Hot air from city leaves country cold
IT IS a bit like sending an octopus to monitor a desert. An expensive report into poverty in the countryside was presented this week to the two ministers deemed responsible, the Minister for Local Government and the Minister for Rural Affairs — respectively the MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth and the MP for Brent North, those well-known rural constituencies.
At least Phil Woolas and Barry Gardiner won’t have had trouble getting to the event, which was held, naturally, bang in the middle of London.
The Commission for Rural Communities (CRC) was set up by the Government a year ago as an arm of the Countryside Agency. It is headed by a “Rural Advocate”, the Rev Stuart Burgess, whose job is to speak for the countryside to government ministers.
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The trouble with such commissions is that as often as not they do as you would expect: they commission things. And then they write reports about what the commission has commissioned. And then someone makes a speech about the report into the commission’s commission. And before they know it, they have turned into little more than talking shops.
If I were cynical I would suggest that the CRC was simply created to shut the Countryside Agency up and make it feel as though ministers were listening to it. Remember how it used to cause trouble all the time? It doesn’t any more. Indeed the Countryside Agency’s website now boasts that its rural advocate has a remit to “argue the case on countryside issues and for rural people at the highest levels in government and outside . . . The rural advocate has direct access to government ministers and can attend the Cabinet’s Ministerial Sub- Committee on Rural Renewal.”
It’s a tried and tested formula in government to flatter your biggest critics with grand but meaningless titles, give them a budget and invite them to important-sounding meetings.
So what did the CRC produce this week? First, a piece of market research which found that 93 per cent of people in rural areas were very or fairly satisfied with the local area. Only 4 per cent were dissatisfied.
You might think they would stop there – everyone’s happy; fine, but that, of course, would render the CRC futile. So in a stunningly pointless exercise the researchers honed in on how much harder it is for people in rural areas to access services than it is for people in towns. Amazingly, they found that it is harder to get to the doctor or cashpoint; that public transport is better in towns than in villages. Wow!
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When asked spontaneously to name the problems people faced in their local area, the most common answer was public transport — much to the surprise of researchers, who had expected them to mention things such as poverty, housing and jobs. So they prompted them to do so. You can read it at ruralcommunities.gov.uk
This was a study into rural disadvantage which found that rural people by and large do not feel disadvantaged. If people don’t feel poor, even when technically they are, and they are happy, then surely they are fine? But governments and quasi-governmental bodies such as the CRC have to discover misery to justify their existence. If nobody is disadvantaged, then what is the point of the CRC’s campaign against rural disadvantage?
Yes, there are pockets of poverty in the rural idyll. But by and large people do not feel poor, largely because they are secure, well-fed and often surrounded by great beauty, after which the amount of money in their pockets comes a poor second place. Life is cheaper and more relaxed than in the cities. People cook rather than get takeaways. The doctor might be farther away but that doesn’t necessarily make him less accessible, as anyone who can compare an inner-city practice with a rural one will tell you. There is a lesson for ministers here, but it isn’t the one the CRC is trying to push.
I am happy to say that the two ministers at the event responded with non-committal speeches about the potential of electronic government and the need to tackle social exclusion anywhere it occurs. Mr Woolas pointed out that 7 per cent of the total population targeted by the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund, which focuses on areas of greatest deprivation, are in rural and largely rural districts. Only 7 per cent, and that includes semi-urban former mining areas such as Easington near Newcastle.
Why? Because on the whole rural areas suffer nothing like the deprivation of the cities. No matter what the CRC says.
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As for the Cabinet’s Ministerial Sub-Committee on Rural Renewal, the one the rural advocate is allowed to attend. It was scrapped two months after the CRC had been created.
Mr Burgess, you’ve been had.