rural penalty

This article chimes with the RSN’s long standing call for a fairer distribution of funding from central government. The latest EFRA Select Committee report on Rural Communities which I tweeted about earlier in the week – explains how government policy too often fails to take account of the challenges to providing services for people living in rural communities. According to the Committee’s chair Anne McIntosh MP: “The government needs to recognise that the current system of calculating the local
government finance settlement is deeply unfair to rural areas in comparison with their urban counterparts. This is unacceptable. Rural communities pay more in council tax, receive less government grant and have access to fewer public
services than people in large towns and cities”. With funding reductions continuing across central and local government, how and crucially when will this system be reformed? For more information on the RSN’s work in this area follow this link.