Our Vision for the Countryside

We believe the countryside is its people. Britain’s landscape is justly treasured and famed because of, not despite, the communities who have lived and worked there.

In one of the most densely populated countries in the world some 75% of the whole of the UK’s land mass is still under the active custody of farmers and other land managers.

It is no coincidence that the vast majority of this landscape is still beautiful and diverse. Our picturesque countryside, including much of our national park areas, is the result of its being ‘worked’ economically.

But rural communities’ relationship with the land runs deeper than mere economic livelihood.

The land has also nurtured - and in turn been positively shaped by - its people’s culture, traditions and values. If our countryside is to resist the ever-increasing pressures of development - and the consequent irreversible destruction of rural landscape and habitat - policymakers must facilitate and encourage the maximum sustainable economic and cultural exploitation of the land by those who live and work there.

Thus the key to protecting the land - its landscape, ecology and wildlife - is to safeguard the livelihoods and values of its working communities.

These communities are the only ones who can actually maintain our countryside.

It is the Alliance’s conviction that:

a sustainable physical countryside can only be the result of sustainable rural communities.

safeguarding rural communities in turn depends on maximising the sustainable productive use of the land.

to survive and prosper the countryside will have to embrace change - but the sustainable use of the land itself must remain the foundation of such change, not become the victim of it.

rural policy must centre on rural community empowerment, not environmental protectionism.

Maintaining real links with the land…
Real rural communities are only sustainable if they are local and land-based.

The long-term conservation of our landscape is not threatened by but depends upon its sustainable productive use by its own communities and others for economic, social and recreational purposes

Investing in sustainable, progressive land-use…
With the modern pressures on our countryside, a new approach to rural investment is required to catalyse the transition away from unsustainable intensive agriculture towards sustainable food production and to extend the productive capacity of land beyond food products into other crops and land uses, such as biomass and environment products.

But food farming can and should remain the prime land use: there is no economic or social justification for allowing a massive decline in UK food production.

Thinking local…
What the countryside needs above all is more local, affordable homes, close to local jobs, local transport, social services and amenities such as pubs, post offices, shops, police stations and schools.

Without local viability rural communities’ relationship with the land will be weakened. If we lose this link between the land, its products and its communities our countryside is doomed to slow extinction.

When development in the countryside is useful…
To safeguard our countryside we must conserve both the quality and ‘quantity’ of our existing rural landscape.

To do so we need to minimise the predation of countryside areas by commercial and other urban development. But a certain level of judicious, well-planned commercial and residential development can help local rural community viability -- and thus enhance the prospects for countryside conservation as a whole. Rural development should be predicated on three main parameters: local economic impact; local social impact, and environmental impact. In particular any new development should provide, or facilitate, a high density of local jobs or affordable homes. If not, even if the scheme’s ‘environmental impact’ is low it will still hasten, rather than help prevent, the overall erosion of the countryside.

Our countryside also badly needs new IT infrastructure to provide the communications links vital for rural-based businesses to be able to compete effectively with their urban counterparts. It needs better local public transport. And it needs new villages -- or extensions of existing ones - to provide the affordable homes for those required to fill the jobs which move into or are created in rural areas.

Do we want a real countryside?
Current public policy presumptions of a massive decline in farming and organic land use risk becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Alliance believes that with energy, ideas, and progressive solutions which look beyond traditional ‘food farming’ it is possible to develop new ways to work the land sustainably and productively.

Turning over swathes of productive land to state-sponsored landscape management is simply not a long-term solution, since this would always be hostage to commercial development, political whim, social engineering or public spending pressures. Moreover the absence of real economic activity would irreversibly change the character of our countryside.

Do we want a real countryside or a faux-countryside?
Suburbanisation of the values of rural communities would kill our real countryside as surely as suburbanisation of the landscape itself.

www.countryside-alliance.org