Cautious welcome for social care funding
On Tuesday 2nd of October the Health Secretary announced additional £240m funding for social care. Funding to local authorities will be payable in 2018-19 to help deal with winter pressures. In the statement, the Health Secretary says: “I am making an extra £240 million available to councils to pay for social care packages this winter […]
Smart Rural Transport Areas (SMARTA) Project
Introduction SMARTA is an international research and demonstration project which is developing new insights into the challenges faced by rural communities across the world in maintaining good transport and accessibility. The project consortium offers expertise to selected rural sites to pilot and evaluate innovative solutions to overcome these challenges. The research and testing will provide […]
Borrowing cap scrapped
There was broad media coverage of Theresa May’s speech at the Conservative Party Conference, during which she announced that she is lifting the borrowing cap on local councils to help solve the housing crisis. Scrapping the cap means that £1 billion extra could be available to local councils to assist in the building of thousands […]
Calls for a online sales tax
The Times reports on calls from the Tesco boss for a two per cent tax on goods sold online to support ‘bricks-and-mortar’ retailers. Dave Lewis, Tesco’s chief executive, said an online sales tax would raise roughly £1.25 billion and could be used to protect struggling high street shops which currently employ 4.2 million people across […]
Towns are key election battlegrounds
The Sunday Times Magazine featured a long article on the increasing importance of voters living in towns across Britain. It highlighted the feeling of disempowerment that has been growing in towns around the UK embodied in the EU referendum result: broadly, cities voted Remain, towns voted Leave. It continued to say that the traditional view […]
Rural hospital success reported
The Daily Mail reported on Public Health England data collected over the last year from 151 hospitals showing that rural trusts have, on average, the fewest cases of E.Coli infections. Salisbury in Wiltshire, Weston Area Health in Somerset and Wye Valley on the Welsh border were the top-ranked trusts. The figures are not adjusted according […]
Rural maternity services
Managers of an Oxfordshire NHS trust have called for GPs to have extra training on how to perform caesarean sections, the Independent reports. According to the Independent, to address shortages of obstetricians, health chiefs are considering modelling trusts on rural or remote maternity services where women often do not have access to an obstetrician at […]
National recycling confusion
The Local Government Association has rejected calls for a nationwide standardised recycling system saying that ‘no one size would work’. The charity Keep Britain Tidy (KBT) highlighted that there are currently 150 different local waste management systems, arguing it was therefore unsurprising that recycling rates have remained flat over the last year as people were […]
Are we really headed for a cashless rural society?
How we pay for goods and services, and how we access cash are changing rapidly with rural consequences, finds Brian Wilson. The continuing closure of bank branches, along with recent evidence about the loss of cash machines (ATMs), is building into a significant news story about access to cash. It is one that has implications […]
