LGA Governance


Agenda item

Agenda item

Strengthening Rural and Coastal Recovery and Resilience

Minutes:

The Chairman welcomed Mark Pragnell, Director, and Rebecca Munro, Consultant, from Pragmatix Advisory to the meeting and invited them to introduce the report.

 

Mark Pragnell introduced himself and presented a series of slides to Board Members which outlined structural challenges, immediate challenges of Covid recovery and challenges and opportunities of longer-term revitalisation in relation to strengthening rural and coastal recovery and resilience.

 

Following the presentation, Members asked a number of questions and raised the following points:

 

  • There must be more of a focus on public transport in rural communities. A number of areas across the country have lost a significant number of bus services in recent years due to the councils being unable to fund bus subsidies. We must ensure that the hard to reach communities are not forgotten about otherwise they will be socially isolated. There is no point offering free transport to young people when there are no buses running to certain areas.

 

  • We must continue to push for adequate broadband in rural, hard to reach areas.

 

  • Given the £3b allocated for bus activity across the country, could we factor connectivity issues into our work?

 

  • We need to be mindful of the new ways of working and support a need for different housing. Whilst it’s ok to work from home during a pandemic, we can’t do it forever. We need to look carefully at different ways of economic counting to reflect the new reality.

 

  • With regards to micro and nano businesses that our rural and coastal areas provide, have you considered the freeports that they have on our rural communities? I understand that there will be challenges, but there will also be opportunities.

 

In response to the points raised by Members, Mark stated that:

 

  • The general theme seems to relate to the work that we’re undertaking in circumstances where services are currently deemed to be improper and unviable in the market place and require subsidy, what we’re seeking to do with this project is turn the language and discussion around and move it away from it being about how one subsidises to deliver services, but how one starts to think about investing in the opportunities that rural and coastal now have as a contributor to UK PLC.

 

  • The best solution for services that are unviable is to see background economic growth which makes them viable and requiring less of a subsidy, what we are seeking to do is provide that narrative and evidence base.

 

Decision:

 

Members noted the report.

 

Supporting documents: