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Bookings are now officially open for the National Rural Conference 2025, which will take place online from Monday 15 to Thursday 18 September.
This is the Rural Services Network’s flagship event of the year, bringing together rural decision-makers, practitioners, and advocates for four days of live, interactive sessions focused on the future of rural communities.
Click here to book!
The Inquiry was limited to England and has been conducted to enable the APPG to submit evidence to, and to respond to the specific issues contained in, the Government’s Proposed Green Paper on the subject to be published later in 2018.
The Rural Services Network provides the Secretariat for the APPG on Rural Services.
Rebecca Pow MP, one of the Joint Chairs of the APPG is submitting the Interim report as a result of the Inquiry to Matt Hancock, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care.
The report sets out a number of Overarching Recommendations, Resource Distributional Recommendations and Workforce Planning Recommendations.
The overarching Recommendations include:
The Rural Services Network has long campaigned for Fairer Funding for Rural Areas. Central Government has historically and systematically underfunded rural areas giving them less grant per head than urban areas – despite the fact that it costs more to provide the services. Rural residents earn less on average than those in urban areas and pay more Council Tax for fewer local government services. Government policy, implicitly, is that council services in rural areas are more reliant on funding through council tax than their urban counterparts. We demand fairer funding for all public services serving rural areas and wait to see what relief the Green Paper on Social Care will bring!