I moved to South Devon in 2007. Before then, I’d lived in Edinburgh, Sheffield, and London on and off for nearly two decades.
Coming here 18 years ago was my first real experience of rural life, other than holidays, and in the time since, something has become clear to me: the rural/urban divide is one of the deepest in our country.
Last week, I led a parliamentary debate about this.
I spoke about the 10 million people who live in rural areas and feel left behind by successive governments; spoke about a place where pubs, banks, post offices and other services are closing en masse; spoke about somewhere where there are no buses, no dentists, where healthcare is far away and hard to reach and broadband is frankly archaic compared to what you get in the cities.
This is rural Devon. But I was describing a very different Devon from the postcard perfect image many people have of rural life.
It’s a place that’s hidden in the data.
The Index of Multiple Deprivation, which is used to capture need for core Local Authority services, is urban-centric and woefully out of date, relying on data from 2019.
It misses small, dispersed rural pockets of acute deprivation. All it takes is one or two very wealthy residents to skew the figures for an entire settlement – meaning deprivation disappears from the official figures.
It paints a rosy picture when in reality, Devon is considerably more deprived than the national average on several key measures. Housing and low wages are two that often crop up, but access to services is also very poor.
This measurement has a knock-on effect on the levels of government funding, which, in turn, helps to perpetuate an issue that no government, Conservative or Labour, has taken seriously.
Under the 2025-26 Local Government Finance Settlement, government funded spending power in predominately urban areas will be £573.51 per head compared to £407.32 in rural ones.
Urban councils will get a huge 41% (£166.19) more per head than rural, despite council tax being on average 20% higher in rural places than urban ones (£718.10 compared to £600.72).
Last week the Government announced continued funding for the Rural England Prosperity Fund, with up to £33m directed to the fund, to improve local infrastructure and essential services that benefit rural communities and help businesses to expand, creating jobs and kickstarting the rural economy.
From 2023-25 this fund was £110m, so while £33m is welcome, it does equate to an annual funding cut of 36%.
The terrible economic inheritance from the Conservatives can partly explain this, but in many ways, Labour has picked up from where they left off in holding rural areas and particularly the southwest in contempt.
There is the outrageous family farm tax, for starters. And the decision to raise the bus fare cap. But also, Labour’s Plan for Neighbourhoods scheme, which was announced this month.
The Scheme is Labour’s answer to Levelling Up and will offer up to £20m to 75 areas across the UK to support high street regeneration, local services and public spaces. However, only one town in the entire southwest will benefit from it, compared to 13 in the northwest.
Given Devon is considerably more deprived than the national average in areas like housing, how can this be? I’ve asked the Government to urgently reconsider this.
I’ve also expressed my concern over the Government’s decision to allocate additional funding with the Local Government Financial Settlement on a “need and demand” basis.
This new system of allocation will not recognise that the sparse and isolated nature of rural areas drives higher costs for the delivery of essential services, creates challenges in recruitment of staff for key services, and requires local authorities to provide a greater public subsidy for the provision of public transport.
There’s a lot to unpack here and much of this chronic underfunding goes back decades. I was proud during the debate to hear so many of my Lib Dem colleagues raise stories from their own rural constituencies, not only of closing banks and bad broadband, but about isolation, loneliness and mental health too.
Listening to them I was struck again by something I thought while I was preparing for the debate: that we urgently need people at the top, making decisions, who really understand rural communities, can recognise the gaps in our current deprivation data, and tackle the systemic issues that are growing in a part of the country that is so often forgotten about.
10 million people who live in rural areas have been left behind by successive governments, this has to change
