Country life is not always a bed of roses; it can be a mix of poverty and ill health
James Derounian – top bloke. This is a cracking article which will reinforce what many of those responsible for rural communities know, but helpfully through the Guardian bring the issues to a wider audience. He tells us:
Forget the roses around the cottage door, country living can be a toxic mix of poverty, isolation and ill health. Government-funded research has repeatedly pointed to 20-25% of households in rural England living in or at the margins of poverty.
Professor Mark Shucksmith, a commissioner to the now defunct Commission for Rural Communities, pointed to hidden and “dispersed poverty”, highlighting the fact that there are similar risks of poverty in urban and rural areas.
Another professor – Clare Wenger – established some time ago that older residents are vulnerable on account of not having social support networks to hand. The classic case of this is the couple who retire to a small town and then, if one of them dies, the other is left alone in a new setting.
In other cases, family members are forced to move away as housing becomes unaffordable. In the last year or so, housing supply has collapsed: affordable housing starts fell by 65% in 2011-12.
Furthermore, rural deprivation can be self-reinforcing – an elderly resident may not have much money, which leads to poor housing and upkeep, payment for relatively expensive goods at a local store and cost of maintaining a car because of bad local transport systems. The combination can lead to physical and mental illness.
It’s not just the elderly who face an uncertain future in the countryside. Farmers are increasingly feeling the pain. A 2007 article in the journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine stated that farmers “are one of the professional groups at highest risk of suicide in England and Wales, and account for about 1% of all suicides”.
What about young people in the countryside? Shucksmith points to suffering due to poor access to transport, a lack of public transport and the high cost of private transport. These are all barriers to finding work.
Careers advice is lacking too, so while schools have a new duty to access independent careers advice, they have no additional funds for this. A low wage, low skill economy dominates rural England. Youth services are disappearing and public services are withdrawn, especially in more remote areas, while voluntary and community provision loses much of its subsidy.
The upshot is hollow words from government: a Defra rural statement in 2012 admits that poverty and deprivation exist in rural areas and that there are crucial economic, geographic and demographic factors relating to distance, population sparsity, ageing, social isolation and market structure, for example, that can have a significant on people’s lives.