conservativerural action

Quality of life in the countryside, as measured by access to basic services, income, housing conditions, and crime rates, is getting worse.The topdown, big is beautiful policy that has prevailed under Labour has caused enormous damage to rural communities. This insensitive approach disregards special circumstances and human impact.

The social value of a particular service – its importance to the community that cannot be measured in pounds and pence – barely registers in central decision making. Small services are run down and reorganised into larger, more distant units. The real world effect has been the closure of post offices, police stations, small shops, maternity services, and small schools, with local GP surgeries now under threat.

Conservatives recognise the vital community role played by the local post office, village school and GP surgery, and believe services like these should be delivered as close to local communities as possible.

Village Life

Since the year 2000 one in five rural post offices has closed. The impact on rural communities is immensely damaging and has been compounded by the loss of small shops and local pubs.

A change in approach is required to one that recognises that while it may be cheaper in the short term to close down local services such as the rural post office, in doing so you close down the informal networks that can give elderly and often isolated people vital interaction and social connections and therefore inevitably cause higher long term costs.

• We will announce measures to ensure that consideration of social value is built into each central government decision that affects local communities. When making decisions, we will take account not just of economic efficiency but also the important social role of rural services and thus ensure that decisions are cost effective in the long term as well as the short term.
• We will facilitate new business opportunities for post offices, giving them freedom to offer a wider range of business services and encourage local authorities to open ‘council counters’ in local branches.
• We will cut taxes on low alcohol beers and ciders, and raise duty on problem drinks like high strength ciders and alcopops, to help promote the traditional pub while targeting binge drinking.
• We will let councils cut the red tape that makes it unnecessarily difficult for charities, sports clubs and other local groups to put on events such as fetes and other social activities unless there is strong local objection.

Rural Services

The 20 most excluded parts of the country, in terms of distance to services such as GP surgeries and primary schools, are all in significantly rural areas.

Village residents prize their local school but hundreds have been closed in recent years under Government guidance which favours shutting schools with empty desks. This has served to undermine the sustainability of villages, increase travel costs and place pressure on parents to relocate to be within proximity of an alternative. Elsewhere where populations are growing local schools are overflowing, again removing parental choice.

Rural health services are also under pressure as the roll-out of polyclinics – large, centralised surgeries – threatens the closure of hundreds of traditional GP surgeries. While polyclinics might be appropriate in some areas, they are likely to reduce the physical accessibility of primary care for patients in rural settings. We oppose this. We will continue to defend the right of rural GPs to dispense drugs and treatment in their area.

As local services are lost, the decline in public transport provision has made accessing alternatives increasingly difficult.  Due to the sparsity of many parts of the countryside conventional bus services, which run along set routes, can be an inefficient use of limited resources. Demand responsive schemes are often more appropriate to rural needs andprovide better value for money.

While there are successful dial-a-ride services operating in this country, these tend to be small-scale, offering limited hours of operation and requiring booking well in advance. Schemes in mainland Europe have been found to provide from five to fifty times as many passenger trips as typical schemes in England, suggesting there are clear opportunities to make current expenditure on rural public transport ‘work harder’.

• We will scrap limits on surplus places so that good small schools can prosper and new ones can open where parents, not Whitehall, want them.
• We will encourage parents, charities and others to start new schools, by cutting red tape from planning laws to building regulations, and give parents control of the taxpayers’ money that the government spends on each pupil.
• We will pilot the successful demand responsive transport schemes which operate in rural areas of mainland Europe, often coordinated with main services, as recommended by the Commission for Integrated Transport.
• We will encourage school trips to farms and the countryside to enable children to gain a real understanding of the natural environment and food production by allowing teachers more discretion to organise visits and sweeping away absurd health and safety regulations.
• We will halt Labour’s top-down imposition of polyclinics across the country because we understand that local GP surgeries are an important and valued part of our rural communities.
• We will use the existing Sure Start programme to introduce a universal health visitor service for new parents which will help those in rural areas who might have difficulty accessing post-natal support services.

Affordable rural housing

Traditional village life is threatened not only by disappearing shops and services but by the chronic shortage of affordable rural housing, which is driving many young people into towns and cities. Shrinking populations threaten the continued existence of local services such as post offices, GP surgeries and schools. Without action on affordable housing villages risk becoming frozen in time.

Currently the Government selects sites in the middle of the countryside from behind desks in Whitehall. In contrast, our plans to provide more affordable housing in rural areas will return genuine power to local communities.

Many rural areas are unable to develop the homes they desperately need because permission is required from the planning authorities. We believe that these restrictions should be lifted and that if a village wishes to propose its own expansion then it should have the power to provide itself with the planning permission required, subject to the agreement of local people and within set limits.

Crucially we will ensure that the benefits of development will remain within the community in perpetuity. So any affordable housing that is sold at below market rates to local residents cannot be subsequently sold on the open market but must be recycled within the community, who can then decide on the type and quantity of housing to be built.

• We will encourage the creation of new bodies – Local Housing Trusts – for those villages that wish to develop new housing to benefit their community. These bodies will have power to develop new homes and other space for community use, provided there is strong local support.
• We will help to establish a voluntary body representing Local Housing Trusts to pool knowledge, technical skills and experience to help provide assistance and guidance to newly formed Trusts.
• We will relax the rules that prevent thousands of habitable empty properties being used to house those on local authority waiting lists.
• We will enable rural councils to revise their current local plans in order to protect Green Belt land.

Tackling disadvantage

Despite outward appearances of wealth more than one and a half million people in rural areas are living in poverty. This figure is on the increase but many parts of rural England are missing out on funding to tackle financial hardship and worklessness because the problem is dispersed over a wide geographical area.

• We will work to ensure that rural needs are fairly reflected in the allocation of funding.
• We will introduce a new entitlement for every home to be fitted with up to £6,500 of approved energy efficiency improvements, which will help the one in five families in the most rural areas who are struggling to keep warm; this will pay for itself in reduced heating bills.
• We will encourage local authorities to introduce and expand village agent schemes and make it easier for them to access the rural development funding that is currently allocated by RDAs. Village agents are a signposting service where trusted people who know the local area and what’s on offer can help elderly people in need, advising on benefits and preventative measures, like flu jabs, smoke alarms and grab rails.