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The Countryside
Local Government Chronicle
I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that the main threat to the countryside is the risk of burying it under reports detailing the misery and deprivation of the 20 per cent of the population unfortunate to live in it. I can never remember a time when so many people have prodded, poked, analysed, dissected and monitored the rural pulse – and come up with practically nothing new to say.
The latest batch of doom and gloom was kicked off by the Affordable Rural Housing Commission led by ex-Channel Four political correspondent Elinor Goodman. Elinor, a good fox-hunting sort, is usually pretty sound on rural matters but the Commission’s suggestion that Sir Michael Lyons “explore” the idea of a local impact tax to stem “the negative impact of second home ownership” had a look of desperation about it.
Next into the field was the Carnegie Commission for Rural Communities, telling the countryside to stand on its own two feet and be ready to live without subsidy (though it carefully and prudently was very circumspect about agricultural support)
This was followed by Institute for Public Policy Research (usually described as a left-leaning think-tank) rural justice summit to launch A New Rural Agenda – held, appropriately enough, at the Royal College of Pathologists. IPPR north said it wanted to explore whether we should shift our focus beyond traditional policy areas like environment, agriculture and planning and “embed” social justice issues in the debate about the countryside.
The fourth in the sequence of reports on the countryside was from the Commission for Rural Communities. This was presented, demonstrating at least a sense of humour, in the Cabinet War Rooms bunker. About half way through I began to lose the will to live.
To have one junior minister at an event is occasionally unavoidable: to have two is a disaster. Phil Woolas, Minister for Local Government, said rural problems should be addressed by local areas agreements carried out by community partnerships involving local government, public agencies, the private sector and voluntary bodies. He said this several times. Then he said it a few more times. Then, mercifully, he stopped.
Compared with the treat to follow Woolas was brilliant, charismatic, scintillating, incisive, original, a deliverer of a veritable tour de force.
For what was to come was Barry Gardiner, Minister for Rural Affairs. Gardiner was simply awful - a fumbling, bumbling, narcolepsy-inducing meander as if he was on a country ramble too soon after lunch and had forgotten his Ordnance Survey. The glassy-eyed concentration of the chairman, a perfectly sensible cleric from East Yorkshire, suggested that he was already concentrating on the after-life.
Do we really need more reports on the problems of the countryside which require ministers to plod through the same dreary rituals? We know that there are problems of affordable housing. We have been told of the difficulties of rural transport. We have understood that social isolation exists alongside community solidarity and that high levels of employment can mask low pay and seasonal working.
We should be cautious about lumping all rural areas together as if they formed a single countryside (the inevitable consequence of finally arriving at a national definition of “rural”!) - Cornwall and North Yorkshire are hugely different socially and economically. We should be wary of accepting definitions of poverty which are measures of relative well-being.
Above all we should radiate scepticism at the proposition that there are all-embracing programmes that a benevolent state can bestow on a grateful peasantry. Enablement (broadband, flexible housing tenures and employment conditions, for example) can work with the complex dynamics of local communities in a way intervention will never achieve. Introducing some administrative competence into the Rural Payments Agency and the benefits system – notably tax credits – will do far more for my constituency than clobbering second homes in the belief that this will achieve affordability.
Do we really need a Commission for Rural Communities (the name itself is redolent of paternalistic bossiness) perpetuating the fantasy role of “rural advocate?”
At this rate it won’t be long before we are back with the College of Pathologists and are spending more time in the bunker!
© Local Government Chronicle
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