Villages need development to survive

The village as an institution has been able to survive, and in some cases prosper, through wars, famines, pandemics and depressions. The village is, however, facing its most difficult enemy, which is indifference.

Many once rock solid appurtenances of a village have gone the way of all things.

The village school, pub, shop and now the rural bus are either extinct or heading that way.

There are large parts of rural Kent that are now without buses. Soon a 100-year-old rural way of life will be in the breakers’ yard, along with all those vehicles that used to ply between a village and the nearest town.

Why is this happening? Bus companies find little profit in running provincial, let alone rural bus services.

They want to extract revenue from mass transit in urban areas. The bus companies are conglomerates with other interests such as coaches, trams, and rail.

The country bus features little, if at all, within their corporate plan.

In the past there was some cross subsidisation between profitable urban routes and struggling rural routes, as bus passengers from rural areas fed into the ‘core routes’.

This paring down to run only core routes is as painful to society as drilling out root canals is in one’s teeth and often pointless, because cutting away loss-making routes only makes the core less profitable, and the network unbalanced.

The county council can maintain a rural network, as is done elsewhere in the UK and abroad, but it has decided instead to throw the money it saves from subsidising rural bus services into the roaring firebox of adult social care.

There is a brief flame and then nothing. The sad thing about KCC’s thinking is that rural bus services probably keep more old people from needing social care than will be saved by trashing the rural bus network.

If people of any age can travel to see friends, make appointments and socialise, they will be healthier and less reliant on others, and the rural bus has facilitated this socialisation.

Of course villages, or rather their inhabitants, have some responsibility for this state of affairs.

The adamant refusal to accept any development means that the population of many villages is becoming older and wealthier. Village life increasingly means owning a car and having a good income. Farms employ few permanent staff, there are relatively few rural industries and services the village relies on for its wellbeing come from urban areas via van and car.

Since 1851, we have become an increasingly urban society. Perhaps if the village is to survive, we need to think less about villages remaining in aspic, and instead how we can allow sympathetic development that restores villages to their former vibrant selves.

Richard Styles