Debate contribution: Financial Support for Rural Communities in Mid Ulster

Debate contribution by Mr Patsy McGlone on 12 November 2024.

MLA

Mr Patsy McGlone

Party at the time

Social Democratic and Labour Party

Date

12 November 2024

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Adjournment

Heading

Financial Support for Rural Communities in Mid Ulster

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4658856

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I thank Mr Buchanan for securing the Adjournment debate. Financial support for rural communities in Mid Ulster is clearly an issue. Sometimes, we feel a bit forgotten. However, the good industries that are there, be they Dale Farm or the manufacturing industries that have got themselves to the top of the pile, have excelled by themselves, albeit, with support, surely. They have shown such initiative and clear vision, and seen and established such clear needs and markets, that many of them are world leaders. We do not lose sight of that. They started small, many of them from their backyards and farmyards, and expanded from that. That innovation, creativity and initiative in many of our rural areas has to be recognised. Today, we are talking about getting support and making sure that people are fully endorsed and seen through their work, because new generations and people who want to start businesses are coming up every year. I will come to that in a wee while. I welcome the inclusion of the constituency in the recent Mid South West growth deal. That proposal has the potential to deliver much-needed investment in infrastructure, skills, innovation and tourism. Those are all necessary investments. As a mostly rural constituency, the local economy is heavily dependent on agriculture. As a result of Brexit, which the DUP campaigned for and the SDLP and others opposed, funding for agriculture has suffered real-term cuts. The annual funding allocation to replace the EU's common agricultural policy payments has been capped at approximately £330 million since 2020. Within that, there is around £300 million of direct payments for farmers. The Ulster Farmers' Union has calculated that, to maintain the real value of that funding, it should have increased to £389 million by the end of 2024. That means that there has been a cut in real terms of £60 million this year. From next year, the funding for agriculture will be included in the baseline figure for the block grant. Funding that had been ring-fenced and guaranteed over many years will now be part of the annual negotiations between the parties in the Executive. In future, Executive funding to support farmers will compete with Health, Infrastructure and Education. That will almost inevitably lead to cuts in the direct payments that farmers and farming families receive, and that is not good news. That is happening at a time when the total income from farming recorded by the Department across the North fell by 44% from £609 million in 2022 to £341 million in 2023. That is 14% lower than the average total farm income for the past 20 years, when inflation is taken into account. As a result of Brexit, we have also lost access to pillar 2 of the rural development fund, losing approximately £100 million of rural development funding since leaving the EU. That funding was available to support rural communities in Mid Ulster and elsewhere. The British Government have not replaced that lost funding. That rural development funding is very important. I want to make this point: although Invest NI is very supportive — I have to pay tribute to its local team, which recently helped a local business get support and funding to create a number of jobs — we have to look at the indigenous market, meaning those indigenous firms that we have, which do not export, and at how they are supported and how those firms, particularly in rural areas, can get extra support. That often does not mean huge amounts of money, but it is money that will help them to train and support staff and help them with the growth of their business. In many instances, they require professional help. That deals with the economic aspects of the issue, if you like. However, despite legislation that has been designed to protect rural services, there have been repeated cuts to services in rural areas. Health and Social Care in rural areas has been gradually stripped of services through a lack of funding for staff. On that point, there is an increasing, persistent factor every year, and that is the need for properly paid domiciliary care workers. I emphasise the words "properly paid", because we get a number of cases, usually around autumn and wintertime — invariably, it starts earlier in the year — where domiciliary care packages are not available to support people to return home after a spell in hospital or other care settings. Therefore, you have the usual stuff of bed-blocking and the need for people to move into a nursing home at increased cost. That is a false economy. People are not being paid enough to do that vital work at all hours, in all weathers, in all seasons, up hill and down dale and particularly at night and to be there to provide care to people who, in many instances, live alone. The workers cannot be got. That is one thing that happens in the health service, and it happens in circumstances in which we are supposed to have legislation that governs the absence of services to our rural areas and that allows us to have some sort of control over them to make sure that our rural areas are properly treated and looked after. Just recently, the GP practice at Fairhill Health Centre in Magherafelt was forced to close because no one could be recruited to take responsibility for the 2,330 patients that it served. They have had to be "dispersed" — I think that that is the word that is used — among other practices in the area, increasing pressures on those practices. We will not even get into how that was done, because it is whole other world stuff, which was, in many instances, very poorly handled by the Department. I will go back to the investment that we now see for the Mid South West growth deal and say that I am looking forward to it. It will create the infrastructure that we so need for our manufacturing sectors and our base, and it will give hope, prospects and a future to our young people, many of whom are self-starters. Education is not just academic education; education is the skill set that people obtain from the training that they get in our FE colleges. That, too, is a vital service, which provides, if you like, the workforce to those excellent companies that already exist in the communities. On the economy, I say that we should keep doing it, keep supporting it and allow some sort of diversification of funding to make sure that those companies that are not exporting have that support. On that point, thank you very much for the opportunity to speak.

1,118 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

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