Speech by Barry Gardiner MP for the Commission for Rural Communities Conference, "One Year On", on "The wider rural agenda", 14 June 2007
The opportunity of a decent home at a price people can afford is a vital component to a prosperous and sustainable countryside. It helps support communities to be socially and economically vibrant and inclusive.
It is one year on since the Affordable Rural Housing Commission published it’s final report, and actually quite a lot has been done since then. Yvette Cooper, will talk in more detail about how central Government is helping people in rural communities access housing informed by the Commission’s report. I think the actions taken across Government have set a clear base and foundation for local delivery.
As Yvette will tell you, Communities and Local Government, work with Defra, across Whitehall and obviously with other partners, have put in place the national framework for delivery. Through measures such as the new Planning Policy Statement 3: Housing (PPS3) – this framework enables and empowers local and regional delivery bodies to better respond to need and deliver affordable housing in rural areas.
I welcome the lead taken by the Commission for Rural Communities – as a champion for rural people on affordable housing and working with local delivery bodies in this area. And in providing an opportunity, here today, to take stock of the progress made across government and equally at a regional and local level over the past 12 months.
12 months sounds like a long time. Developments such as PPS3 are only 6 months old, and you and I know that it takes time to turn that progress actually into bricks and mortar. It can look like things aren’t happening but in fact they are. We are off to a good start and have set the foundation for delivery at local and regional levels.
Today, however, by way of setting the context for your discussions I want to focus on the wider rural agenda – of which housing is of course, a key element. This will leave Yvette as Housing Minister to focus on the bricks and mortar of housing policy in rural areas.
It is six years since Defra was created – and became the first government department with a specific remit for rural affairs. In that time what we’ve really tried to focus on is improving the evidence base for rural policy.
The new “rural definition” provides data on rural areas right down to local neighbourhoods – and that is a key tool, that rural definition, that is available to inform all delivery bodies at national, regional and local levels.
This evidence base has helped to dispel some myths about life in rural areas and to identify the real challenges for public policy. As a result, rural policy and our rural agenda has become in a way more sophisticated.
So, what does the evidence say about the state of the rural England, and where our priorities should lie? Well, there is strong evidence to show that rural areas are thriving and that rural communities are performing well with regards to sustainability.
One key point to make at the outset is that rural areas are places where people really do want to live. There is a significant trend of counter-urbanisation.
Over the last decade, the population of rural districts in England has increased by almost one million people. In a recent survey, 9 out of 10 people living in the countryside said they would prefer to stay there, compare that to urban areas where only 2 in 10 people interviewed said they wanted to stay.
It is important to put ‘rural’ into context. In general, rural areas are performing well, often on a par with, or better than, urban areas for a range of social and economic indicators. In relation to social disadvantage, evidence suggests that rural areas fare better than the national averages for virtually all dimensions of deprivation.
And much has been achieved in rural areas.
Employment levels have risen and are above the national average. Unemployment in rural areas is now down to 3%. Across every region, the unemployment rate is either the same or lower than the rate in urban areas.
Rural areas have lower proportions of children and working age adults living in poverty compared to urban areas – and these numbers are declining at the same rate or faster. Pensioner poverty has declined across the country - but is declining at a faster rate in rural England.
Rural school closures have fallen from an average of 30 a year before 1997 to an average of 5 a year between 1998 and 2005. Across all rural areas there are fewer working age people with no qualifications compared to urban areas and more rural residents are university educated with a first degree.
If you look at crime in rural areas is much lower and is falling faster than the national average. There is half as much burglary, violent crime and car crime in rural compared to urban areas.
But that’s part of the evidence base. But of course there are still problems and challenges in rural areas, just as there are in all types of areas.
So, while good progress is being made in rural areas across a range of indicators such as I’ve mentioned, we know that more needs to be done. It is often those people who are continuing to suffer from problems of social disadvantage or exclusion that are the hardest to reach, or have the most complex needs.
In rural areas, the deprivation that does exist is dispersed widely and unfortunately not only widely but evenly across rural England, rather than being concentrated in particular localities.
In aggregate, rural areas consistently perform better against all key benchmarks of success, with the notable exception of geographical access to services. In this context, the choices exercised by the relatively affluent, mobile majority to travel to access goods and services have had a direct impact on the viability of certain local services.
Housing is an example, whereby the popularity of living in a rural area impacts upon the housing supply and availability and affordability of housing for local people on lower incomes.
In developing affordable rural housing, as in supporting local services, rural communities themselves must have a key role. In recognition of this, our policy has been to build on and sustain strong existing community ties in rural areas, supporting voluntary and parish council sectors to build the capacity of rural communities to meet their own needs where possible.
Other challenges relate to wider change taking place across the country. Changes, such as demographic and societal change, changes to the economy and globalisation, the threat of terrorism and the impacts of climate change, and opportunities brought by the use of new technologies, - all of these affect the whole of society – of course including people and communities in rural areas.
In many respects, rural areas are at the forefront of many of these changes. And related challenges for public policy will be required to take place in rural areas first. Population growth is occurring across the country, but the pace of change is fastest in rural areas – more than double the rate of growth in urban areas.
Linked to this, the effects of demographic change, in particular the ageing population, is more pronounced in rural areas. Rural areas are seeing the fastest growth in the proportions of older residents. The most rural districts will find that almost half of their residents will be aged 50 and over by 2028.
A rapidly growing and ageing rural population are key drivers for pressure on rural housing supply
The increases in average house prices between 2000 and 2005 experienced across England have occurred at a faster rate in rural compared to urban areas. In sparsely populated rural areas, average house prices have increased by over 100% during this period, compared to around 74% in urban areas.
More societal change is taking place in the form of international in-migration happening across the country – at a faster rate than was experienced historically. All the evidence shows that migrant workers are of great benefit and importance both economically and socially.
Rural industries, such as agriculture, food processing and hospitality are heavily reliant on migrant labour. However, alongside these benefits there are also short-term pressures as service providers that have perhaps limited previous experience of dealing with international migration get to grips with new challenges.
So how can we sustain the progress that has been made in the countryside and meet these existing challenges and the impacts of change that are still occurring?
The first thing to recognise is that there are many more similarities between rural and urban areas than one might initially expect. Rural and urban economies are similar, as is the nature of disadvantage. The challenges and solutions for public policy tend to be similar for those people affected wherever they might live.
Unemployed people living in any type of place need employment or educational opportunities, homeless people need adequate housing.
However, based upon the type of place people live in, policy responses or service delivery may need to be tailored to meet the needs of those particular places and reflect those specific local circumstances.
It is important to recognise that rural England is not a single, homogeneous entity. It takes many forms, from commuter belts around cities to sparsely populated areas on the coast. And differences between rural areas can be greater than between rural and urban areas.
Different places provide different challenges to service delivery. Rural areas present challenges with regards to distance, distribution of population and relationship with the natural environment. But being in a ‘rural’ setting is just one of the many different characteristics to be considered in the development of policy to meet local needs.
What we don’t need are top-down “one-size fits all” rural policies. These won’t deliver for rural communities - just as they actually wouldn’t do for urban areas.
Government is committed to ensuring that public services deliverin all areas and for social and economic outcomes to improve across all parts of the country. This should not be about ‘rural’ vs. ‘urban’ policies.We need to ensure that rural needs and priorities are understood and embedded in wider Government activity – including the regional and sub-regional level and that local areas have the flexibility to deliver in response to their locally identified needs.
Back in July, in his letter to the Prime Minister, David Miliband made a clear statement of his intent on the rural agenda – and that is to “mainstream” rural issues across Government.Of course we have been doing this already, but the message is loud and clear – we need to accelerate the pace at which mainstreaming happens, we need to ensure that it happens across the piece.
Mainstreaming makes sense if we remember that many rural issues are simply reflections of wider societal questions – on housing, transport, education, health – and they should be addressed by Government as such.Public sector delivery needs to deliver for all areas – and rural areas are of course part of that mix.
This is at the heart of the ‘places’ agenda that Communities and Local Government are developing. Linked to the recent Local Government White Paper, whereby local areas - who are best placed to make decisions on local priorities and strategies - are empowered to identify and respond to local needs.
At the national level, it means ensuring that national policy is tailored to local circumstance, rural or urban.At a more local level, it means intelligent, targeted delivery solutions and decisions taken closer to the customer by locally empowered people.David Miliband has dubbed this approach “community proofing”.
Community proofing ensures that rural issues are mainstreamed as they are considered along with all the other characteristics that make up a particular place to make sure that all the issues that affect service delivery in a community have been taken into account.
To enable this, central government has a role of putting in place the framework, resources and opportunity for local delivery bodies to respond to local needs.
Now let me bring it back to affordable housing, I believe that work following the recommendations of the Affordable Rural Housing Commission has, at the national level, put in place this framework.
Changes to the planning system, and the new Planning Policy Statement 3, are a real result for rural areas. PPS3 takes forward many of the Commission’s recommendations and includes a range of policies to ensure that the housing needs of rural communities are considered as part of mainstream policy.
The next milestone at the national level will be the Comprehensive Spending Review – where the provision of social housing has been identified as a priority by Gordon Brown. The Spending Review will report later in the year.
In the mean time, the latest figures suggest that good progress has been made in the provision of new affordable homes in rural areas: In 2005/06 there were a almost 45,000 new units of affordable housing provided (both new build and acquisitions) across England. 10,000 or 23% of these new units of were provided in rural local authority areas. The same proportion of the population lives in these rural areas.
Affordable housing delivery in rural areas is taking shape, coupled with a new national framework to take this forward. Making the existing tools work is important.
One of the Commission’s most important findings was that if the existing policies, tools and mechanisms to deliver affordable housing were applied as effectively in rural areas, as those that perform most effectively, then the challenges and blockages to the provision of this housing would be significantly less.
And that’s something I am keen to explore, and can announce today some new work to explore how we can break down local barriers to the delivery of affordable housing in rural areas. We can not pre-empt the findings of the Spending Review, but I have asked the Housing Corporation to conduct a feasibility study to look into how a new time-limited fund might be set up to help local delivery bodies to overcome local barriers and blockages to the delivery of affordable housing in rural areas.
This would have the desired outcome of enabling local delivery bodies to access funding to help them tackle and overcome specific local barriers and to deliver a step change in the delivery of affordable housing in rural areas.
One of the Affordable Rural Housing Commission’s recommendations was for future funding of Rural Housing Enablers. But I am interested in outcomes rather than delivery models. And I’d rather empower others to work out what is best for their particular parts of rural England rather than take decisions for them. Local delivery bodies are those who know best what their particular problems are and how best to overcome them. This may, involve the Rural Housing Enabler model that is used in many areas. There can’t be any promises, but this is what I have asked the Housing Corporation to explore.
So let me round up. There are many positives to take away from the state of rural areas across a wide range of social and economic measures. People are voting with their feet as many move to, or would like to, live in rural areas.
Good progress has been made – but we have got huge challenges that remain. Not least by the great demand that there is to live in the countryside, and the pressures this creates for affordable housing. To address these challenges, we think that our approach to mainstream rural issues is absolutely fundamental. The evidence certainly justifies it, and the Government policy context, with its increasing emphasis on devolution and place shaping, confirms this too.
With regards to affordable housing, we share the aspirations of the Affordable Rural Housing Commission. The Commission produced a large number of recommendations – some we have completed, others we are working on. And, of course, many of the key recommendations are aimed at regional and local delivery bodies – like those here today.
Government can and has put in place the framework to deliver, but it is the regional and local delivery bodies who are best placed to identify local need and who are the bedrock to delivering this and meeting those aspirations – supported by and constructively challenged by the Commission for Rural Communities. And I look forward to continuing to work with you on it.
Page published: 3 July 2007