Austerity in rural England…. any glimmers in the darkness?
There has been so much speculation and projection about the scale and impacts of future public austerity measures. It’s mostly pretty depressing stuff. Let me add to this! The literature on this subject has largely been silent on the possible impacts on rural people and places.
So, we in the Commission for Rural Communities have published a discussion paper, ‘The potential impacts on rural communities of future public austerity’. We prepared this following a literature review and a roundtable discussion last month chaired by Ben Lucas, Director of the 2020 Public Services Trust.
We want to help those who represent and serve our rural communities with ideas on how future austerity measures might affect rural people and places. And what they could do about it. Now is the short window of opportunity for rural representatives to consider these challenges and to act on them where possible.
Where decisions are taken locally, using the practices and tools of Rural Proofing, the more likely it is that the right decisions in the circumstances will be taken. The Total Place approach should have the potential to deliver joined up spending reductions that still maintain good service access.
New Start readers will be pleased to hear roundtable participants also focussed on questions about rural people and communities and their resilience. It was felt that government, at all levels, needed to protect, maintain and sustain the capacity of local communities to help themselves, through community development and other support.
Other highlighted areas included throwing a spotlight on a hardy perennial, trying to achieve fairer resource allocations between different local authority and other areas. And within them.
We felt there was room for delivering further efficiencies in the rural public sector, including unitary authorities and virtual unitary authorities and improving boundary coterminosities. This would demand strong leadership and collaboration.
On the basis that you shouldn’t waste a crisis we also felt now was a good time to look at more radical innovation. Maybe constructing shire mayoral/gubernatorial systems to deliver Total Place ambitions; releasing further potential from the work of parish and town councils; and also insistently taking up best practice from Beacon Councils and (Audit Commission) Green Flag exemplar projects and elsewhere. The challenge for rural representatives, as well as public servants, is to see the glimmers and occasional opportunities through the prevailing grimness of austerity.
And that’s about as cheerful as it gets.
Posted on Friday, 22nd January 2010 | This entry has 3 comments
Bill McCallum | Thursday, 4th February 2010 | 04:18 PM
I don’t wish to denigrate the stance taken by the individuals and organisations involved with improving rural communities, but some questions do spring to mind…
Firstly…the use of language is so important to enable participation at all levels, having been involved in community regeneration for almost 15 years, this is the first time I have come across the terms “coterminosities” or “gubernatorial” and I found it almost laughable that such language should be used where relating to rural communities. Or is the author inadvertantly stating that the grass roots community won’t be reading this type of document and that everyone who does understand it will know what he means?
Secondly… I suspect that it is highly unlikely that some of the examples set by Beacon Councils would be ideal for replication in rural areas. One of these councils undertook a campaign against a local regeneration practitioner, making accusations of fraud, insisting on management changes within an independant community group, recruiting a replacement who failed miserably, took over the groups assets when it failed and then won Beacon Status for Neighbourhood Renewal.
The rural communities you seek to strenghten can be supported by encouraging people who want to make improvements (and these are not usually the affluent middles and upper classes with enhanced vocabulary) to their communities.
My experiences here in West Dorset seem to imply that the majority of those with high incomes or lucrative pensions don’t really want their communities to change, they draw comfort from the fact that there has been little change over the last 50 years, and don’t relish outsiders telling them that they need to change, but i’m an outsider, what do I know?
Robert Bullard | Monday, 8th February 2010 | 05:44 PM
Interesting to read your discussion paper …
I agree with you about the probable cuts, move to on-line services, etc. But it would be nice to be a bit more specific – areas like affordable housing have risen up the agenda and could well be protected by either new government. Other talk however is probably just promises - like the idea that the voluntary sector and social enterprises be used to mend Cameron’s ‘Broken Society’ (if he wins).
You say quite a bit about the unitaries, but an earlier impact I think is the move towards localism (with MAAs, Total Place and now LEAs) which could give councils more powers in their areas…
And you don’t mention the probable demise of RDAs – but I think most people in rural areas will applaud that. What do you reckon?
You can read my predictions on the same theme: http://www.robertbullard.com/blog/?p=504
Crispin Moor | Saturday, 13th February 2010 | 09:42 AM
Not wishing to take your comments a bit personally Bill, and failing!, I have to say I’m not going to dumb down my language for a New Start blog and to do so would be patronising. The confusion of boundaries within shire England has long been recognised as a challenge to effective local governance and service delivery (and is one driver behind the push for more shire unitaries). And a gubernatorial system which is beginning to have an interesting (good and bad) history in urban England (whether in London or Hartlepool or Middlesbrough) is just assumed to have no relevance to rural governance. This is patronising, or perhaps just forgetful. I wanted, and want, to challenge that view. One bad example of a beacon award (and actually there are usually two sides to both bad examples and good examples) does not logically mean that the whole category is bad, as it were. And I agree that the dynamics of incomers and indigenous folk leads to interesting and challenging local sociologies and power structures and dynamics. West Dorset, from my visits there, is a good case in point. I hope community development initiatives are fighting the good fight there. (Beware though that indigenous power structures in some rural places look a bit like (barely) modernised feudalism to me!).