I very much welcome the hon. Gentleman’s comments, because it is important to clarify that when I talk about social disadvantage, I am talking about it wherever it is found. His analysis is correct: at one level, we could say that social disadvantage is a wide side of difficulties that prevent people from participating in society. They include poverty, but also limiting factors such as lack of skills, unequal levels of health and well-being, inability to participate fully in local government and so on. We may find concentrations of those factors in what I referred to earlier as lagging areas, although there was a suggestion that areas might not want to think of themselves as lagging. Such areas are typically remote—there is a core-periphery relationship in all this analysis—and may often have seen a decline in traditional industries, such as fishing, mining and agriculture.

A huge number of people want to retire to my constituency of South Dorset, with its beautiful environment and wonderful quality of life. Many people want to purchase second homes and holiday homes there. In many ways, the prosperity that they personally and individually bring masks pockets of deprivation. I would certainly see one of the commission’s functions as producing the evidence and   marshalling the arguments on addressing pockets of rural deprivation so that it can assist government at all levels to do so.