Commitment to restoring rural communities

Last week Conservatives launched the Rural Action Campaign designed to halt a decade of disrespect for rural England.

Amongst other things, these proposals will give rural communities the power to resist school closures; scrap top-down housing targets; allow councils to oppose development on green belt land; pilot new rural transport solutions and allow councils to offer rural business rate discounts.

As I revealed last year, the current system of allocating funding by central government to rural areas has been totally discredited, with spending priorities motivated by political considerations rather than economic or social ones.

In scrapping this system, Conservatives will give the independent Audit Commission a new duty to report to Parliament on the draft Local Government Finance Settlement, removing the political element from allocation of grant settlements. This will hand back to rural communities the power to decide how to spend billions of pounds a year.

As the Ludlow constituency is the eighth largest in England in geographic terms and has a correspondingly sparse population, rural issues have always been high on my agenda. As Chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Rural Services I have also championed the need to recognise the costs of delivering services to rural communities. I was also pleased to be able to play a part in this Conservative policy development through my work last year highlighting problems of funding primary schools in rural areas.

If elected, a Conservative government will make real changes to balance out Labour's bias against rural communities. In the meantime I will continue to do all I can to ensure rural issues are championed in Parliament and at Shirehall. Details of the action plan can be found on Conservatives.com or via my own website www.philipdunne.com.