Rural Services

Services are the basis for any community – access to shops and post offices, healthcare, activities - create and enhance a feeling of belonging and a sustainable future for the area.

Rural communities have experienced significant social change over the last couple of decades. Very often villages do not offer adequate services for the local community to access, which forces people to travel out of their community to access services such as doctor’s surgeries, schools, shops and post offices. For many, private transport, either a car or taxi, is the only way of accessing these services. The increased costs of accessing services together with the increased costs of housing has led to rural living becoming less and less affordable, and for some completely unaffordable. This is particularly a problem for older people, families with young children and young people.

Given the need to minimise the use of public and private as transport, ACRE promotes activity that delivers and helps sustain services within rural areas especially those led by the community itself.  There is clearly an inherent challenge of the additional cost of rural service delivery that is reflected by the continuing closure of key rural services like shops, garages and pubs.

Factors that have caused a decline in rural services

There has been a decline in key rural services across rural England based on a range of factors:

• The effect of market forces and, in some cases, the arrival of supermarkets in local areas making local services no longer competitive 
• The changing pattern of rural population, with more mobile residents with different shopping and consumer patterns becoming a greater part of the rural pattern of life
• A change in expectations of rural residents themselves, no longer prepared to make do with relatively poor and expensive services and, in many cases, with the means and opportunity to access better services.

The 2007 report A loss to everyone from one of ACRE’s members, Action with Communities in Rural Cumbria describes some of the consequences of the withdrawal of services to communities in a rural area.

The work of the Rural Community Action Network members

ACRE is the national umbrella body for the Rural Community Action Network members across England.  Read more about RCAN here

Rural Community Action Network members work with rural communities, groups and individuals to develop projects, initiatives and approaches in response to this social change. The aim is to try to ensure that rural communities do not become a place where only the rich can afford to live and that support sustainability.

Across the Rural Community Action Network there are specialist advisers to provide advice and support for a range of rural services. These services include:

• Transport
• Community services -  shops, post offices, health and social care
• Young people   
• Childcare
• Housing
• Local area development and environmental improvements
• Crime & community safety

Throughout these web pages are examples of relevant work of RCAN members.  Further details can be found via ACRE’s website About RCAN

View ACRE's Policy Position Paper on Services here