It’s vital to help village shops stay in existence

The loss of a village shop in his constituency is symptomatic of a growing national problem, Bridgwater and West Somerset Conservative MP Ian Liddell

Grainger tells Farming Minister Robert Goodwill

DEAR Robert Good to see some tourists around as the main holiday season cranks up but for one of my villages, I regret to have to inform you, even the arrival of visitors is unlikely to lift the gloom.

You almost certainly won’t have heard of the community itself but Exford, in the heart of Exmoor, is experiencing a crisis which has implications for every rural settlement in the country.

It lost its village shop and post office some weeks back when the former owner died and since then, as someone put it to me this week, the heart of the village has been ripped out.

Aside from its function as a shop and post office, the business also acted as a social focus for the village. People would meet up for a chat as they called in to collect their newspapers and it’s fair to say it was val

ued as much for that as for its primary role.

The closure was a further blow to a village which has already lost its filling station – thus bidding farewell to something which provided an incentive for tourists to stop and while they were stopped perhaps patronise the pub –or indeed the shop in former days.

And now everyone in Exford faces a five-mile trek to get a morning paper or some groceries or to post a parcel.

We have managed to get part-time postal facilities restored but there are fears for what will become of the shop when it and its living accommodation come up for auction at the end of the month. Will there be anyone will to take on the role of village storekeeper and minder of a muchvalued social centre?

Or will (after the statutory period expires) the shop merely be converted back into a living room or a dining room? For local people that outcome is too dreadful to contemplate, conjuring up visions as it does of a deserted village centre becoming the norm rather than a short-term phenomenon.

There are alternatives: in two nearby villages locals have clubbed together to buy shops as they fell vacant and have either run them themselves or leased them out. Other villages have equipped themselves with shops in portable buildings. I hope one or other of these outcomes can be achieved because we are talking about a situation which sooner or later will affect everyone in the village in another way as property values start to fall as the result of an essential local amenity disappearing.

I don’t think the Government understands the knife-edge situation thousands of village shops are in, nor quite how devastating can be the effects, both short- and long-term on the community if they fail.

This is why we should be looking at whatever we can do to help those still in business survive, either by way of direct grants or financial concessions delivered via the tax system.

The role of village shops in delivering far more than a local retail outlet must be recognised and acknowledged.

If we fail to do that we shall be presiding over the death of hundreds more rural communities.

Yours ever

Ian

For some villages the solution has been to house the local shop in a portable building