The new landowners’ leader for the East of England believes the untapped potential of the rural economy is a “huge opportunity” for the UK as we move into a new era.

Cath Crowther – who grew up on a Welsh sheep farm – was a chartered surveyor at Bidwells when she was chosen as the new director at the eastern regional offices of landowners’ lobby group the Country Land and Business Association (CLA) in September 2019, taking over the reins from Ben Underwood.

She believes strongly that there is much more to the UK rural economy than meets the eye – and that policy needs to favour it more heavily in order for it to thrive as it should. 

“The untapped potential of the rural economy is a huge opportunity for the UK. Historically, landowners and farmers have always provided local facilities, provided jobs, but could be doing more and providing more local homes, if there was a system that supported it,” she says.

Smaller village housing schemes would have less of an impact than massive ones, she points out, and villagers need housing to support local facilities and services, which are being lost in rural areas.

“We need to have rural areas that are attractive for people to either move into or stay in,” she says

All these issues are close to Cath’s heart, having grown up on a mainly arable family farm on the cliff tops of south Wales, which keeps 850 ewes. Her father is “obsessed” with soil health, she says, using digestate from a local anaerobic digestion (AD) plant. Her brother is developing a holiday cottages business with his wife.

“It’s something I’m very passionate about is farmers, landowners and rural businesses and trying to ensure their needs are recognised,” she says. 

Such businesses are often very innovative, she points out, and as a surveyor she has spent time looking at lots of different diversification opportunities on farms.

Brexit uncertainty and a global economic slowdown amid the US-China trade war has set Britain on course for the most prolonged slump in business investment in 17 years, according to the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC).

Setting Britain on course for weaker economic growth in future, the lobby group said business spending in the UK was due to decline by 1.5% in 2019 and by 0.1% next year as companies put their investment plans on ice amid the global political turmoil.

Paving the way for the longest period of annual declines in business investment since the turn of the millennium – when the dotcom bubble burst to drag down investment around the world – the BCC said investment in the UK was due to fall for three years in a row.

London and the south-east will see more than half of the UK’s future job growth if the government does not address the massive gulf between the capital and everywhere else, an independent inquiry into the UK’s deep–rooted inequalities has warned.

Bob Kerslake, the former head of the civil service and chair of the UK2070commission on regional inequality, said the UK was going “materially in the wrong direction”. He urged the government to take lessons from Germany in reunifying the country by setting up a £250bn “national renewal fund”.

Londoners as well as people elsewhere will suffer if the imbalance is not addressed, the commission warned, as housing becomes ever more unaffordable and a growing population puts pressure on transport infrastructure, with increasing need for long-distance commuting.

The capital’s taps could also run dry as water supplies come under pressure from the climate crisis. The Environment Agency estimates there will be serious water shortages by 2050, particularly in the south, as the amount of water available is reduced by 10%-15%, with some rivers having 50%-80% less water during summer.

It will also become even more expensive to build in the capital, which is already costly by international standards because of the challenge of engineering through the crowded urban fabric. Despite this, researchers for the 2070 commission estimated that London and the south-east would gain 2.26m extra jobs by 2015, 55% of the UK whole.

UK growth slowed sharply in the final three months of 2018 as Brexit anxiety weighed on consumers and firms, official figures published on Monday are expected to show.

City economists estimate that economic growth halved to just 0.3% in the fourth quarter of last year, compared with 0.6% growth in the third quarter.

If confirmed by the Office for National Statistics, it would be the slowest growth since the first quarter of 2018 when GDP increased by just 0.1%.

Philip Shaw, chief economist at Investec, said growth in December alone was likely to have flatlined.

“Putting the pieces together, we are forecasting GDP to have remained unchanged in December, although it is possible that we see a very small gain,” he said. “This results in a 0.3% rise [for the fourth quarter].

“We will look closely at business investment – the area which we consider to be the most affected by Brexit worries – and specifically to see if it recorded its fourth consecutive quarterly decline in the fourth quarter.”