Shaping the Future Countryside: A vision for a thriving rural Britain

The Future Countryside event, held on June 6, 2023, at Hatfield House, was a gathering of more than 200 voices from rural Britain, each with unique perspectives but a shared aspiration - to ensure that the countryside is a positive force in the lives of the British people. This event aimed to provide a platform for dialogue, fostering a collective vision for a modern countryside that offers diverse opportunities, including enhancing human health, facilitating nature recovery, addressing climate change, ensuring energy security, and providing nutrient-rich food. A Digest of the discission on the day is available here – designed to capture the conversation and as reference point for its continuation.

The primary objective of Future Countryside was to create a forum for debate where individuals who care deeply about rural Britain could share their views and engage with decision-makers. Of course, this debate underlined that the countryside is a complex entity, with a multitude of demands and ever-evolving challenges. Defining a unified vision and determining the path to its realisation was acknowledged as a necessary yet difficult task. However, amid these complexities, areas of consensus emerged. There was a sense of urgency in the room, with many highlighting the need to address global issues such as climate change, public health, and nature recovery through the untapped potential of the countryside.

The many roles played by rural areas were recognised, and that a shift is needed in our thinking to maximise the countryside's contribution to our collective future given the growing recognition of the value in these natural assets. As several participants emphasised throughout the event, we already possess the knowledge necessary to address the challenges at hand. We have compelling evidence demonstrating the degradation of nature, as well as the role that land, soil, trees, and hedgerows can play in mitigating climate change, and the positive impacts of spending time in nature and consuming food from healthy soils on health and well-being are widely understood.

With this recognition of the countryside's potential, a strong call emerged for rural communities to be at the centre of decision-making and as agents of change. The goal is to optimise the countryside's contribution to our collective future, whilst ensuring the prosperity of those who live and work within it.

The issues undermining rural community vitality are well-documented, including restrictive planning controls, unsympathetic development, policy divergence, inadequate funding, and rural concerns often being relegated to secondary status in central policymaking. The lack of access to affordable housing, services, transportation, and employment opportunities has led many to reluctantly depart rural life, resulting in a 'missing generation' across much of our countryside.

If we are to ask more of the countryside as a vital part of addressing some of our biggest challenges, we need to tackle these systemic issues to make sure those able to deliver those benefits are enabled to do so. There is still much to do to address the issues that undermine the vitality of rural communities, and we need to be ready to embrace opportunity if rural areas are to fully benefit from these shifting priorities.

While there may not be universally applicable solutions, this does not imply that solutions are absent. Event Rapporteur Heather Hancock has addressed this challenge with her reflections on the discussion at Hatfield, and in particular the principles required to shape and deliver a vision for a thriving countryside capable of addressing complex challenges and realising future opportunity.  We look forward to further debate and discussion from those who attended and others as to how we realise this future for our countryside.

You can read the full digest here.