Kerry Booth, Chief Executive of Rural Services Network
Public services are the backbone of this country, quietly carrying on in the background, making sure that our bins our emptied, our children can get to school, and our most vulnerable are cared for.
At the Rural Services Network we believe that every council should have the resources it requires to meet the needs of its residents. We will only succeed if we enable our rural communities to thrive, alongside our cities, and contribute to the prosperity of the nation. It is perhaps our version of ‘Every Child Matters’.
It is clear that this requires fairly funding rural councils, removing barriers that inhibit the growth of the rural economy, such as improved digital connectivity, access to affordable homes, transport to access skills, training and employment opportunities and effective planning to deliver the right homes, in the right places, with access to infrastructure.
Afterall, rural England is full of potential, research shows if we grow the rural economy we can potentially add 19Billion to the Treasury. But what happens when the mechanisms that fund them, leave services at risk, and there is a lack of resources available to meet our residents’ needs?
And this Government has a clear policy, it wants to help our most deprived communities.
We agree yet also know that deprivation exists not only in our cities, but also in our villages and in our hamlets; something that is often under recognised and hidden when statistics and data are collated for larger areas.
Rural Councils have long suffered from unfair funding, with the Local Government Finance Settlement leaving them at a disadvantage under successive Governments.
The Settlement for 2025-2026 saw the Rural Services Delivery Grant of 110 Million abolished, which was providing some respite for rural councils facing the additional costs of service delivery. The introduction of the 600M Recovery Grant designed to support councils with higher need and service demands based on high clusters of deprivation has ultimately directed funding towards our cities and away from our rural communities.
As a result, for 2025-2026, Urban Councils receive 40% more in Government Funded Spending Power per head than Rural Councils. Over the years to counteract the lack of funding, rural councils have had to increase council tax to balance the books. This means if you are a rural resident, you now pay on average 20% more in Council tax than your urban counterpart.
This effectively means that if you live in a city, the government contributes more to your public services, and if you live in a village, you pay for more of your public services yourself, while your cost of living is likely to be higher, greater transport costs, housing and heating costs etal.
The Fair Funding 2.0 consultation seems to provide the answer to meeting the needs of rural residents – with a fundamental review of the Local Government Funding Formula taking place over the Summer. We now await the changes to the formula that will follow, but with a change at the top of MHCLG, it remains to be seen how this will progress in the short term.
This funding consultation said it would take into account the differing needs of rural, and urban authorities. Yet it also wanted more evidence on the additional costs faced by rural councils that were ‘isolated from major markets’. Our Councils provided evidence to the consultation, showing that not only do rural councils face additional travel time, with the implications that brings for funding services but are also impacted by their remoteness. Councils shared stories of letting contracts, with only one tender being received by the existing provider, meaning that cost negotiations are very limited and examples where they pay a premium for home care provision in their more remote areas. As expected, rural Home to School transport features heavily in local authority budgets, and there were examples of councils having to pay for ‘dead miles’ where taxis would have to come out from the city to rural communities to transport children to school, adding to the premium charged.
Furthermore, if we don’t also acknowledge and focus on the additional cost our councils face in delivering services to those communities, we risk alienating a sixth of our population who live in those rural communities. More people live in rural England than live in Greater London, and as the team at LCC often remind us the 157 C&C constituencies Labour now holds are a significant part of the government’s majority.
The government has an opportunity to right a long term wrong, to support and invest in rural communities; addressing long term under-investment thus helping these communities contribute to a growing UK economy, as places that can thrive too.
The Rural Services Network is a membership organisation, representing rural local authorities and rural service providers and we work on their behalf to ensure that there is a strong voice at a national level for rural services.
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