Village strife

Rural social housing often seems invisible in the sector. The kudos of the big city with its “man-sized” problems fits well with a culture where the development budget serves as some sort of virility substitute. Yet, unnoticed, associations working in rural areas are facing challenges at least as large as those of their urban neighbours.

In the countryside, affordable housing developments are more noticeable than their urban counterpart. And they attract a disproportionate level of opposition. Their neighbours, especially if they have moved out of the city on the back of successful careers, are likely to be articulate and accustomed to getting their own way. They may see their pleasant rural surroundings as a trophy for hard work: to share that with the less successful is felt to diminish it.

Whatever the reasons, opposition is stronger, better and more imaginatively argued, and time-consuming and costly for a housing association to counter. And even a successful planning application is likely to bring only a handful of new homes on stream. That any association continues to press its case in such circumstances is little short of a miracle.

Rural areas face the same demographic changes as urban ones. We grow up, and more of us have to learn to live independently but not anonymously. We break relationships more often and need to create new households precisely when we are at our most vulnerable and dependent on the support and help of our friends and neighbours. We live longer and are more likely to require some form of care in our latter years – for most of us it will be a mixture of professional and informal support. Yet in almost all cases it is assumed that when we reach adulthood, separate, or become frail, we should move into town. It is inhuman to demand someone leave the community in which they are known, respected and cared for at their moments of greatest weakness. And yet the shortage of rural social housing has exactly that consequence.

I’ve begun in recent months to look at some of the work being done in rural areas to support Gypsies and Travellers. There are parts of the country where prejudice against Travellers has become the acceptable replacement for overt racism.

We are only prepared for them to live among us if they replace their existing culture and lifestyle with ours. We draw arbitrary distinctions between “genuine” Travellers and those who are assumed to have adopted a Traveller lifestyle for less acceptable reasons in the same way.

All this stigmatisation does is distract people from addressing the legitimate needs and expectations that Travellers have. How someone came to adopt a semi-nomadic lifestyle, or how long they have lived that way is not the issue, except inasmuch as the rural economy has always depended on a travelling community to undertake poorly paid seasonal work, as it still does. Where Travellers seek more settled housing for a time, they do so for good reasons such as health problems. The excellent work being done by associations such as the Rooftop Housing Group needs to be backed by a reinstatement of the obligation on local authorities to provide adequate Traveller sites in appropriate locations.

Housing associations working in rural and semi-rural areas are not the country cousins, living in some backwater where the problems and pace of change are less acute. The issues they are facing bear comparison with their urban counterparts. They just don’t get the credit they deserve.