going to speak up for the unemployed, the unhoused and others?
The Minister will know that I am in a slightly difficult position. I have been asked by Richard Benyon, the Defra Minister in the Commons, to pool together a group of Peers to help rural-proof the government department’s policies in each individual case, but I still have not quite grasped who is going to do or commission the critical and independent research that will penetrate the normal attitude of most departments to the countryside, which is ambivalent at best. Actually, their attitude ranges from ambivalence to total ignorance and they need spurring on.
Most of us in this Room have argued our best on several occasions for some representation at arm’s length from Government, as stated by the noble Lord, Lord Knight, of those rural voices that are not normally heard. I hope that the Minister can reassure me on the question of the independent, fearless research that is often critical of the Government, and which departments are, frankly, unable, to carry out. I hope that he can also reassure me on my point about who will represent the voice of the rural deprived.