A radical agenda designed to deliver genuinely sustainable reforms through an ambitious and targeted set of policy priorities for rural communities and the countryside was presented to Parliament on Wednesday by Margaret Beckett, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

Government Response: Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

Margaret Beckett, secretary of state for the environment said: "I will devolve decision-making and funding for economic regeneration to the RDAs to allow decisions to reflect better the needs and pressures in each region.

"I shall not impose a single structural form - I want to encourage maximum simplification and streamlining, so that regional delivery partners are set free to focus on doing, not talking."

"The Government's policy is to tackle rural exclusion wherever it occurs and achieve fair access to services.

"I will create a small and well-focussed New Countryside Agency by next April to act as an expert 'watchdog' and advocate on behalf of rural communities, particularly the disadvantaged.

"I am establishing an Integrated Agency to deliver our policy objective of a healthy countryside valued and used in a sustainable way.

"The new Agency will be a powerful, independent statutory Non Departmental Public Body, building on the world-class strengths of English Nature, the Countryside Agency and the Rural Development Service. Its remit will be the integrated management of our natural heritage that the challenges and the environmental threats of the 21st century demand."

Party Response: Liberal Democrat

Andrew George, Liberal Democrat rural affairs spokesman, said: "There needs to be an end to woolly ideas about the countryside. It is pointless having a strategy cloaked in conceptual language, and talking of a vision, but which actually achieves nothing.

"DEFRA is still confused about what its strategy really means and hasn’t even worked out which areas should be classed as rural.

"Ministers should be seeking to devolve decisions to local levels rather than to typically city-based regional bodies. Local areas shouldn’t have to go cap-in-hand to remote regional quangos which treat rural areas as an afterthought.

"If the government really does want to make sure that rural life does not become the exclusive preserve of the well-off, it needs to tackle the lack of affordable housing by changing its planning policies and finally putting its money where its mouth is."

Stakeholder Response: Action within Communities in Rural England

Sylvia Brown ACRE’s chief executive said: “The time-scale imposed after two years of thinking about it means we will all have to work very closely to ensure there isn’t a vacuum in service delivery.

"All sorts of programmes, such as transport, access to health and other services could be in danger whilst new structures become effective.  We’ll be seeking urgent talks with our new partners to see this doesn’t happen.

"It will be important to match programmes to the needs of communities under the new urban rural definitions also announced today.  

"This is just one more in a set of unknowns in terms of delivering appropriate support to communities across the country.