Future Society in 2024: 21st Century 'Good Life' - Rural Economy ...

Economic: Transient rural areas face grave economic difficulties. We have identified the main
growth prospects for rural areas in the coming 20 years to lie in tourism, leisure services, rural
enterprise, retirement services and positive multiplier effects arising from affluent in-migration.
Transient rural areas face poor projections on all these counts.
Social: The socio-economic structure of transient rural areas is particularly adversely affected by the
process of rural de-industrialisation that is presently taking place. As stated transient rural areas
will continue to face difficulties with respect to social exclusion in future years.
Technological: Technological changes will neither bring rapid improvement to transient rural areas,
nor will it indeed affect them in any major way. Transient rural areas fare extremely badly on all the
indicators of ICT take-up, with the sole exception of age (transient rural populations tend to be of
working age). They are likely to continue to have poor infrastructure and this will deter what few
rural entrepreneurs they might otherwise have succeeded in attracting.
D. ‘Deep rural’
Overview
In the more scenic areas, the ‘farmer’ owns a few sheep and a sheep dog for ‘maintaining’ the
countryside – keeping the grass down. For this he gets a subsidy from Europe or central government
because there is value in cared for uplands. However, the rest of the time he is working for the
professional couple that now live (for most of the week) nearby. His wife runs a B&B.
The professional couple nearby regard the area as their ‘home’ but there ‘intellectual and economic’
base is still the city, and they maintain a second home there where they use their time to socialize
with friends and colleagues. There is no longer a clear distinction between the working week and
the weekend. Rather, their week is structured by time in the country and time in the city and they
work for about two thirds of every day (internationally). During the summer they spend more time in
the country and less in the city (they have an outdoor swimming pool and a separate (up-market)
self catering annex for housing paying guests as well as friends and family). During the winter, they
spend more time in the city. Their children are at boarding school.
During the summer, the area is busy with tourists, who stay in Germanic log cabins. The area is
much quieter in winter. The National Trust has bought up one or two farms in the area, which are
very popular with the tourists.
The area is very dependent on the wealth of city based people. There is still no ethnic diversity in
the area – it is still very much white Anglo-Saxon.
The less scenic areas have been taken over by wind farms, and factory farming/poly tunnels for
continuous food production.
The key drivers that have affected the lives of the people described above are: IT, economic growth,
farming supports and the planning system.
Key Trends
Political: Over a twenty-year time frame, deep rural areas are unlikely to be affected by many of the
salient political changes that we might foresee (e.g. regional devolution). A looser planning policy
will aid in-migration to these areas; however local political pressures to restrict new development are
weakened by the relative absence of politically active groups in these areas.
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