Countryside Alliance - love the countryside

To safeguard our countryside we must as far as possible maintain both the quality and quantity of our existing rural landscape. To do so we need to minimise the predation of countryside areas by commercial and other urban development. But a certain level of judicious, well-planned commercial and residential development can help local rural community viability - and thus enhance the prospects for countryside conservation as a whole.

Our countryside badly needs new IT infrastructure to provide the communications links vital for rural-based businesses - especially so they can overcome their inherent geographic communications disadvantages and compete more effectively with their urban counterparts. It needs better local public transport. And it needs new villages - or extensions of existing ones - to provide the homes for those required to fill the jobs which move into and are created in rural areas.

Planning has a huge impact on the social, environmental and economic sustainability of rural communities. But increasingly the process is being wrenched away from the elected representatives of these communities and centralised into the hands of departmental civil servants and quangos, on the pretext of ‘predict and provide'.

Our politicians and policy-makers appear increasingly to interpret ‘rural planning' - indeed rural policy as a whole - as the subordination of rural communities' interests to those of visitors or commuters from the towns. This is not only inequitable but self-defeating since it will lead to the disappearance of the kind of countryside people want to visit or live in.

To solve this will require a completely new rural policymaking ‘mind-set'. In the same way that urban planning focuses on promoting the interests of urban residents, the ‘rural planning' process should be re-focused on ensuring the viability of the countryside's own communities - and the culture and values and traditions which keep our landscape special.

policy recommendations

• PPS 7 has a provision for land that is not deemed suitable for commercial development to be used for the building of affordable housing. More local authorities should adopt this to encourage development of affordable housing where the demand exists amongst those on low incomes.

• Future revision of planning policy PPS 7 should fully endorse the role of rural enterprise and give preferential treatment to the use of rural brownfield sites.

• The Government should commission an urgent review of the options for reducing the top-heavy development in the South East and equalizing economic development in other areas of the country.

• New commercial enterprises need to be encouraged by a reform of VAT and the generous application of rate relief applied to converted agricultural premises previously exempt as agricultural land or buildings. The existing tax regime not only acts as a disincentive to diversification by farmers but also fails to encourage the use of brownfield rather than greenfield development.

• Inappropriate red tape and over-regulation should be cut to ensure SMEs flourish in rural areas.