A POWERFUL coalition of Britain’s leading countryside organisations has just published a hard hitting report warning that, without action, rural services face meltdown as spending is cut, housing outprices all but the wealthiest and rural wages will continue to lag behind urban averages.

None of that will surprise Echo Country readers but the new Rural Coalition has challenged the Government to empower local people to shape the rural places in which they live. Rural communities have slowly – but relentlessly – become less and less sustainable and less and less self-sufficient.

The coalition warned at the outset that much of the countryside was becoming part dormitory, part theme park and part retirement home and that rural communities have become a casualty of the current planning system.

In the CLA we have argued that there has been a negative approach to development in the countryside.

The planning system has been used as a brake on appropriate and much-needed development in the misplaced belief that this supports communities and the environment.

The planning system must now be approached in a new way, as a positive, proportionate and flexible instrument to promote the long term sustainability of businesses, communities and environment that surrounds them.

The coalition’s report sets out detailed proposals for taking on five key challenges facing the countryside – meeting rural housing need, building thriving economies, delivering good rural services, creating flourishing market towns – and empowering local communities, entrepreneurs, community groups and councils to deliver positive change.