Thank you for contacting me about rural communities.
The Conservatives are determined to be the party that stands up for the countryside and ensures that rural communities across this community can continue to thrive.
Rural areas already contribute over £250 billion to the economy. We will build on this, supporting jobs, growth and education in rural communities.
We will promote good oral health through our ‘Smile for Life’ programme. Rural communities will be better served through ‘golden hellos’ to encourage dentists to work in these areas, and through new dental vans.
We will also further improve access to NHS services across England by training more staff in rural areas. For the first time the NHS Constitution will reflect the bespoke healthcare needs of rural communities and the need for the NHS to tailor services accordingly.
We will support solar in the right places, not on our best agricultural land. We have changed planning rules to protect the best agricultural land with a presumption that this is used for food production, while also making it easier for solar to be located on brownfield sites and on rooftops. Our new planning rules also prevent multiple solar farms being clustered in one area to help protect our rural landscapes.
Food security is part of our national security. Our food and farming sectors generate over £120 billion for the UK economy every year. In the last Parliament, we maintained the farming budget to support our food security. In England, this has supported farmers with a range of options to choose what works best for them, from business advice to new equipment, soil and nutrient management and hedgerow planting.
Our manifesto commits to go further by investing an additional £1 billion in the farming budget over the next Parliament. Labour’s actions in Wales show that they will never be on the side of the farming community. Their blueprint involves top-down targets, fundamentally denying farmers the flexibility they need to achieve environmental goals in ways that work for them and making their primary job of keeping the nation fed harder.
Their manifesto dedicates just 87 words to farming, and does not commit to protect the farming budget. Conservatives will always be on the side of farmers.
Over 80 per cent of properties across the country can now access high-speed broadband, up from just 7 per cent in 2019, with a record £714 million committed to boosting rural broadband coverage in 2024. We will invest in new technology to achieve our ambitious broadband targets for hard-to-reach areas.
On transport, the £2 fare cap has cut rural bus fares by over 11 per cent and our commitment in our Backing Drivers Bill not to introduce pay per mile road pricing schemes will ensure people who rely on their cars in rural areas are protected.
We will do more to boost the availability of affordable housing for local people in rural areas. We will ensure rural exception sites support local people into home ownership and create a dedicated taskforce in Homes England to deliver on the mission set out in their Rural Housing Statement to invest in regeneration and building high quality homes.
We will ensure councils have the powers they need to manage the uncontrolled growth of holiday lets, which can cause nuisance to residents and a broader ‘hollowing out’ of communities.
In June 2023 we launched the Unleashing Rural Opportunity, setting out four broad priorities that are key to rural communities being able to thrive. As part of this, we provided £200,000 to help establish the National Rural Crime Unit. The NRCU supports forces nationally in their responses to rural crime, such as the theft of farming or construction machinery, livestock theft, rural fly tipping, rural fuel theft and equine crime. In collaboration with the NRCU, the Combined Industry Thefts Solution has provided training to nearly 600 police officers, covering skills in how to identify and examine stolen agricultural and construction machinery, and knowledge about the methods of theft.
We will continue to support and back rural communities.
