These are some of the downsides of life at the top of Wensleydale, as presented to a visiting House of Commons committee.

The committee for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, an all-party ginger group for Defra, met in the Wensleydale Creamery Restaurant in Hawes recently to hear evidence about "the potential of England's rural economy".

The draft minutes of that meeting can be seen at
http://tinyurl.com/5krbor but here are some tasters of what the MPs were told ...

Rima Berry, chairwoman of the Upper Wensleydale Business Association, said low wages and high prices meant recruitment was difficult.

"One member used the Jobcentre to try to recruit, and they were sending candidates from Newcastle and Sunderland. One organisation I know has been advertising for several months to operate customer services and people from as far afield as Northallerton have applied for the jobs. That means a 60-mile round trip to get a job which at the end of it will pay £6 to £7 an hour."

Paul Birnie, finance director of Wensleydale Creamery, which employs 200 people, said: "We employ about 25 to 30 per cent East Europeans. We have found them an absolute godsend. We would not be where we are today without them."

Ruth Annison of WR Outhwaite, rope-makers of Hawes, employing 16 people, said they had needed to outsource some of their requirements to a factory in India. She also introduced the first of a series of
complaints about the regional development agency.

"When we came here, we had an organisation called The Council for Small Industries in Rural Areas, and that was followed by the Rural Development Commission. That was subsumed into the Countryside Agency, and all of that work is now with the regional development agency Yorkshire Forward.

"Yorkshire Forward believes that 'strategic' means 'large'. Decisions are made and funding allocated to the large issues because they are viewed by Yorkshire Forward as strategic, whereas we would say, in the context of Wensleydale, the smaller-scale is equally strategic.

"If one family with two or three children leaves a school in this area, the school can lose half a teacher. It sounds a long way from the creation of employment, but it is all part of the background to our lives.

"If any of you have a heart attack 28 minutes from now, you will not be seen by a doctor until tomorrow morning. If it was Friday night, you
would not have a doctor until Monday morning. If there was a bank holiday in the previous week, you would not have a doctor until
Tuesday. It is beginning to feel less secure and less attractive as a place to live in spite of, for example, senior citizen bus passes.

"A small amount would often help because people here are so self-reliant. Bainbridge, which is four miles away, needed a new mortuary. I am sure that where you come from you would not need to give a thought to whether there was somewhere you could place the bodies of your loved ones. The village of Bainbridge itself raised the money for the mortuary and the wives of the plumbers, builders and joiners provided all the internal furnishings."

John Blackie, owner of holiday cottages and catering businesses, is the chairman of Hawes and High Abbotside Parish Council; the Richmondshire district councillor for Hawes and High Abbotside; and the North Yorkshire county councillor for the Upper Dales – which he summed up as "325 square miles, 6,000 people, 250,000 sheep and one million rabbits".

He told the committee: "I agree with Ruth Annison about the Regional Development Agency (RDA). It has vacuumed up all the ring-fenced funding that used to be available for deeply rural communities."

Before Yorkshire Forward, he said, Reeth, in neighbouring Swaledale, had got funding for local workshops which had become home to four businesses and 10 jobs.

"That was small beer as far as the RDA was concerned, when it had to deliver thousands. But here it had a huge impact. They have a difficulty, in that their contract with government is to deliver the targets, but those targets should take into account the needs of remote rural areas."

Coun Blackie added: "Occasionally, we believe that the decisions made by local authorities on our behalf could do with a lot more local involvement. The county council is 37 miles away; the district council is 27 miles away.

"The national park (authority's) statutes and purposes mean that it must be far more national in its approach than simply a local authority. A local business wanted to convert a barn and it has taken two and a half years to get planning permission."

He added: "There are real issues about access to services. Last year, local people in Hawes, using the Hoppa (bus), had to leave home at seven o'clock in the morning to get to the college to pursue vocational education at nine o'clock. They would get back at about six o'clock at night. How can you ask youngsters who have just left fifth form to tackle that long day and still be interested at the end of a year's course?

"If you go to Upper Swaledale, you will find no terrestrial radio or TV; there is still no mobile phone contact. In Upper Swaledale, there are still only six telephone lines, and they have been patched so many times now that they do not even know where the connections lead to."

There were complaints about the national park authority making it almost impossible to get planning permission for barn conversions, which might provide affordable housing. Mrs Annison of Outhwaites commented: "It is much easier to make a case for saving a rare plant than to save a community.

"The national park is a decision-maker but it does not have to take account of the effects of its decisions, so it turns down an application for a house but, unlike Richmondshire District Council, it does not have to deal with the homeless. The district council does not have authority over building and planning permissions. There's a lack of joined-up thinking.

"A subsidy was given to a bus service from Hawes to Ribblehead, but it failed because they did not put in the link that was needed first, to make a success of the longer transport route."

Coun Blackie said an extension to the Hawes rope works had cost £40,000 more than it need have done, because of the materials the park authority insisted on. He said: "Sometimes I think they overplay their hand to demand the very highest quality, when the aim of the game is to keep the communities sustainable and prosperous."

Ms Berry, of the Upper Wensleydale business Association, said the area was left out of a lot of aid schemes because of Defra's reliance on statistics.

She said: "In Richmondshire, there is a huge garrison town which means that if you lump our statistics in with them suddenly we have hardly any old people at all. We have a high level of employment here but it is characterised by low wages, so under the Defra indicators we will appear as a really strong community but we are not.

"The local White Paper goes on about the bottom-up approach and yet the strong policy that is coming through is a top-down approach and does not even notice us."

One local businessman said: "Here, petrol is 10p to 20p a litre dearer than 30 miles away, because it is a small area with a small garage."

Robert Tunstall, accountant and tax adviser, told the committee: "The prescriptions to which farmers in particular now have to keep are just phenomenal compared with what they were. The vast majority in the dales are one-man bands. To cope with the bureaucracy that now exists
and the form-filling and the rules and regulations is the biggest single burden I have seen develop in the past 30 years."

The MPs travelled back to Westminster under no illusion that life in one of Britain's most picturesque areas is easy. The inhabitants of the dales await some reflection of their views in future policy-making.