Heather Hancock - Let’s take a fresh look at the challenges facing the countryside

My home sits deep in the heart of the Yorkshire Dales, and the Yorkshire Dales is just as deeply embedded in my heart. Like many lucky enough to have been born and brought up in the countryside, I feel hefted to that landscape. From my early career as a land agent, then running the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority, through to today when I have the privilege to chair the Prince’s Countryside Fund, I’ve met thousands of country people with that same passionate commitment to their environment and their community.

I’ve witnessed the self-help instinct, the resourcefulness and determination, of families, farmers, rural businesses, to carve out a sustainable future for their corner of rural Britain. Although many of our fellow citizens wouldn’t choose to live in ‘the middle of nowhere’, millions of them feel a great connection to and responsibility for our countryside, for those places which to some of us really are the centre of everything.

They recognise that enormous expectations are piling up on our countryside. Make us healthier and happier! Reverse the biodiversity deficit! Enhance our national resilience! Contribute to a prosperous future! And do these things quickly and in concert, with less national funding, while opening ever-wider the metaphorical doors to the countryside. These are admirable ambitions with which almost everyone seems to agree. They are often urgent, and they are undoubtedly critically important.

But who is going to make these things happen? How will they achieve them? Do they have the authority to convene and intervene? Have they the skills, the powers, the wherewithal to act? Where and how will the consensus be built? Who is trusted to negotiate the inevitable compromises and trade-offs? And where, in all of this, do we place the people who live and work in the countryside today, integral to the environment we so desperately need to repair and improve?

For too long, and regardless of the political persuasion of government, many people who are deeply invested in and hopeful about our countryside have felt that the opportunity to design and deliver a bright future for rural Britain has stalled. They’ve noticed the absence of cohesive national policy, listened to noisy turf wars over who has how much say, observed the failure at many levels of leadership to appreciate how the countryside works today and how it could work tomorrow. We must get beyond this.

That’s why, as rapporteur for Future Countryside, I’m delighted to be part of an event that’s taking a fresh look at the challenge and our responsibilities, that’s getting us talking about the route map that will deliver us to a healthy, prosperous, valued countryside and a promising future for the people who live and work there. More than anything, and because I know there is no shortage of vision, I’m going to be listening for the who and the how. What has stopped successive brilliant ideas and promising innovations from being realised or scaled up? Where are the roadblocks and how do we get around them? Can we think differently, creatively about the structural economic and social issues, the complications caused by isolation and fragmentation, the situations where the unattainable best becomes the enemy of the achievable good. Writing a visionary manifesto for our future countryside is easy, but success is in the detail - the kind of detail and commitment that will see us progress at scale, at speed and in harmony to deliver the future our countryside and its people deserve. I look forward to hearing lots of it.