Countryside: Thriving communities

Underinvestment, growing transience and a knowledge economy oriented to the cities have hollowed many villages and small towns of their economic and civic assets. But many rural places are responding, restoring pride and dignity in the countryside. We can help with rebuilding thriving rural communities through a rural strategy and the development of new economic institutions.

Frome: a public value lens

Tobias Phibbs, Food, Farming and Countryside Commission

Public value, one of the guiding principles of the Commission’s work, can seem an obscure or technocratic term. Its life as a concept began in academic departments and international civil services. But it has meaning and power beyond Whitehall.

The public value framework encourages mapping economic and social assets, bringing them together to deliver a broader set of objectives than the traditional measures of productivity or growth. This can mean government departments breaking down siloes and working together to meet shared goals. But it can also mean local communities coming together and pooling skills and assets to meet needs and bring community cohesion to their shared home.

The independent-spirited West Country town of Frome in Somerset has done just this. In 2011 local residents created Independents for Frome, a non-party political grouping to stand in local elections. Later that year they won a majority on the town council, and by 2015 they had every seat on the council — four years on, they still do.

At the heart of their approach is what former Mayor Peter Macfadyen calls flatpack democracy, an attempt to rejuvenate town and parish councils, breaking the sclerosis and divisiveness of party politics and involving the whole community in decision-making.7 They have, for example, invested in a local credit union and created a ‘share shop’ in which people are free to borrow all manner of tools, toys and anything else that local people donate.

The work of Compassionate Frome exemplifies the best of the Frome experience. Supported by the town council, local GP Helen Kingston set up the initiative in keeping with the ethos of flatpack democracy. It is ostensibly a health initiative but its impact goes far beyond just healthcare; it has created a real-life social network that builds on the assets of local people and replenishes community life.

Like asset-based community development, its starting point is not local needs but local assets and social resources. To this end, Compassionate Frome asked residents what social resources they had to offer — whether fixing computers or spending time with isolated people. From this they created a service directory8 with an active network of ‘Community Connectors’ to provide help and manage the directory. They now have 400 groups providing forms of mutual aid from help with DIY to mental health support networks, serving the town and its rural hinterland.

This form of social capital may seem like a nice but expendable extra befitting a bohemian West Country town but in fact it has delivered a significant and quantifiable benefit to public health and finances. Since the experiment launched, emergency admissions to the local hospital have dropped by 17% with an associated 21% drop in costs, whereas across the whole of Somerset admissions have risen by 27%, with a 21% increase in costs.

Public value is about corralling the assets of people and place to achieve public goods. Frome has done this, breathing new life into small town democracy, and showing that neither productivity nor growth adequately capture what the goal of public policy should be. Frome is a town of nearly 30,000 people — a far larger settlement than most of the places the Commission has engaged with. This scale confers certain advantages, most obviously the relative ease with which people can gather together in a place. Nonetheless, there is much that people and councils in rural areas could learn from the Frome experiment.

Peter Macfadyen adds that “in May 2019, having adopted the Frome model, Independents won control in five small towns in rural Devon. With a similar total population to Frome’s, they are now looking to work together in a range of areas”. Flatpack2 is also on the way, which will record what has happened in Frome, and other small towns using the same model, since 2011. It will be available in late summer of this year.

Agrivillages

Ashley Dobbs & Jimmy Skinner

An agrivillage is typically around 500 houses with some 350+ acres of land dedicated to ecological farming. They are designed to meet the needs of new food entrepreneurs and those who want to escape the city and lead their lives back on the land.

Agrivillages are places everyone can live and work, benefitting from collective marketing and branding that enables producers and farmers to sell branded products rather than commodities at greater margins. The goal of our agrivillage plans is to build exemplar communities that are: food positive, energy positive, biodiversity positive, and rent positive.

The first of the inHarmony agrivillages will be in Millom, Cumbria, which was a mining town until 50 years ago when the iron ore industry closed.

We’re designing agrivillages as a response to the difficulty of obtaining land. They will help new farm entrants by making it affordable to cultivate innovative and ecologically sound ways that protect and conserve biodiversity and wildlife whilst enhancing the fertility of the soil. The farm plots for renting will range from allotment size to micro-dairy size of 30 to 40 acres. This farmland will eventually be owned by the community. Technological back-up from organic research organisations will play a crucial part in increasing productivity per acre. We’ll address the problem of profitability by forming an umbrella brand that enables residents to market what they grow as branded products rather than commodities. Creating a home market and shorter supply chains to other markets means that both producers and consumers benefit from reducing transport and other intermediary costs.

Millom will also feature; a multi-university campus encouraging cross-over between science, the arts, entrepreneurship, and horticulture; an eco-hotel; miles of trails; and a freshwater lido. Transport will be via electric cars and a bike pool and will link to the mainline railway station via footpath. 500 homes of different designs and sizes will cater for a diverse population of all ages, which will be available for rental and for purchase.

Although Millom is still in the planning phase and will not be completed for at least another three years, we’ve received a huge amount of support for the project so far — we now have more than half a dozen other projects in the pipeline. We think the idea is really starting to gain traction because people want places where they can lead stimulating, happy and healthy lives. Agrivillages are designed to contrast with typical housing estates, which have failed to grasp the opportunities to advance civilisation and have largely neglected the urgent need to tackle the climate emergency.

But this is not to say there aren’t challenges: ironically, small eco-communities create a larger per capita footprint than ordinary development. Scale is vital — larger eco-developments can meet most of the energy, food, educational, intellectual and entertainment requirements of its residents without the necessity to travel further afield. By design, they encourage neighbourly interaction with lots of meeting places, gardens and shared facilities — addressing the physical and mental health crisis and creating a sense of community.

Why we need regional stakeholder banks

Tony Greenham

The Community Savings Bank Association advocates independent, local banks working for, controlled by, and answerable to their customers, and South West Mutual, serving Cornwall, Devon, Somerset and Dorset, is their first.

The UK’s banking industry is still dominated by a handful of giants. Large-scale and standardised ‘tick-box’ systems can bring great advantages for some banking needs, but for many communities it falls well short. Healthy banking systems, like healthy eco-systems, need diversity.

Most countries outside the UK have a mix of banks including regional banks, local public savings banks and cooperative banks owned by their customers. Europe has 3,135 cooperative banks with 80.5 million members and 209 million customers. The USA has 5,700 community banks with total assets of USD 4.7 trillion and Germany has 209 regional commercial banks with total assets of EUR 830 billion, as well as 400 local public savings banks, or ‘Sparkassen’. These regional stakeholder banks do the heavy lifting when it comes to lending to smaller businesses, financial inclusion, reinvesting in regions, tackling regional inequalities and supporting local economies during recessions.

One of the key advantages of smaller scale is the ability to gather additional information about local markets, industries, companies and investors that can improve credit decisions allowing them to do more and better lending to smaller business, as well as regionally important and specialist sectors.

What we’re doing at South West Mutual

The Community Savings Bank Association has been established to help create a network of regional community banks for the UK. South West Mutual is one of the early ones, seeking a banking licence for Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, and Dorset. We intend to offer a range of banking services, from current accounts and savings, to mortgages, loans and overdrafts for personal and SME customers. We will offer state of the art online and mobile banking but, unlike most other banks, we are also committing to maintain a branch network to serve our members’ needs.

The bank will be a commercial business seeking long-term profitability, but profits are not the sole reason for its existence. Our mission is to serve our members and to support the broader prosperity of our region. Integral to this is an approach to lending that takes full account of economic, social and environmental factors, including the need for a zero-carbon economy.

This makes us unique, being the only bank with all three of the following characteristics:

• Participation. The bank will be a cooperative. All customers will be members and have a vote. This helps ensure that the Board keeps focused on the interests of members. Too often, executives in distant skyscrapers can lose sight of who they serve.
• Purpose. We exist to promote more environmentally sustainable and widespread inclusive prosperity in the region. We will be financially profitable to serve this purpose.
• Place. Reinvesting in the region. We are dedicated to the region and will use local deposits to fund local lending. Our local knowledge will be part of our competitive advantage.

What does that mean for food and farming sector businesses?

First, food and farming do not loom large in the balance sheets of massive global banks which devote much of their assets to financial trading, commercial property and large corporations. In contrast, small-scale regional banks reflect their local economy and focus on SMEs. And that means that food and farming become a top priority for those banks within more rural regions.

Second, for food and farming businesses adapting to a world where climate change is already affecting them and who want to future-proof their business for a zero-carbon economy, who better as a banking partner than a mission-led bank that is set up to finance the socially-just transition to a net zerocarbon economy?

Exploring land stewardship

Caerau, Treherbert, and Ynysowen — Wales

Chris Blake

Skyline, managed by The Green Valleys CIC, was a year-long project to explore the feasibility of landscape-scale, community land stewardship in Caerau, Treherbert, and Ynysowen — to create a shared vision for the next 100 years.

Coal and steel created the Valleys communities, which today illustrate a striking paradox — a landscape that has been largely repaired but a society struggling to respond to the loss of industry. Steep-sided valleys have created communities that are both geographically and psychologically isolated — unable to take up economic opportunities along the M4 corridor. The high moorland that surrounds each valley does not support any economic activity that engages the local economy.

But the Valleys communities are also isolated by land ownership — by the red lines of land registry maps as much as by contour lines. Uniquely for post-industrial communities, each Valley town is surrounded by publicly owned land — the forests of Welsh Government Forest Estate, legacy coal boards, and local authorities. None of these landholdings provide any economic benefit to the communities. Where the land is of economic value — from forestry and wind power — it is managed by national and international corporations with no direct economic benefit to the local community.

What would happen if a community had the right to manage the land that surrounds the town, for the long-term? What happens if we transfer to the town the rights to use all publicly owned land — to the skyline? We sought to answer one important question — do communities want to be stewards of their own landscape?

Asking a question that has never been asked before is a difficult challenge. The possibility of community land stewardship had barely been considered. The forest on the sides were managed by the ‘Forestry Commission’. It was easy to find people who had lived in the valleys for 50 or 60 years who had never even been in the forest — let alone considered taking control.

To answer this core question, we started with artists to engage communities, to help people speak with their hearts first, their minds second. Our artists enabled so many different activities.

We broke bread together — 100 people met for lunch; we wrote poetry — the local primary school children capturing what they would put, “in my magic box of Treherbert…”; dreamcatchers walked the streets of Aberfan collecting dreams on coloured ribbons. But most of all we remembered. Together we remembered what had been lost. We celebrated memories of place and of community. And then we started to dream, imagining the world 100 years into the future, crystallised in the postcards received from a century hence. A future vision made real. A vision different from both the past and the present. A vision built on the residents’ dreams.

There were other questions we sought to answer. Are there sustainable business models that would allow communities to break free from a culture of grant dependency? Are communities able to manage the landscape in a way that enhances ecological resilience for the long-term? Can these projects be wellgoverned for the long-term? The artists wove their spells. The memories and the dreams emerged, and grew, and took root.

A few things struck me powerfully. Firstly, the residents of each valley instinctively balanced all the goals that are so often presented as being in conflict. Yes, they wanted jobs and prosperity — but they also wanted a more resilient environment — “more round trees, less pointy ones”. They wanted access for everyone — for the young to learn and for the physical and mental health of the elderly. Secondly, the elderly had no problem describing with passion their vision for a valley in 50 or 100 years — a future they would never see. Thirdly, the scepticism, hardened over four decades of repeated policy failure, that any changes would make any appreciable difference to their lives. And this, I came to realise, was because in the past what had been offered was money or development staff — both of which come to an end and leave the place unchanged. Why might Skyline be different? Perhaps because we are offering something that hasn’t been offered before. Control.

I realised that above all you go to listen and not to tell. We are enabling and facilitating and not consulting. We are providing a space for dreaming. Working with artists allowed us to have a far more productive conversation than we could have achieved with traditional facilitation practices. Engaging hearts before heads allowed us to build trust more quickly.

But perhaps the single most valuable thing we did was to take members of our three communities to Scotland to see community land projects first hand — seeing what other communities had achieved. In each case we worked in partnership with an established and trusted community organisation. This gave us knowledge, insight and a start to conversations. We also found that children were able to express the most compelling vision of the future. Perhaps because they were unencumbered by the history, they provided deep insights into place and its future potential.

But it all takes longer than you think. Nine months and our limited budget was not enough to start a develop a deep conversation with the community. It is all too easy to talk to the small group of people within a community that volunteer for everything — the usual suspects. The enthusiasts, often retired, but open to new ideas. Starting conversations with the unusual suspects is more difficult. It takes time and imagination. I wish now we had the time and the budget to engage more fully across the wider community although I also recognise that not everyone is willing to engage. We found it particularly hard to reach the 30–45 year olds — perhaps because they are busy with work and family responsibilities. Land stewardship, I now realise, is all about control and trust. Giving control to a community to shape their own landscape and through it their destiny. Working to build the trust of the current land owners in communities.