Everybody in this place knows what a district electoral division, DED, is. A district electoral division is usually half a parish. Everybody in politics knows about them and how they work. When the Central Statistics Office does an analysis it does an analysis of how many people there are per square km. It looks at them in DEDs. In many of the parishes around me, there are approximately 20 people per square km. That is the average. When we look at international statistics, they all tell us that if there are fewer than 35 people in an area per square km, that area is in terminal decline. There are many areas in my part of the world in terminal decline because the people are not there. The reason the people are not there is because the services are not there and there is no emphasis to try and regenerate those communities. Sometimes when you go to a place that is near a town, it has a better population of 35 or 40, but in many of them they are down at the level of 20. When they are down at that level they do not have enough people to keep the pub going at the crossroads, and the post office and the school are going to close. The local football club is in trouble. All of these things need more people, and to have them we need more people living in rural areas, and that means housing in rural areas. Housing is the key thing we need to look at. If we do not put practices in place - in a lot of these places there are no towns and we are talking about one-off rural housing - to allow people to come and live in their community then we have serious problems. Last week, the Government brought in a notion it was going to allow people to build a little house at the back of the house, in the garden. Many people in rural areas are asking why they are allowed to build a house behind the house to put the auld pair into, but they cannot build a house for themselves in the field next to it. The Government needs to cop on that that is a problem. We need to recognise that people from rural areas want to come back there. They may go away and get educated and get good jobs and live in the city for a while, but they want to come back and live in their rural area, send their children to the school they went to, and for their children to play with the football club they played for. Policies and opportunity stop them from doing that. If we are going to turn this around the Government has to come up with policies which will actually deal with those issues. The primary one it needs to come up with are policies that deal with ensuring people can build a home in their own community. I have given the Minister the statistics. Go to the DEDs where there are fewer than 35 people per square kilometre, and those are the areas the Government needs to put the emphasis on to ensure we can do something for people who live in rural areas.

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