Village Halls (Hansard, 10 July 2002)

§ Matthew Taylor (Truro and St. Austell)
I am delighted to have the opportunity to initiate this Adjournment debate. I have taken part in many such debates at two or three in the morning, but procedures have changed and tonight I cut short a dinner with my good friends, Martin and Miranda Thomas, because I was told that Third Reading would finish 45 minutes ago. Life never quite works out as planned.
The issue is important to Cornwall and other rural areas. Bugle village hall was built by volunteers at the end of world war one to commemorate those who died in the war. It is extremely well used. Everything from the panto, the Darby and Joan club, the toddlers group and bingo take place there, but all improvements are carried out by voluntary labour. It now needs a disabled toilet and disabled access, which alone will cost £20,000. The hall struggles to find even a small proportion of that in what is one of the poorest communities in Cornwall, which is itself one of the poorest communities in the country.
Penwithick has spent five or six years putting together fundraising events locally to get a community centre, but it cannot get the land because land prices have taken off in the past few years. The project has huge support. The community has held car boot sales, jumbles, sponsored swims and so on. It has the support of the local community council and St. Austell college, but the various funding organisations will not provide the funding for land so it is unable to proceed.
Village halls in Cornwall and across Britain are facing a crisis in funding that threatens their continued existence. Traditional sources of funding have gradually been eroded. Funding bodies that offered assistance have now withdrawn or changed the basis of their support in ways that create real difficulty for many vital institutions. I have primarily been alerted to the issues by Cornwall rural community council, which has done extensive work researching the situation in Cornwall. My concerns are also shared by Action with Communities in Rural England, the national body representing the rural community councils, which has done extensive research on the problem nationally.
I raised the problem with the former Secretary of State at the Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions on 28 May. My concerns have been transferred to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and I await a reply. However, I am sure that the Minister will respond to the issues tonight.

§ Mr. John Burnett (Torridge and West Devon)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. It would be worth his knowing that in Devonshire some 60 halls are waiting, in vain it seems, for—11 million of assistance, which they are finding it impossible to get.

§ Matthew Taylor
I thank my hon. Friend. In a moment I will give the House some figures about Cornwall that will make a similar point.
I know that the Countryside Commission put out a press release today about some of its sources of funding, and I shall return to that later, but there is one issue that 1002 I want to pre-empt. The press release suggests that there has been a substantial increase in the number of village halls. That is purely a statistical change. It is not that there are more halls; it is only that the commission is including more buildings as halls. Sadly, we are not getting more halls. A great many are under threat of closure and some are in the process of closing.
To respond to my hon. Friend's point, the extensive village halls survey by the Cornwall rural community council shows that about £10 million of investment is required simply to bring village halls up to present day standards. We are talking not about expansion, great improvements or new services but about basics such as toilets that work, kitchens that meet current hygiene standards and, perhaps most fundamentally, roofs that do not leak. Approximately £6 million of that work is classed as urgent, and if the remaining £4 million of work does not take place, much of it will become urgent.
In addition to the rural community council research, we have the results of a similar survey conducted in 1998 by the Cornish millennium projects, which found that £13 million of investment was needed. Since then. £3 million of investment has come from that fund. That suggests that the more recent research is pretty accurate.

§ Norman Lamb (North Norfolk)
I have received similar representations from the Norfolk rural community council and from ACRE. Is my hon. Friend aware that, as well as the costs that he has mentioned, village halls face the 2004 implementation of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995? Its provisions on access to public places are creating additional concern because they come with a substantial price tag that many village halls simply will not be able to meet.

§ Matthew Taylor
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I know that hon. Members on both sides of the House want to raise similar concerns.
I do not want this debate to be only about Cornwall. If we take the figures for Cornwall and Devon and look at the ACRE research, we can extrapolate a figure of some £400 million of necessary capital investment. No one pretends that it is all needed overnight, and of course local fund-raising committees will run their jumble sales and bring-and-buy sales and access local funding. However, much of that funding cannot be put together without substantive Government support.
We should not forget that village halls are worth protecting as an asset. Their total value is estimated at over £1 billion. The average lifespan is already over 50 years and more than half are over 60 years old. As my hon. Friend suggested, current facilities are inadequate for modern use. Nationally, annual capital investment of roughly £20 million is required to cover replacement costs and another £20 million is needed to meet the rising demand for quality in facilities. That is on top of the figure of £400 million that I have already given for the backlog of urgent fundamental repairs to the structure of the buildings.
The problem, and the reason that I bring the matter to the House, is that the money available to village halls is being eroded just as their age is making the work far more urgent. That has not happened only under the present Government; it has been a process over many years. It reflects cuts in funding, some of which perhaps were necessary, 1003 but the overall effect has been to store up problems in an ageing asset. Many halls were built after the first and second world wars and now need that major capital investment, but there is no funding for it.

§ Mrs. Annette L. Brooke (Mid-Dorset and North Poole)
Does my hon. Friend agree that there is a tremendous urgency about the situation? It affects the fabric of social life and the sustainability of village life. With the funds drying up at such a critical point, we need a package quickly, not in the next 10 years.

§ Matthew Taylor
For many village halls, the need is immediate. If communities cannot raise £50,000 or £100,000 to replace the roof, their only option is to allow the village hall to close. Once closed, it will not reopen. We all know the truth of that. The building will rapidly deteriorate and in most cases it will be sold.
I shall deal briefly with the sources of funding. Local authority funding to village halls in England has remained static at just over £5 million annually between 1981 and 2000. By definition, that is a significant decrease in the real value of that funding. At the same time, legislative requirements on health and safety and, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Norfolk (Mr. Lamb) mentioned, the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 must be met.
Almost half the county councils—16 of them—provide no funding at all. It is not and never has been a statutory duty, and as councils have had to focus on their statutory duties in respect of education, social services and so on, we all know that whichever parties have been running local authorities, many non-statutory duties have been drastically cut or have come to an end. The same is happening in the district and unitary authorities. The relevant figures are given in the ACRE "Status of Funding for Village Halls" report of January 2002.
Many local communities have sought national lottery funding. The millennium grants were a significant source of funding, but they have come to an end. The lottery's community fund national grant aid, which might have provided some funding, is coming down. Its grants strategy, as is the case generally, is focused on limited geographical areas or smaller amounts aimed at the delivery of specific functions or feasibility studies on expanding services. However, my concern is not the extension of services provided in village halls. I am worried about the existing structure or the loss of that structure, and the statutory requirements that must be met. Grants for that are no longer available from the community fund.

§ Alistair Burt (North-East Bedfordshire)
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman and the Minister for kindly agreeing to allow me to intervene.
The hon. Gentleman may be aware that I have been contacted by Bedfordshire Rural Communities Charity. We look after some 100 village hall committees in Bedfordshire. The charity tells me that some £31 million was available a few years ago, and now only £13 million is available. Is the hon. Gentleman reassured—I am not 1004 sure that I am—by a recent letter that I received from the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, which I have shown to the Minister? The letter tells me: Distributors confirmed that they were now finalising details on a trial scheme for the funding of multi-purpose community facilities which would be applicant-friendly with a single front door application system. Does the hon. Gentleman share my concern that that may mean that village halls have some priority in that funding, or is he confused by the possibility that that wonderful single front door application system might conceal the fact that funding for village halls is rather less than it used to be?

§ Matthew Taylor
It is undoubtedly true that funding for village halls is somewhat less than it used to be. If we can bring funding schemes together and have a single front door—there has been such a scheme in the west midlands—it may be easier for the village hall committee to access it. That would be good news. However, if the money is not available once one goes through the door, it will not get the building work done.
The national village halls grants scheme was operated by the old Rural Development Commission. I was one of those who regretted the loss of the Rural Development Commission, which had a targeted role that worked extremely well in support of rural communities. It was replaced by the Countryside Agency and the national village halls grants scheme was axed. It has been replaced by community service grants, but those limit funding improvements to facilities that allow new services to be introduced, which is great in its own right, but does nothing to keep the hall open if the roof is falling in. That fund is down to £600,000, which is a drop in the ocean, compared with the sum that is needed. There is also a loans fund, which is even smaller—just £250,000 has been given out—but it attracts an 8 per cent. interest rate. For an agency tasked with strengthening rural communities, that is not much of a solution for anybody.

§ Andrew George (St. Ives)
On funding for the future of village halls, I can speak from experience, having worked in that area in the period immediately before I was elected. Does my hon. Friend agree that over a period of years a fad has developed among grant schemes that are supported by Government or have Government involvement whereby they support not established, much appreciated services that people know and love, but only new innovations—and that only on the basis of being the funding of last resort.

§ Matthew Taylor
I agree with my hon. Friend, who is extremely experienced in this area, having worked with Cornwall rural community council in the past. I know that he shares my concern that there has been a great move away from the fundamental capital funding that is needed to keep halls open when they are most in need of it.
I have let several hon. Members intervene, and I hope that they accept that I cannot let any more do so. I hope that the Minister will allow me an extra minute or two to make up for the time that I lost through interventions.

§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr. Elliot Morley)
Injury time.

§ Matthew Taylor
I thank the Minister for that.
1005 Another problem with the Countryside Agency is its rather rigid definition of services—it will fund only services, and that does not include the basic structure of the hall. I know of a community in Cornwall in the next-door constituency to mine. It has a population of 220. They have managed to secure the shell of the building, but the Countryside Commission will not allow them to get it into a state to operate as a village hall because that is not in itself a service. That is nonsense; it is juggling with words.
Very few other sources of grant are available. The South West of England regional development agency provides no funding for village halls unless they can illustrate economic outputs—so they could put in a suite of computers for training, but could not repair the roof to keep the computers in working order. That is despite the fact that, as the rural community council survey shows, village halls can demonstrate that there are genuine economic outputs as a result of their basic day-to-day work, not least through the staff who are employed in helping to run them. Yet the RDA is simply unwilling to recognise that contribution, and this form of support from the Countryside Agency does not exist. European funding and other economic development funding is extremely hard to access for such basic services. In Cornwall, funding is wrapped into objective 1, which has not made a single grant to village halls on the ground that they do not fall within the economic development criteria with which objective 1 is charged.
These halls have scores of fundamental uses within the local community. One hall picked at random from the Cornwall survey had 72 separate uses, including sports, arts, cultural events, community events and meetings, lunch clubs, post offices, polling stations, wedding receptions, school events, Women's Institute events, farmers' markets, conferences, doctors' surgeries, blood transfusion services, police liaison, religious services and private hire. The list goes on, but time does not allow. The fundamental fact is that for many rural communities village halls are not a luxury—they are essential to their well-being. The venues create a valuable sense of community and help to prevent rural communities from being isolated.
If the buildings are allowed to fall into ruin, there is little chance of their being replaced. Lottery funding has introduced a regime whereby capital is readily available for most things, but running costs are not. Yet in the case that we are considering, capital is needed but not available. That is ironic. The village hall's basic revenue costs are next to nothing because it is run by volunteers, but it finds it almost impossible to gain access to the capital funding that it needs.
The problem is not new and, in some ways, the Minister is in the difficult position of having to catch up and resolve a funding difficulty that has been allowed to grow for far too long, but is now urgent. The Action with Communities in Rural England report, the Cornwall rural community council report and the wide support from hon. Members show that the problem requires immediate action. Rural Members of any party from any part of the country express the same anxieties.
I do not want village halls in my constituency to close, but I cannot tell them where they can find the money that they need. I hope that the Minister can do that.

§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr. Elliot Morley)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Truro and St. Austell (Matthew Taylor) on securing the debate and making an important case about the role of village halls and community centres. The Government acknowledge that they are often the hubs of village life. We understand their importance and the hon. Gentleman's case.
I read the Cornwall village hall survey with interest. It contained much that is important for all rural Members to note. Although it confirms the importance of village halls, the survey also stated that many are not achieving their potential as community resources. For example, it mentioned that they are often under-utilised, especially during the day.

§ Matthew Taylor
Because of poor facilities.

§ Mr. Morley
There are several reasons that we need to consider. The report provides important lessons, and I have a great deal of respect for ACRE and its work. We give its submissions careful attention.
We have supported the development of active communities, and village halls provide a location for a range of community services and activities. They are generally eligible for some funding towards necessary improvements or modifications. The available evidence shows an increase in village halls and meeting places, as reported in the Countryside Agency's rural services survey in 2000. It shows that 85 per cent. of parishes had such a facility in 2000, compared with 72 per cent. in 1997. That shows the impact of lottery money. It also demonstrates that community centres and village halls have increased rapidly in the past few years.

§ Matthew Taylor
Will the Minister give way?

§ Mr. Morley
The hon. Gentleman has squeezed me, but as it is his Adjournment debate, I shall give way.

§ Matthew Taylor
I am sure that the Minister believes that the statistics that he cited show an increase in halls. I ask him to query that, because the definition has changed to include other community centres. If the Minister asks his officials after the debate, I am sure that they will confirm that. I do not want to make a political point, I simply want him to check afterwards.

§ Mr. Morley
I agree, but it is important that communities have a centre, whether it is a hall or a community centre. The facility rather than its exact definition is important. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman agrees. That does not detract from the fact that the survey shows that village halls and meeting places are increasing. That is due to a substantial increase in the money that has been made available.
We are discussing the problems. There is a need to improve data collection and consider the funding for village halls to establish need. I take the hon. Gentleman's point that we are considering a capital issue. In many cases, it is easier to support through capital rather than through running costs.
I live in a village, where support from the town council and the local council meant that it could buy a redundant school and convert it into a village hall. That was 1007 achieved mainly through activities in the community. I know that the hon. Gentleman is not suggesting that people should depend on outside funding. There is a role for active communities in raising money, but that is not to say that there should be no such support. In recent years, there has been a big increase because of the lottery. In the 1980s, about £10 million was spent, compared with about £50 million at the peak in the mid-1990s. There has been a slight fall, but the most recent figure that I have, which is for 2000, is £31.4 million.

§ Mr. Burnett
Will the Minister give way very quickly?

§ Mr. Morley
If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I am afraid that I cannot.
That is a significant increase. Indeed, ACRE's report on the financing of village halls, which I have in front of me, shows that the increase in the funds made available in the past few years has been dramatic.

§ Mr. Burnett
It has dried up.

§ Mr. Morley
It has fallen back, but the suggestion that it has dried up is misleading. The 2000 figures are six times greater than those for the beginning of the 1990s, which bumped along at a very low level. I commend the report to the hon. Member for Truro and St. Austell and suggest that he look at the situation that it describes. Although I am not saying that no issues are involved, anyone seeking to make a big case about the fact that there has been a gigantic increase in funding that has fallen back a bit in comparison with very low funding for very long periods should put the matter in perspective. Record sums have been going in in comparatively recent times and the number of facilities for villages has increased since 1997.
Those are the figures that we have. As the hon. Gentleman said, the village halls loans fund is available for use and is administered by ACRE on behalf of the Countryside Agency. The fund can provide loans towards capital improvements such as maintenance, extensions or rebuilding costs. The Countryside Agency can also offer assistance through the community service grants scheme, which he mentioned. That assistance is delivered through the vital villages programme and can help to fund an alteration or extension of a village hall or other community building where it will provide a new or extended service to the community.
The community fund, a lottery distribution body that distributes lottery funds on behalf of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, is the main source of funding 1008 for village halls, and accounts for the significant increase in recent years. That funding alone accounts for about £18 million of the £31.4 million that was available in 2000. Other sources of public funding include local authorities, regional development agencies and the Sports Council.
I accept that there are caveats. Of course, the criteria must be met and the process depends very much on the nature of the application. However, that is all part of community activity and of local communities determining priorities and activities in the halls and centres where those activities are focused. None the less, considerable funds are still available. Even though there has been a decline in lottery money, the amount provided is still a considerable improvement on what was given in the past.
There has been a meeting with the DCMS. Indeed, it was dealt with in the letter cited by the hon. Member for North-East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt); I accept that the use of language was interesting. The meeting was held to consider the detail of the analysis provided by ACRE in relation to the £50 million shortfall—or, rather, the amount that it has identified as being needed for modernisation and repairs. There is a feeling inside the DCMS and among lottery fund providers that, although they do not dispute the justification for funding, repairs and maintenance, especially on large capital programmes, the £50 million figure needs to be broken down. There needs to be some examination of how the figures have been arrived at, so that we can have a more accurate picture of the needs of village halls and communities.
In conclusion, there is no disagreement in the Government with the case made by hon. Members about the importance of village halls, community centres and community meeting places. Such places are a focus and hub for communities and we want to support them. With all respect to the hon. Gentleman, it is sometimes easy to overstate the case about a fall-back on what has been a very large increase in the funds available. A number of Government bodies and Departments are involved in relation to the lottery providers and distributors, and they include DEFRA in respect of its various rural action programmes. It is not unreasonable that they need to discuss with ACRE and other interested bodies the scale of the problem and decide what action can be taken to deal with the matter through a partnership approach that recognises that the strength of the facilities is measured by the strength of the support that they have in communities in making them work and ensuring that they are part of the community and a focus for community activities.