Rural Services

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

Rural communities especially, 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.

Rural Community Councils 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.

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

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

Factors in Decline

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 no opportunity to access better services.