Baroness questions progress of rural equality
A LEADING North Yorkshire politician has issued a “wake-up” call to the Government over the inequality of weighting Whitehall policy between people living in rural areas of the country and their urban counterparts.
Baroness Anne McIntosh of Pickering impressed the need for Parliament to address years of failure by successive governments to grasp the problems that countryside communities face.
Speaking in a key debate about rural life that she secured in the House of Lords yesterday, Baroness McIntosh said: “Public services are under pressure in rural areas. Providing health and social care, affordable housing, adequate transport to work or to access doctors or dentists, accessing the digital economy via broadband and mobile phones, are major challenges facing rural dwellers.”
The former MP for Thirsk and Malton, who will be attending this week’s Great Yorkshire Show, added: “Successive governments have for years failed to understand and grasp the issues in the efficient and safe delivery of public services in rural areas.
“Officials tend to be metrocentric and urban-based and, in many cases, have never been exposed to the challenges of rural life. Also, funding per head of the population in terms of education, health and other sectors are often less in rural than urban areas.”
She explained that there were many issues affecting the lives of people in rural communities.
“Finding an affordable home with the ability to travel to a job some distance away, using the electronic prescription service in rural GP practices, reporting an emergency with poor mobile signal, accessing local post offices and banks for small rural businesses are some of the everyday challenges that rural communities face,” she said.
A former chairman of the Government’s Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee, the Baroness said the committee had highlighted local-authority funding, rural broadband, blackspots for mobile phone coverage, poor rural transport and developing the rural economy as “crucial factors” which need to be tackled as far back as July 2013.
“Now five years on, this is a wake-up call to government that rural dwellers should be treated equally with their urban cousins,” she said.