Welsh Conservatives have called this debate to draw attention to the needs of rural Wales in the recession.  Yes, all areas are suffering because of the downturn, and this isn’t a question of where the hardship is greatest.

But it’s asking for recognition that many of the challenges facing households and businesses in the countryside are different to those in the large towns and cities, and they’ll need a different response for them to recover.

Welsh conservatives believe that it’s right that attention is drawn to this, and that a recovery isn’t undermined by red tape, stealth taxes and bureaucracy.

Even before the downturn - rural Wales was already blighted by poverty.

This was documented extensively by the Rural Development sub-committee – and it drew on extremely wide-ranging evidence.

The conclusions found those in rural areas experienced lower pay, fewer employment opportunities, higher costs of living in many cases, as well as poor access to public transport, which was non-existent in some cases.

And while every area is now suffering Gordon Brown’s economic ‘bust’, even when the economy was growing, many rural areas missed out.

Big cities like Cardiff may have seen dramatic growth, but ten years after devolution, a rural area like Anglesey is now poorer than the poorest parts of Poland.
 

Yes, all areas of Wales have seen redundancies, and businesses going under, but the impact job losses in rural areas is often far greater because there were fewer employment opportunities to begin with, and replacing them takes far longer.

On top of this, the Welsh Assembly Government is planning to hit businesses that are crucial to the rural economy with additional charges, and red tape.

Tourism makes a massive contribution to the Welsh economy, but rural Wales is particularly dependent on this industry, in part because so many visitors are drawn to our magnificent natural landscape… but also because, outside of farming, other business opportunities are so scarce.

Yet the many businesses offering bed and breakfast and self-catered accommodation in the countryside are going to be saddled with another unnecessary and gold-plated EU regulation, that will bring in regular charges of hundreds of pounds for testing, monitoring, and auditing private water supplies.

On top of this, self-catering businesses face additional costs because the Government wants to start treating them as private landlords.

Understandably, there’s dismay in rural areas that these small, family-run, businesses – that have survived the initial shock of the recession – are being squeezed until the pips squeak.

Welsh Conservatives are fully opposed to these unnecessary stealth taxes – and I would hope that other Members here would join us in our support of these businesses – and I thank the Liberal Democrats for highlighting these very issues in their amendments – which we will be happy to support.

Finally, I would like to touch on the importance of improving rural infrastructure.

Broadband access has taken far too long to roll out – putting small businesses at a competitive disadvantage.  In my own constituency, in Gwythein, the residents don’t even have a reliable telephone line, let alone broadband.  There are obvious concerns that while towns and cities gain access to the latest high speed services, rural areas will be left lagging behind.

The poor transport network is also holding rural Wales back – a point that was frequently stressed in the evidence given to the Inquiry into rural poverty.  The lack of better road infrastructure is discouraging businesses setting up in rural areas, where there’s such a pressing need for jobs.

An issue I have raised here on a number of occasions, for example – is the need for a bypass at St Asaph – there’s a great potential in the Vale of Clwyd for encouraging business, yet for years it’s not been considered enough of a priority to alleviate the bottleneck in St Asaph.

If rural Wales is going to recover – something that I hope all Members here want to see as soon as possible - then addressing this poor infrastructure has to be a priority, as is recognition that rural Wales faces many different challenges to urban areas, and that Government should not ignore them by adopting a one-size-fits-all approach.