The View From England

by Carol Evans

UKCAP's voice on rural issues

June 2009

 

Country life a bed of roses? Not for all.

That idyllic country cottage may be very desirable when you are on holiday and have a car, but consider the difficulties of someone on low income and no car trying to access services that urban dwellers take for granted.

 

Here are some figures:

 

Over 20% of rural households are more than 4 km from a GP surgery and 33% are more than 4 km from a NHS dentist. (The figures for urban dwellers are 0.1% and 0.2%.) 30% are more than 4km from the supermarket and 37% from a bank or building society, with15% more than 2 km from a post office.

 

Whereas only 5% of people in urban areas do not live within 13 minutes walk of a bus stop with at least an hourly service, in villages or hamlets 51% don’t.

 

It is not surprising that 36% of all households with no car or van living more than 60 minutes travel time from a hospital are found in rural areas.

 

The percentage of rural people living below the poverty line is very similar to that of urban areas, but recent research has shown that it is the rural sparse areas that have the highest percentage of people living in low income households. The Commission for Rural Communities (CRC) found that except for parts of London the most unaffordable housing areas are nearly all rural. The average house in East Dorset costs 16 times the average annual income and in South Shropshire it is 16.5 times average incomes.

 

(Figures taken from CRC State of the Countryside 2007 and National Federation of Housing report 2009)

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