Letting small family farms go to the wall will “break the backbone of Britain’s rural communities”, Prince Charles has said.

The focus on producing plentiful and cheap food threatens the survival of the country’s smaller farms, he says.

If they go it will “rip the heart out of the British countryside”, he warns.

The government says it wants to support all farmers and “the choices that they take on their own holdings”.

It comes ahead of the publication of the National Food Strategy, the first major review of Britain’s food system in more than 70 years.

The strategy was commissioned by the government and is headed by Henry Dimbleby, the founder of the Leon restaurant chain.

Thursday’s report will explore the links between food production and environmental degradation including climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution and the sustainable use of resources.

It will include recommendations for the government, which has promised to respond with a White Paper within six months.

The first part of the strategy was published in July last year and highlighted the connection between obesity, poverty and the UK’s high Covid-19 death toll.

The Prince of Wales has been concerned with food and the environment for most of his adult life.

His latest intervention comes in the form of an essay for Radio 4’s Today programme.

In it, he condemns the super-efficient intensive agricultural system that produces much of the food we eat as a “dead end”.

Would-be members used to contact Bergholt Hall, one of Britain’s longest standing farming communes, at the rate of 70 or so a year: 50-something empty nesters looking for companionship; 30-something couples in pursuit of an idyllic upbringing for their children; 20-somethings keen to erect a yurt on the hall’s rolling Suffolk pasture. Since the Covid lockdowns, however, Hodgson admits, it’s been “bonkers”. “We had 70 applications in April and May alone.”

It’s a pattern echoed across the UK, with communes reporting being inundated by new applicants of all ages, driven by the Extinction Rebellion movement and its focus on low-carbon living and, more recently, by the glimpse that lockdown has offered of simpler, less consumption-driven, lifestyles.

There are more than 400 such “intentional” communities across the UK. Many are cohousing set-ups, in which residents live in individual dwellings with a few common areas and domestic functions; others are based upon a lifestyle or worldview (spiritualism, gender non- binarism, veganism) and feature a variety of communal labour arrangements and facilities.

A surprising number are longstanding country communes, such as Bergholt Hall, founded in the heyday of the 1960s and 70s back-to-the-land and self-sufficiency movements. It was an era when an ideological generation of “diggers” (named after the 17th-century English communards) sought to challenge notions of the sanctity of the nuclear family and opt out of “the grab-game of straight society” (as hippy bible Oz magazine put it in a 1968 article on the first London digger commune).

Black Lives Matter activists have launched a toolkit designed to help rural communities across the UK to fight racism in their local area.

Their campaign, BLM in the Stix, is aimed at building on the momentum of June and July, when more than 260 towns and cities held anti-racism protests, from Monmouth in south Wales to Shetland in Scotland. It offers rural communities support to take a stand against racism at a local level.

The online toolkit was launched on Saturday with a protest along the banks of the River Colne in Essex.

“This toolkit is about getting people who are not racist to become anti-racist, especially for people who live in rural areas who might be thinking we don’t have that much racism around here,” said Gurpreet Sidhu, founder of the Wivenhoe Black Lives Matter group and co-organiser of the protest.

The toolkit, developed by Wivenhoe BLM supporters with help from Stand up to Racism Colchester and the Local Equality Commission, provides resources on how to start a campaign in a rural setting, describing some of the key challenges as well as ways to overcome this. It is targeted at white people in rural areas who want to stand up against racism but might not know where to start.

B4RN started planning to roll out its fibre-to-the-home network in Clapham in 2014, and by the end of 2018, around 180 homes out of 300 in the village had been hooked up with an affordable full gigabit-per-second symmetrical connection (currently only around 10% of homes in Britain are even capable of receiving such a connection). The speeds are impressive, especially in a rural context where internet connectivity lags horrendously behind urban areas in Britain. Rural download speeds average around 28Mbps, compared to 62.9Mbps on average in urban areas. B4RN, meanwhile, delivers 1,000Mbps.

B4RN is registered as a Community Benefit Society, which means the business belongs to the communities who need it: community members own the enterprise, and in B4RN’s case, they also actually build a lot of the infrastructure themselves. As a result, the process of “getting” B4RN involves a substantial commitment—of time, training, money, and physical labour.

Mobile carrier O2 is working to eradicate mobile signal ‘not-spots’ by extending 4G coverage at 91,000 areas across the UK – including 400 tourist destinations.

O2 says it wanted to ensure people would have adequate coverage as the country prepared for a ‘staycation boom’ from July 4 – as coronavirus-easing lockdown measures are eased and tourism firms allowed to re-open. 

A number of National Trust and English Heritage sites have been included in the 4G signal boost including the ruins of St Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury. 

Rural connectivity and fixing ‘not spots’ in less populated areas is a big issue and comes as part of government measures to improve national connectivity.

The firm claims to now have 4G coverage in over 18,000 regional towns, villages and hamlets – which also reduces network congestion and improves download speeds. 

Eight locations across the UK have been chosen to test solutions that will help communities retain free access to cash, as the nation shifts to an increasingly cashless society.

The launch of the pilots follows the publication of the 2019 Access to Cash Review, which found that 17% of the UK population rely on cash, with vulnerable communities, including the poor and those in rural areas, at particular risk from reduced access to cash.

The Covid-19 pandemic has further heightened the problem, with many high street businesses spurning cash payments in favour of contactless transactions.

Natalie Ceeney, who led the Access to Cash review and is now in charge of the pilot projects, says: “The world is changing – we can’t just magic back our old bank branch and ATM infrastructure. Instead, we need to use innovation to develop new solutions as well as harness tried and tested approaches to meet people’s needs.”

The aim of the pilot schemes is to create new approaches to current challenges, which include helping local shops to give cashback, introducing shared bank branches, subsidising bus services to surviving branches, and the opening of local cash deposit centres for merchants.

Stephen Jones, CEO of UK Finance, says: “While our latest data shows that people are increasingly choosing to pay digitally, the banking and finance industry is committed to ensuring that access to cash remains free and widely accessible to those who need it.

“The impact of the Covid-19 lockdown in recent months has shown the importance of continuing to do so, and with retailers and businesses reopening their stores this week the sector is playing a central role in helping people to pay for the goods and services they need using the method of their choice.”

A row of karate kids are performing mawashi geri kicks in unison to the cries of their teacher. Coincidentally, in the room next door, the Brownies are learning first aid. The next morning, a gaggle of pensioners arrive and are soon waltzing to wartime classics. Then, by the afternoon, a jumble sale is in full swing. One week later, dozens of people are queuing up to vote, hot on the heels of a neighbourhood forum discussing a contentious planning application.

These are just a few moments in the life of a humble village hall. More than any other building type, the village hall represents the ultimate multifunctional democratic space. It is a forum for raffles, cake sales, birthday parties, fitness classes, political meetings and more – a witness, as Jethro Marshall puts it, “to great human events – mostly for around £8 per hour”.

Marshall, a Dorset-based art director and photographer, has surveyed a range of village halls across the West Country for his latest book, Halls & Oats, a celebration of what he calls “utilitarian bucolic construction”. In the midst of the pandemic, his carefully framed black and white images, devoid of human life, take on a new level of pathos. The children’s parties have stopped, the Bums and Tums classes are postponed, Knit and Natter has been put on hold. Absent of the life that sustains them, village halls have become empty shells of promise, haunting symbols of a time when we could congregate – but also hopeful reminders that we might one day do so again.

Windermere School is working in partnership with Ambleside Parish Centre offering hot lunches to people in rural communities during the coronavirus lockdown.

The weekday meals are prepared in the independent school’s kitchen by chef Jane Kirkpatrick.

The Patterdale Road school linked up with the Ambleside Parish Centre through Cumbria County Council and the meals made possible by donations and grants received by the Vicarage Road centre.

Meals were delivered to 24 households in the first week, 36 the week after and a whopping 68 turkey dinners went out last week.

The scheme is available for residents of Ambleside, Grasmere, the Langdales and Hawkshead. Negotiations are underway to see if there is a need in Coniston too.

The cost for two courses is £3 or free to those who have lost their income. They can be picked up or delivered by a volunteer.

Coronavirus death rates could be between 50 and 80 per cent higher in rural communities, according to scientists.

A study from the University of St Andrews has predicted significantly higher levels of Covid-19 fatalities in rural locations due to larger ageing populations.

The analysis found that death rates could be up to 80 per cent higher if the outbreak reaches people in these more remote areas.

It is feared this could have long-term socio-cultural impacts on certain communities, particularly on areas which are strongholds for minority languages.

Professor Hill Kulu, who co-authored the study with his colleague Peter Dorey, said: “If the pandemic is to last long and the virus is to spread to all areas of the UK, remote small towns and rural communities are projected to have 50 per cent to 80 per cent higher death rates than the main cities because of their old population composition.

“Remote location may offer a protection from Covid-19 to some areas but if the virus is to spread to these communities the effects will be devastating.”

The ACS’ 2020 Rural Shop Report outlines the crucial role that rural shops play in people’s daily lives as job creators, service providers and social hubs.

The report shows that the UK’s 16,986 rural shops continue to provide around 146,000 local, flexible and secure jobs. Almost a third of colleagues say they rely on the flexibility to fit their job around childcare commitments or caring for other family members, while jobs in rural shops also offer the security of the guaranteed hours and pay that does not come with gig economy jobs.

People in rural areas rated their local convenience store as their number one most essential service, the report reveals, in addition to the service that overall has the most positive impact on their local area. Rural shop customers are also more dependent on these stores because the nearest alternative is further afield than in urban areas.

ACS chief executive, James Lowman, said: “The UK’s rural shops provide a lifeline for hundreds of thousands of people, not just through the provision of everyday essentials and a range of services, but also by providing secure local jobs in otherwise isolated communities. They do all of this despite facing an uphill battle to gain access to decent broadband speeds and reliable mobile connectivity, and if they have a cash machine on the premises, to keep that machine free to use for customers. If this Government is committed to levelling up the UK economy, it must include plans to level the playing field for our rural shops.”