Rural Community Councils: the Perennial Community Harvest.
Rural Community Councils (RCCs) came into being in October 1920 in Oxfordshire, inspired by an ideological desire to offer social service in rural areas – through cooperation, education, and volunteering. By the Second World War some 15 were up and running, all with individual priorities but bound by a broad common purpose and orchestrated nationally through a range of support from the National Council for Social Service, the Development Commission and the Carnegie UK Trust.
Rural depopulation was a common problem to be tackled and developing village halls, adult education and music and the arts would enhance community cohesion. A rural industry portfolio also would stimulate jobs. With RCCs being place-based organisations, these functions all would overlap and coalesce.
After the War, with many parts of rural England begining to experience population growth, RCC emphases naturally shifted – not immune from the influence of adventitious urban incomers. The introduction of the welfare state after the War, provided some ambiguities for RCCs in the provision of social service.
At the same time, an interest in rural ‘preservation’ was growing amid fears of a ‘recreation explosion’. Whilst a post-War restrictive planning system would help the preservation cause, the lack of development it brought about created problems for rural housing and transport, and the inevitable decline in rural services. These would have to be tackled, whilst still providing support for industry, village halls, education, and social organisation.
From the early 1970s, a further 12 RCCs were in business (the full England coverage of 38 was not achieved until 1989 when the Isle of Wight was formed) and all were undergoing a process of professionalisation. Countryside officers (often young and graduate) would become involved in direct action in a range of environmental projects, in planning at the very local scale (for example village appraisals) and helping to tackle growing housing, transport and services problems.
In this period to 1995, too, the decline in the welfare state impacted on RCC identity again, just as its introduction had done: the importance of social service, particularly in relation to rural elders, was in the ascendency again.
In the most recent quarter century, business skills have become the order of the day in RCCs as the contract culture and competitive bidding for funds have displaced core funding from central and local government. This has taken place in tandem with the almost total dismantling of the state governance structure for rural areas. Despite this, RCC portfolios are more diverse than ever, embracing traditional work in education, village halls and employment, core work in housing transport and services and a host of new initiatives in community care, particularly amongst the elderly.
A hundred years on, social service is again at the forefront of RCC work, and voluntary effort, within a framework of professional guidance, core to delivery mechanisms. Despite a full range of political and financial churn, and no little organisational change both locally and nationally, the RCCs survive today to provide an essential local place-based service for all of England’s rural areas.