Western Daily Press (Saturday)
Help ghost villages keep spark this winter
Summer’s end will see gloom spreading through dozens of villages in the South West – and it will have nothing to do with the weather, Bridgwater and West Somerset MP Ian LiddellGrainger tells Defra Secretary George Eustice
DEAR George, Well, autumn beckons, holding out the prospect of scores of villages across this region emptying with the kind of speed associated with the removal of the plug in a very well-filled bath.
The crockery will be washed up and put away, the linen stored, the gas and electricity will be turned off and hundreds of second homes will be shut up as the nights lengthen and the weather deteriorates.
They may briefly spring to life for a half-term weekend and perhaps for a few days over Christmas and New Year but, by and large, they will remain dormant until Easter. As will the communities where they are situated.
It obviously doesn’t matter a tittle or jot to anyone living in a town or city where the pace of life alters little from day to day or season to season.
But in holiday areas where the spread of second homes has been unchecked for years, it’s a vastly different thing.
I can name you a dozen villages where it is possible in winter, even in the middle of the day, to drive from one end to the other without seeing a single living soul. In fact, that’s a good word to use because ‘soul-less’ is what these communities are.
I feel very sorry indeed for those remaining inhabitants who face a winter of empty streets and whose settlements have become so overrun with second homes that their social life – indeed their entire quality of life – is now being affected.
Depleted populations often lack the critical mass necessary to sustain clubs and other organisations. There are no longer enough people to raise a cricket or football team, run a flower show, even ring the church bells.
And as these traditional elements of village life decline so the spark, the spirit of the community, is dimmed.
From which sentiment you may judge that I am indeed grateful that we are proposing to empower councils (finally) to tackle an issue which has already bequeathed us dozens of winter ghost villages. National park authorities and others have already taken some steps towards slowing, if not halting, the spread of second homes, but their efforts have necessarily been piecemeal. All being well, we should soon be able to adopt a far more robust approach.
The only positive I can see is that the move for more home-working has delivered the South West an injection of new blood as families have upped sticks in the suburbs and taken advantage of the property market differentials to move down. I welcome every last one of them because many have young families and all are going to be year-round residents.
We could be witnessing one of the most significant population shifts since the migration in the 19th century of thousands of poor, rural families into towns and cities in search of better-paid work.
All we need now is to ensure that the home workers are properly serviced in terms of telecommunications, but this remains a real problem for the more rural parts of my constituency – and in several others, as I know. Millions have been spent, deadlines have been set and missed, promises made and broken, and still we are a very long way indeed from delivering decent broadband to swathes of the countryside.
I could go on, but the guilty parties know who they are and they know, equally, that my sights are permanently trained on them.