February 2020

Housing shortage: Scale of UK’s housing gap revealed

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The lack of affordable housing across England and specifically rural England is having a major impact on people’s health and well-being as this story tells us

In a poll of more than 2,000 people for the Affordable Housing Commission, 13% of adults said their mental health was affected by their housing situation.

Looking just at those in unaffordable housing – costing more than a third of income – produced a greater level of concern.

Twenty-five percent of the sample said their mental health had suffered. That’s potentially millions of people.

The Affordable Housing Commission found that more than half of 18 to 24-year-olds live with family, and 18% are still doing so as 25 to 34-year-olds. 

At the same time, government statistics show that the number of young adults living with parents is on the rise.

First trains stop at Worcestershire Parkway station

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Brilliant to see major rail opening up again in rural settings, even if it did take 30 years to get this show on the road!! This story tells us:

Worcestershire Parkway, in Norton, near Worcester, is the first station to open in the county for more than 100 years.

About 50 people waited on the platform of the £22m station to see the first train pull in on its way to London Paddington.

Among those to get on was Mike Bond, who only travelled as far as Evesham. He said: “I just wanted to be on the first train.”

Tom Pierpoint, GWR’s interim commercial development director, said: “We know this station has been a long-held ambition for the people of Worcestershire and we have been pleased to work alongside the county council and our rail industry partners to ensure the delivery of this impressive new facility.”

Councillor Ken Pollock, Worcestershire County Council’s cabinet member for economy and infrastructure, said: “I’d like to thank all those involved in making this station, which has been talked about for more than 30 years, a reality.”

More than 11,000 homes in England to be built on land at high risk of flooding

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Looks to me like there is some considerable misery built into our housing planning in rural England for some time to come. This article tells us:

More than 11,000 new homes are planned to be built on land at the highest risk of flooding in the regions battered by the worst winter storms in a generation, the Guardian has learned.

An analysis of planning documents reveals that 11,410 new homes have been planned for land the government considers high-risk in the seven English counties where thousands of properties have been devastated by flooding since November.

Wood burners: Most polluting fuels to be banned in the home

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No rural proofing here……

Owners of wood burners, stoves and open fires will no longer be able to buy house coal or wet wood, under a ban to be rolled out from next year.

Sales of the two most polluting fuels will be phased out in England to help cut air pollution, the government says.

Bags of logs sold in DIY stores, garden centres and petrol stations often contain wet wood – a type of wood which produces more pollution and smoke.

The public should move to “cleaner alternatives”, the government says.

Plans for the ban were first announced 18 months ago, but the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has now confirmed it is going ahead.

The government said wood burning stoves and coal fires are the largest source of fine particulate matter (PM2.5), small particles of air pollution which find their way into the body’s lungs and blood.

Particulate matter is one of several pollutants caused by industrial, domestic and traffic sources.

What’s the catch? British fishermen’s hopes and fears for Brexit deal

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A very thorough exposition of a complex and introspective world. This fascinating article tells us:

Although the industry is a tiny part of the UK economy – worth less than 0.1% of the total in 2018 – it has become emblematic of a plucky, independent Britain, freed from the shackles of restrictions and regulations set by other people in other places, forging its own way in the world.

Much, therefore, is riding on trade talks that are due to begin at the start of March. According to Nigel Farage, fishing will be the “acid test” of Brexit. Boris Johnson reinforced this view in a key speech on EU trade negotiations earlier this month. Any agreement must ensure that “British fishing grounds are first and foremost for British boats”, said the prime minister, who visited Brixham last summer to meet fishermen and sample hake and chips on the quayside.

The timetable is extremely tight, with the EU saying that an agreement on fishing must be reached by the end of July, and the talks will be tough. A fishing deal is a precondition to a wider trade agreement, the EU has said – and some European politicians and officials have suggested that Britain’s access to the EU’s lucrative financial services markets could depend on EU fleets being allowed to continue to fish in UK waters on the same basis as now.

At the heart of the talks are issues of access and quotas. Under the EU’s common fisheries policy (CFP), all member states have equal access to EU waters apart from the first 12 nautical miles from the coast. At the end of this year, the UK will become an independent coastal state, operating under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea rather than the CFP. As such, Britain will have control over an “exclusive economic zone” up to 200 nautical miles off its shores – some of the most bountiful seas in the world.

Quotas are set for fish species in Brussels each year following scientific advice about the levels of stocks, and are allocated to member states on the basis of historic practice. Currently, EU boats are entitled to more than 60% of overall landings by weight from the seas around the UK, and for some species the proportion is greater. For example, the UK is allocated 9% of Channel cod, while the French get 84%. From next year, quota shares will be negotiated rather than decided in Brussels.

Mass grave shows how Black Death devastated the countryside

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With all this talk of corona virus a spooky 500 year thumbprint of something that makes you think. This story tells us:

A mass grave containing the remains of dozens of victims of the Black Death offers chilling new evidence of the speed and scale of the devastation the plague brought to rural England, according to archaeologists.

The grave, discovered in a remote corner of rural Lincolnshire, has been dated to the 14th century, almost certainly to the earliest and deadliest medieval outbreak of the disease in 1348-9.

It contained the bodies of at least 48 men, women and children who were laid in a sandy pit within days of each other. DNA tests on the bodies found the plague pathogen, confirming how they died.

About half the population of England was wiped out within 18 months by the 1348-9 pandemic. Perhaps surprisingly, however, direct archaeological evidence for the Black Death is extremely rare, according to Hugh Willmott, senior lecturer in European historical archaeology at the University of Sheffield, who led the excavation.

While a small number of plague mass graves have been excavated in London, he said, nothing comparable has ever been found in a rural context, making this a discovery of national importance. Analysis of the find, made in 2013, has been published for the first time in Antiquity.

The grave was discovered by chance during a survey of the now-ruined Augustinian priory of Thornton Abbey, close to Immingham in north Lincolnshire, on the east coast of England. Nearby, archaeologists found the site of a medieval hospital attached to the priory, suggesting the dead or dying had been brought there in desperation as the plague struck, overwhelming the canons who were then forced to bury them together.

Bus cuts turn rural areas into ‘transport deserts’

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Good piece of lobbying here from CPRE. This article tells us…..

Bus route closures have left nearly a million Britons at risk of being cut off from basic services, research has found.

A study by the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) found that 56 per cent of small towns in the southwest and northeast of England were “transport deserts” or on the verge of becoming one, with residents unable to get around without driving.

Buses are the most popular form of public transport and account for more journeys than all other types combined. However, almost £400 million of local and national government funding has been cut, causing hundreds of services to be reduced in frequency or scrapped, and leading to fare increases of 63 per cent in real terms.

Government to Unveil £40m for UK Rural 5G Broadband Pilots

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This is a very technical article which (to me at least) provides some very interesting insights about the practical challenges of making 5G work on a level playing field in rural places. I fear we are entering a slow lane. It tells us:

The UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, is today reportedly gearing up to announce a fresh round of new capital investment in major infrastructure projects (HS2 etc.), which is expected to include a pot of £40 million to support pilots of superfast 5G based wireless (mobile) broadband in rural areas.

At this point readers may recall that the Prime Minister has already committed to invest £5bn in order to have “Gigabit broadband sprouting in every home” by the end of 2025 (here). The funding is to be targeted exclusively at the final 20% of hardest to reach premises (i.e. mostly rural areas and possibly some disadvantaged urban locations).

The adoption of “gigabit” terminology has also enabled the Government to water down their original focus on “full fibre” by including other “gigabit-capable” technologies (here), such as Virgin Media’s predominantly hybrid fibre coax network and ultrafast 5G mobile services have also been mentioned as examples.

On top of that we shouldn’t forget about the Government’s original 5G Testbeds and Trials Programme in 2018, which also included some rural broadband projects. On the other hand that programme confusingly included some fixed wireless deployments that weren’t actually using 5G New Radio technology at all, despite adopting the terminology and some similar radio bands.

The big challenge with using 5G in any rural setting is the fact that in a normal mobile environment the operators’ tend to focus on lower frequency mobile bands (e.g. 700MHz, 800MHZ, 900MHz, 1800MHz and 2100MHz) in order to achieve the widest possible coverage at the lowest cost (rural communities are small and sparse over a wide geographic area).

Sadly such bands don’t provide operators with much frequency spectrum in order to deliver their data, which makes achieving Gigabit speeds rather difficult. By comparison the higher frequency 5G bands, such as from 3.4GHz and upwards, provide a lot more spectrum to deliver data but their signals don’t travel as far and will struggle to penetrate indoors in any meaningful way.

Due to the above we suspect that the new pilots will most likely focus on targeted Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) style solutions, which – much like under the previous programme – may or may not actually involve real 5G New Radio tech. In these setups it’s not uncommon to mix targetted “Full Fibre” or Microwave capacity links with local Line-of-Sight (LoS) wireless links that connect directly to receiving antennas installed outside of a home.

Over two-thirds of Brits think rural communities are neglected by the Government

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A colleague drew my attention to this article, which is somewhat off the beaten track of my usual reading but has some very powerful insights. It tells us:

69 per cent of British workers agree the government prioritises cities over rural communities, according to a new survey released by Retail Financial Consulting Limited (RFCL), the ATM optimisation and web-based solutions provider for the banking and retail sector.

The survey, which was conducted by research company Censuswide, polled 2,000 British workers in February 2020. The research found that 71 per cent of respondents agree that rural areas have substantially worse broadband and transport connectivity than cities or built up areas, and 66 per cent believe that the government should increase infrastructure investment in rural areas.

This news arrives after cuts to high-street banks and the removal of ATMs have left over 100 rural areas in the UK with no options for cash withdrawal. The RFCL survey even found that almost one in every six respondent has had to travel more than one mile in search of a working ATM or cash machine.

ACS urges government to level playing field for UK’s rural shops

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In a Hinterland of surveys this week some very interesting food for thought here about the crucial role played by Village Shops. It tells us:

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.”

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