Shadow Environment and Rural Affairs Secretary Chris Huhne MP sets out the Liberal Democrat vision for sustainable communities

Let me start by helping to shake up some conventional wisdoms about the sustainability of rural communities. The first that needs attacking is that they are declining and unsuccessful: wrong and wrong again. England’s rural areas attracted half of the country’s total population growth over the last two decades. Rural areas account for a fifth of England’s population, and are growing in population by more than 100,000 a year. If we had the figures for economic growth for rural areas, they would clearly show much higher than average growth.

Rural areas clearly have a higher quality of life than urban ones. People live longer in rural areas, and are in generally better health. Rural areas are also a good place to bring up children: education is better. Nearly two thirds of rural children achieve A* to C grades at GCSE, whereas just fewer than half of urban children do. Crime levels are less than half those in urban areas.

Nor are people making a financial sacrifice by living in rural areas. Although weekly earnings are lower than in urban areas, this does not take account of other sources of income such as self-employment. Household income in rural areas is now similar to that in urban ones. Unemployment is lower too.

However, there are difficulties in the farming sector which warrant careful attention and support. It is in no-one’s interest to see a succession of serious shocks wipe out skills and capacity that are not just viable but essential in any normal year, and there is always a strong argument given the highly cyclical nature of agricultural prices either for good forward and futures markets or for smoothing by public policy if those markets fail to work.  One survival strategy, as in so many other business areas where cheap competition enters the market, is to move up market. The trend to organic production – now particularly significant in the South-West where it accounts for more than 5 per cent of output – is a sensible response to premium prices. So is the development of local farmers’ markets guaranteeing the freshness of local produce.

The establishment of the English Food and Farming Partnerships, which seek to encourage and develop cooperation amongst farming businesses and to improve supply chain relationships, is also welcome. So is the likely referral of the supermarkets to the Competition Commission, announced by the Office of Fair Trading last week, for their dominance of the grocery trade. We need a full scale Competition Commission inquiry into supermarket power. We would also appoint a food trade inspector to protect suppliers from abuses of supermarket power within the Office of Fair Trading.

But another part of the survival of farm businesses is diversification. Rural areas are already much less reliant on farming than many suppose. In fact, the last census showed that agriculture and fishing accounted for just 2.6 per cent of employment even in rural areas. Manufacturing was far more important, with nearly six times as much employment in rural areas as farming. Small businesses have been sprouting in rural areas. Self-employment is substantially higher than across the country. On all these counts, the rural economy is a relatively successful part of the UK economy, and is likely to continue to grow.

Why? I suspect that it is because technology has begun to reverse some of the traditional economic disadvantages of rural areas. We are used to hearing about the death of distance in promoting globalisation, but the death of distance also benefits those parts of the country that were until recently regarded as isolated by their geography. Suddenly, rural areas have all their traditional advantages of closeness to nature and quality of life, but their disadvantages are dwindling daily. Better transport infrastructure, and perhaps even more crucially better information technology infrastructure – through broadband access – has meant that the need for a business to be near its markets in the big cities has become ever less pressing. Because the workforce is relatively mobile, manufacturers can start and grow in rural areas with fewer space constraints than elsewhere.

And because of broadband, creative businesses that are adding value through sales, marketing or design can work without any constraints of geography. Why put a recording studio in Abbey Road, Camden when it could be in Abbey Road, Llangollen?

Development in rural areas must be sensitive and in keeping with the character of existing communities: any industrial sites and offices must be carefully situated and screened. If an area is allowed to become merely a great etiolated suburb of some nearby conurbation, the seeds of failure will have been sown. Getting the balance right is best left to local authorities, where the local electorate can chuck out those who fail to deliver what they want. Decisions should be taken as closely as possible to those affected by them, but they should also be influenced by all the considerations of those with interests in the local community.

We need to bite the bullet on housing, particularly in those areas where local young people are being priced out by an influx of the urban elite buying second homes. The recommendations of the Affordable Rural Housing Commission will need to be considered carefully. It is a clear threat to the sustainability of rural communities if they cannot retain those on relatively low incomes. In ten years, the supply of social housing has been halved. More social housing is a key need.

Rural areas generally suffer difficulties in the delivery of public services that urban dwellers take for granted: the failure of an out of hours service for the local GP can have more extreme consequences if you live sixty miles from the nearest accident and emergency department in a general hospital.

Government protection for the rural post office network to prevent avoidable closures is due to end, and only the Liberal Democrats now propose a fund of £2 billion raised from the sale of a part of the capital of Royal Mail to develop new lines of business that can make rural post offices sustainable.

The collapse of rural public transport has left increasing numbers of people reliant on their car: just 8 per cent of rural households are carless compared with 30 per cent in urban areas. People living in rural areas spend the most on transport. This is why any reliance on green taxes to change behaviour has to take account of the high dependency of all households, including poor ones, on fuel in rural areas, and I hope that the tax commission that is considering Liberal Democrat policy in this area will look at potential offsets for rural areas if the burden of fuel taxes rises.

It is also important to point out that not all rural areas are successful. The more sparsely populated parts of the UK – in England, areas of Cornwall, Devon, Cumbria, Northumberland and the Fens – have not benefited as much from the rural revival. Some are still declining.

An underlying problem is remoteness: there are dramatic differences for example in broadband connectivity with just 33.4 per cent of households in villages in these areas having access against more than 75.4 per cent in the villages in the less sparsely populated rural areas. People are further from services like the GP, hospital, secondary schools. Bus transport is even less frequent than in less remote areas.

The appropriate response to these problems from local authorities has to include an attack on the underlying cause – on remoteness – through the use of economic development powers. Business incubation units can be a real boost to a local economy and in a remote area could also be the trigger for broadband connectivity.

Local authorities in rural areas also have a crucial role in ensuring environmental sustainability. This cannot be seen as an add-on or an optional extra, because the integrity of the rural environment is exactly what makes rural areas attractive. Rural areas lose that environmental quality at their peril. There are many elements to this: landfill, infill development, quality control on the finish and look of new developments, road-building, traffic, bio-diversity and noise and light pollution.

Rural areas face new problems and new challenges. They no longer face the spectre of long-term decline because of the shift in the terms of trade against agriculture, but they face instead the danger that they will lose their attractiveness because urban Britain loves them too much. The danger is that rural areas are killed with kindness and success. Getting the balance right is crucial, and local authorities are the key bodies to make the call.


This article is an edited version of a speech given by Chris Huhne to the Local Government Association on 14 March 2006. The full speech can be read on the LGA website.