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Government initiatives to help poor families are failing to reach those living in rural areas, but there are signs that this could be changing. Mark Hunter investigates.

The idyllic notion of the countryside as the perfect place to bring up children may persist for those with the resources to bypass public services, but for those whose circumstances place them at risk of social exclusion, the reality is different.

There are around 700,000 children living in rural households below the poverty line, according to the New Policy Institute. These often isolated families face many of the problems encountered by their urban counterparts. However, their access to the kind of services taken for granted in towns and cities remains lamentably low.

Fewer than one in 10 of England’s rural parishes has a public nursery and only 14 per cent have a private nursery. Only 40 per cent have a parent toddler group and just 41 per cent have a pre-school playgroup.¹ The services that do exist for families with young children often prove inaccessible to those who need them most. Three-quarters of rural parishes have no daily bus service.

The government’s determination to put social exclusion at the centre of its public service reforms also seems to have passed the countryside by. None of the New Deal for Communities schemes are rural, there are no rural employment zones and the 44 areas included in the Social Exclusion Unit’s neighbourhood renewal white paper are all in cities or towns.

The urban bias of centralised initiatives to combat social exclusion was vividly illustrated during the early days of Sure Start. Over 250 Sure Start schemes were set up during the first two waves of the programme. Only three - Fenland, East Cleveland and Bolsover - took place in the countryside. The main reason for this disparity was the government’s use of Index of Local Deprivation criteria to identify suitable areas. This list of indicators was able to pick out large clusters of disadvantage in cities but ignored the small pockets of deprivation that occur in rural areas.

According to Jacqui McCluskey, policy officer at children’s charity NCH, this is a common failing of area-based initiatives such as Sure Start.

"These initiatives don’t work in rural areas they way they do in urban areas," she says. "The poverty doesn’t really occur in specific areas, it is located in pockets surrounded by people who can be really quite affluent. The general picture might suggest that the area is pretty well off, but that masks individual people’s experience."

Some indicators of deprivation, such as take-up of benefits or the level of unemployment, are also less accurate in rural areas than in the city, claims McCluskey.

"The government’s anti-poverty initiatives are focused on reducing people’s dependence on benefits, getting them into employment," she says. "But there are cultural reasons why people might not want to admit to having money problems. There’s a resistance to seeking help that still persists in rural areas - so there’s a much lower uptake of benefits. Also, unemployment is less of a problem in rural communities. The problem is that the jobs are so poorly paid."

As one of the authors of Challenging the Rural Idyll, a report commissioned in 2001 by the Countryside Agency, McCluskey conducted a number of interviews with people aged between eight and 63 contacted through NCH rural projects across England. The findings show that poor access to services, and in particular affordable child care facilities, remain a major cause of rural social exclusion.

"There’s a huge proportion of people who don’t have access to a nursery or who can’t afford to use one because they are very expensive. It’s a major cause of exclusion. It mitigates against getting a job and it’s a real obstacle in reaching other essential services."

Reaching those child care services that do exist often requires travelling great distances. This either leaves people at the mercy of infrequent and unreliable public transport or forces them to buy a car that they cannot afford to maintain.

"A lot of the services have migrated to the big market towns, so you need a car to get to them," says McCluskey. "Most of the people we spoke to did have a car, because without it they would just be too isolated. But a huge proportion of their income was spent on maintaining the car, or they drove it untaxed and uninsured. So people are taking a huge risk just to be able to access essential services."

And even when attempts are made to provide services more locally, village politics can often get in the way, says McCluskey.

"There may be limited communal space and everybody might be fighting for it. If there’s only the village hall then people might not want it overrun with kids. It’s all about who knows who on the parish council. Who’s got the power locally is a huge issue and more needs to be done about empowering people."

Clearly people living in the rural areas need greater access to essential services. However, simply extending the reach of primarily urban-based initiatives into the countryside is not necessarily the answer. Social care consultant Janet Williams says rural programmes have to adopt a specifically rural approach. Williams was commissioned to carry out research for the Countryside Agency, on behalf of the National Council of Voluntary Child Care Organisations, on the progress made by the first three rural Sure Start programmes. Her findings emphasise the need for rural initiatives to adopt sensitive approaches to rural problems.

These include not only the issue of transport, but also local rivalries, parish politics and the strict class divisions that are often evident within rural communities.

"The distances involved and the problems of transport make everything, including community involvement, much more difficult," says Williams.

Setting up a programme such as Sure Start within a small rural community can create its own social impact that needs to be handled sensitively, she says. It is important to avoid stigmatising those who use the service "because everyone knows about each other’s business". At the same time, those areas not included in the programme can end up feeling "second-best" and this can accentuate the sense of exclusion of families living there.

The programme might bring a small number of well-paid jobs into the area. Competition for these posts may be intense and, if handled badly, the disappointment felt by those who lose out can hamper the programme’s future.

"The performance of local people appointed to these posts is closely observed," says Williams. "Possible evidence of lack of experience or skill can be quite sharply judged, increasing the importance of transparent selection procedures, and of supervision and support."

It was partly due to Williams’ research that Sure Start recently changed its targeting criteria to allow greater flexibility in rural areas. The new conditions have resulted in the establishment of a further 10 rural Sure Start projects. Williams will publish a report on progress made by these schemes later this year.

In addition, a pilot of 45 small-scale Sure Start programmes has been launched in rural areas which would not normally be covered by the larger, traditional Sure Start model. These "mini-Sure Starts" will deliver services such as toy libraries, health advice, parenting classes, day care and crèche facilities to 150-170 children under four in each catchment area.

This belated advance of Sure Start into the countryside is a welcome sign that the government is at last taking the problem of rural child poverty seriously. However, until other services follow suit, rural areas will remain the poor relations of initiatives to combat social exclusion.

¹ Rural Childcare: Briefing Paper One: New Opportunities - Establishing New Childcare Places in the Countryside, Kids’ Clubs Network, 2001