The Rural Impacts Stakeholder Forum (RISF) was established in March 2020 to enable open and regular dialogue between key rural stakeholder organisations and Defra on the impact of COVID-19 on rural communities and businesses.

Members of the Forum meet with Defra officials on a weekly basis, with Lord Gardiner, the Minister for Rural Affairs and Biosecurity in attendance when his diary permits, and are as follows:

• Action with Communities in Rural England (ACRE)
• Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE)
• Countryside and Landowners Association (CLA)
• National Farmers Union (NFU)
• Plunkett Foundation
• Rural Coalition
• Rural Services Network (RSN)

The group meet on the 22/05/20 and the outcomes of this meeting can be seen below:

The meeting focused on planning for a phased return in education and early years provision at the beginning of June, and issues arising from the reopening of non-essential retail outlets.

Education and Early Years Provision

Members were briefed by a DfE representative on their current relevant thinking, including:

• Staffing sufficiency in rural locations.
• Challenges in the provision of PPE.
• Identifying the most vulnerable schools (infant schools with limited space).
• Safety and risk assessment as the prime factor.
• Further guidance to follow (key areas including cleaning and site preparation).

Members raised the following points;

• Incompatibility of the term ‘settings’ when discussing rural education (often rural educational locations are multi use (village / community halls) raising accountability issues)
• Requirement for consistent guidance relative to village halls to avoid accountability issues.
• Ability for rural communities to access next nearest school is restricted by distance.
• The impact of transition guidance in relation to three tier schools.

DfE addressed the members points agreeing to update colleagues working on guidance on the accountability point.

Opening Non-Essential Retail Outlets

The following points were discussed:

• In rural areas many non-essential retail businesses were small independent sole traders typically operating from small premises. They would need detailed guidance to support safe reopening
• Organisations which supported rural businesses would also need training and guidance on how to support them through reopening
• The NFU was preparing a report around reopening the rural economy
• Guidance on reopening would need to clarify whether risk assessments were needed before reopening and how that might need to link with traders’ public liability insurance
• The ‘fear factor’ was very real in rural areas and would need to be overcome for the rural economy to start to recover. This could be addressed eg by a formal risk assessment in order to create confidence that reopening was safe.

Forward look

The meeting on 29 May will focus on the preparations for step 3 of the emergence from lockdown at the beginning of July.