Up to £347 billion in untapped rural potential, says CRC

A new, holistic model of investment could help rural areas reap the fruits of a green economic revival

The Welbeck Estate in Sherwood Forest can teach us a thing or two about rural development. Just three years ago it gave birth to Stichelton, a new blue cheese in the classic mould. Now, a whole School of Artisan Food has opened there. The first such place in the country, set up with an £890,000 grant from the East Midlands Development Agency (emda), it offers courses ranging from baking and brewing to butchery and cheesemaking. And as a seedbed of small-scale entrepreneurship, it promises a triple yield of benefits for rural Britain: job creation, economic vitality and local production.

But public investment in rural projects like this is all too rare. So says Stuart Burgess, Chair of the Commission for Rural Communities (CRC). His 2008 report to Government argues that there’s an urban-rural imbalance in sustainable development funding, and it needs to be redressed.

It’s partly a matter of social justice, the third (and sometimes missing) leg of sustainability’s three-legged stool, says Burgess – but it’s also good economic sense. CRC estimates the value of untapped potential output from UK rural areas at anything from £236 billion to £347 billion. And green considerations strengthen their case too, since their natural environment is often their biggest base asset.

Part of the problem is that standard models for investment don’t always work in smaller communities, says Roger Turner, Head of Rural Economies at CRC. “There’s a mismatch between [communities’] need for relatively small levels of investment over a period of years and the standard view of capital-driven, one-off payments for physical-type interventions.”

An urban bias to investment strategy can even affect money which has been specifically earmarked for issues endemic in small communities. Take the Town Centre Management Fund, intended to help tackle the cascading negative impact of failures of local businesses. To target it, the Government relied partly on the indices of multiple deprivation (IMD). Unfortunately, this measure tends to discriminate against areas with sparser populations. The result: less money to rural areas, where the need for high street regeneration is every bit as acute.

How to put this right? As a first step, Burgess calls for a shift from simply bolstering certain industrial sectors, to a more holistic view of sustainable places, building on their particular strengths and protecting their specific assets. “The answer,” he wrote, “lies in allowing local businesses in partnership with local government to better access government support, with a particular emphasis on benefiting from investment and innovation.”

A recent series of CRC workshops spawned by the Burgess report – on innovation, leadership, empowerment and investment – kept coming back to this underlying theme of sustainable, equitable development. For inspiration, they highlighted success stories like these:

• Haslemere in Surrey. In this Transition Town, mayor Melanie Odell has provided vital leadership with initiatives to make the town more vibrant economically – such as a reward card giving shoppers points for making local purchases. Yet she credits the town’s volunteers as the success force.
• Broughton Hall Estate in North Yorkshire. The Tempest family, its owner for 900 years, stumbled on a new vision almost by accident when a small business asked to rent a portion of a building. Now the estate, extensively restored, houses 40 families and 50 companies as diverse as a pram and carriage manufacturer, a lingerie designer and a radio station. Future plans include planting new woods for carbon sequestration.
• Hethel Engineering Centre. Rural Norfolk’s seedbed for cleantech innovation: its proximity to Lotus Cars helps nurture a network of smaller engineering and manufacturing firms – working together locally, while successfully accessing international markets.

A fifth CRC-sponsored workshop in January will pull together common threads and messages into clear agenda items for local planning and development agencies. Could embedding these in policies and programmes usher in a rural green new deal?

– April Streeter and Roger East

Commission for Rural Communities is a Forum for the Future partner.

13 January 2010

April Streeter and Roger East