15 Minutes With…Kerry Booth, Chief Executive, Rural Services Network

15 Minutes With… Kerry Booth, Chief Executive, Rural Services Network

What does it really take to champion rural communities at a national level — and are policymakers actually listening?

In this episode, we sit down with Kerry Booth, Chief Executive of the Rural Services Network, the national body representing over 450 rural local authorities and service providers across England. Kerry shares her journey from frontline local government to leading the RSN, and makes a compelling case for why rural communities deserve far more than an afterthought in national policy.

We discuss the stark funding gap that sees urban councils receive a third more in government spending power per head than their rural counterparts, why so many Whitehall departments still struggle to understand the realities of rural life, and what genuine rural proofing should look like in practice. Kerry also sets out the enormous untapped potential of the rural economy — estimated at £19 billion in additional Treasury contributions with the right policy interventions — and explains why devolution could be a double-edged sword for rural communities.

A wide-ranging, honest, and essential conversation for anyone working at the intersection of policy, place, and public services.

Transcript

15 Minutes With Kerry Booth – Rural Services Network

SPEAKER_00 0:01

This is fifteen minutes with from the Country Land and Business Association. Before we start, did you know that CLA Insurance supports over a thousand members? Find out what they can do for you by searching CLA Insurance. In this edition, CLA Director of Policy and Advice, Judy Kell Hammond, meets Kerry Booth of the Rural Services Network to discuss rural funding, devolution, and unlocking the rural economy's potential.

SPEAKER_02 0:31

Well, hello Kerry, and thank you very much for joining me on 15 minutes with So I wonder whether we can start by a question on the Rural Services Network, which is your organization. Could you tell us what the Rural Services Network is and what you do?

About the Rural Services Network

SPEAKER_01 0:49

Yeah, certainly. So I'm the Chief Exec of the Rural Services Network. We're the national champion for rural services. So we were actually started 30 years ago. We're celebrating our 30-year anniversary this year. We're a membership organization. We've got around 450 organizations in membership with us, lots and lots of rural local authorities from counties, districts, and unitaries, and then a whole range of rural service providers from rural housing associations to health trusts to national bodies and smaller third sector organizations. And what we aim to do, and we're also a special interest group of the LGA focusing on those rural councils, but what we aim to do is share best practice across them, around that delivering services in rural areas, and then act as the only body really representing those rural service providers at the national level. So we make sure that we're interacting with government, with civil servants, trying to get across their concerns, their experiences, and what's happening in rural areas.

Kerry's Background & Role

SPEAKER_02 1:45

Thank you very much. But before that, tell us a little bit about you. What's your role? So you mentioned you're the chief executive. What does that involve? How long have you been working at the RSN? And things like, you know, what gets you out of bed in the morning?

SPEAKER_01 2:11

So I'm the chief executive of the RSN. I've been in this role for three years now, but I've been with the RSN for around 13 years. But prior to that, I started my career in local government. I was part of one of those first cohorts on the National Graduate Development Programme. So working in a rural local authority, I then progressed to become head of a shared service across two rural local authorities. And I did that for around 10 years. So I've got that kind of background experience of what it's like to deliver services in a rural area to sparsely populated communities and what some of those challenges are. But then I moved across to the Rural Services Network where I've, yeah, I've been doing this role as the chief execu for three years now. And I think what I love about the job is it's it's completely different every single day. I guess you would experience that as well in the kind of policy development world. You know, one day I can be hosting a seminar with our members, so a hundred people on a seminar online talking about the latest developments in policy, best practice. The next day I can be helping an MP write a speech that they're going to give in the House of Commons, making sure they've got the right perspective of what's happening in their rural area and that big picture of what's happening in rural across the country. So every day is different, which I really love about the job. And I hope that I'm able to make a difference in that work that I do by actually being at the table of those national debates and saying, you know, what about rural? We need to talk about what's happening in our rural communities to get those points across.

Getting Rural Into Government Thinking

SPEAKER_02 3:34

Thank you. And I guess not just in DEFRA, but in other government departments as well. What do you think we can do to promote the understanding of the lived reality of the countryside in departments, particularly outside DEFRA? Because my experience is DEFRA gets rural, and the problem is, you know, the Treasury Department for Transport, MHCLG and others. Is that an analysis that you share and improve the understanding?

SPEAKER_01 4:04

Yeah, absolutely. I think we work quite a lot with the rural affairs team in DEFRA. You know, they're brilliant. They understand the kind of things that we're talking about, they understand the challenges when we're raising them with them. And we do find it more difficult to get that level of understanding across other government departments. That's not to say it's not the same everywhere, but generally it can be more challenging engaging with them. I've heard of organizations who write a letter to the minister of a different department and it gets sent back to respond to because it's about rural affairs. Yeah. And actually, it shouldn't be like that. Every department should be responsible for the urban and rural areas of their policy remit. So it can be challenging. We support an all-party parliamentary group on rural services, and that's quite useful as a way of getting that cross-party support. And so dealing with MPs, some of whom are backbenchers, but understanding what that lived experience is like in rural areas. And we're going to be doing some work with our APPG coming up, particularly around energy resilience and the impact of the heating and oil crisis, the fuel prices. Very topical. Yeah, what that's been doing to rural communities and really understanding those challenges. And then looking longer term at not just what support do they need now, but actually how do we change this so that people don't have to pay to have their homes heated by oil, understanding that not all rural homes are going to be suitable immediately for putting a heat pump in. But how do we get them part of the way on that journey towards net zero and having homes that are cheaper to heat and more insulated so they're living in a warmer environment, those kind of things. So it feels like an opportunity to get some of those messages now about the urgent support that's needed, but also longer-term policy-wise, what do we need for our rural homes and how do we help them with that?

Funding Inequality & Rural Council Pressures

SPEAKER_02 5:42

I mean, that is an area where there's a lot of synergies and a lot of commonality between what the RSN does and what the CLA does. So similarly to you, we've been explaining to both the Ministry for Housing and also the Ministry for Energy and Net Zero, what is special about rural areas and the preponderance of oil heating, which you know, some MPs might have come across ministers, maybe less so, government officials varies very much in my experience. And I think it it's great that they hear it in stereo from us, representing businesses in rural areas and for you focusing on communities, really. What do you think has changed, if indeed anything has changed, in terms of working in rural local authorities? So you mentioned that you started your career there and you haven't been there for a while, but your members still are. Has anything changed in the you know 25 or so years in the interim?

SPEAKER_01 6:43

I think it's difficult. The communities haven't changed. I think lots of their needs are still the same in terms of those communities needing access to affordable housing, needing access to connectivity, to transport. I think the way that councils deliver services has changed. They're doing a lot more in partnership now than maybe they weren't 10 or 15 years ago. Some of that has come from austerity years. You know, rural local authorities really struggle in that funding settlement from government. We do a lot of work campaigning around funding for rural local authorities. So we had the new formula coming this year, which actually means that urban councils will get around a third more in government-funded spending power than rural councils per head. You know, that's a significant amount of funding. And what it's meant over the years is that rural councils have had to increase council tax to bridge that gap. So now if you live in a rural area, you generally pay more in council tax than if you live in a city. So it's unfair to us that basically the government says, well, we'll fund public services in our cities, but if you live in the rural areas, you'll be funding them predominantly yourselves through that increased council tax. But it means that overall rural councils don't have as much funds to spend on delivering their services and they cost more. If you just think about something like collecting the bins, you know, from every property. If there's a far five-mile gap between properties, that's going to cost you a lot more than collecting from a terrace row of houses. So for us, the challenge is in government understanding that those it those services cost more to deliver in rural areas and the councils having less money to deliver them. So some have been reduced, some will be delivered in partnership, some will be done on a more risk, risk-verse basis around, you know, how often things are inspected. But there are changes that we've seen in the way that those services are delivered. And we're continuing to see that with local government reorganization taking place as well, and councils completely changing where their borders are, how they're, you know, how they're formed. But for us, those rural communities will still be there. They will still need services delivered to them, whatever shape of authority sits above them. And it is about still being able to recognize those needs. And I think that's a challenge for us all as we move towards as well, devolution in more of our rural areas and how we look at making sure those rural communities still get their voices heard in that process.

Devolution & Rural Representation

SPEAKER_02 8:52

Yeah, so it's great that you're mentioning devolution because the the next topic that I was going to bring up is the devolution bill, which is currently going through Parliament. So we've been working with the rural town planning institute to push some amendments about the voice and the way that rural communities are being represented in the new world governance where more power might be given to mayors and strategic combined authorities, et cetera, et cetera. We're not there yet, I think it's fair to say, but we've got some hope. What do you think the the devolution agenda brings? Is it actually going to improve the understanding? Because, you know, mayors or strategic combined authorities are going to be literally nearer to the ground and nearer to the people that they're delivering service for, or do you think that's still not near enough? And without resources, it doesn't really make a difference how far or how close you are to the people that you're trying to improve livelihoods of?

The Rural Economy's Untapped Potential

SPEAKER_01 9:57

Yeah, I think it's a difficult one. If I've got my glass half full hat on, I think it's really positive because actually giving power to organisations that are closer to communities rather than being run centrally by government is a good thing, actually, because I don't think that Whitehall always understands, particularly the needs of rural communities. So if it's being run by something closer to them, then that's great. I think that there's a risk that we are quite urban focused in this country and that as the devolution model expands, you know, if we have a really large city with a rural hinterland, is there a risk that that rural hinterland gets a bit ignored in that funding that that organization will have? We've seen some really good work going on up in the north of the country though, particularly with the Northeast Combined Authority, who's doing some work around a rural task force and really understanding that rural economy and the potential that it has. Because I think often rural can be overlooked. There's very much a perception by this government, I think at the moment, that our rural areas are affluent and our cities are where all the deprivation is. I think that ignores the deprivation we have in our rural communities, which is often, it looks different. It's pockets of deprivation. It's not huge, you know, tower blocks in the same way that they're that it's perceived perhaps in an urban area. But if we only focus on that urban deprivation, you know, the people living in rural communities will get lost and they won't have policy interventions that suit them. And we need to make sure in the devolution agenda as we move forward that those rural communities and that rural economy also gets considered in the plans for that area, that policy interventions also target their needs. Because actually there's a lot of opportunity there. You know, the rural economy has a lot of potential to grow. We did some work as part of the rural coalition that looked at the rural economy and said, actually, it's got the potential to contribute 19 billion to the Treasury if only we did certain policy interventions. And actually, you know, that pays for a lot of nurses and teachers if we're only able to do that. And it can only be a good thing that if we want to grow the economy, we also grow the rural economy and make sure not just that it survives, but that it thrives as well. But we need to make sure that we're doing particular policy interventions to make sure that that happens. So we need affordable homes in the right places of the right type for people to live in to access that rural employment. We need to have the transport in the right place as well to get them there and access healthcare. We need the connectivity because actually, without that, these days, it's very hard to take part in life, and normal life and children's schooling and all of those things. So I do think there's a number of policy interventions that need to be happening, a bit like in our Delivering for All campaign. But we don't want the government, the the mayoral authorities, the new local authorities that are formed as local government reorganizations to kind of forget those rural areas. We want to make sure that they're included.

Rural Proofing & Policy Language

SPEAKER_02 12:42

That that makes an awful lot of sense to me. A couple more questions for you, but before I do, the the CLA over the the last uh six months, I think, has done a series of workshops looking at what resilient and profitable businesses might look like in 2035. And one of those workshops looked at industrial and commercial uses. And one of the things that we did with the workshop participants was to try and map the number of uh landowners who either were operating or were hosting businesses included in the eight priority sectors of the industrial strategy. And we were thinking, yes, there'd be a sprinkle, particularly light manufacturing and things like creative and audiovisual, because we knew that some of our members were involved in that. What we discovered is that there is a hell of a lot more that is not necessarily visible. So your point about the undiscovered or maybe invisible power of the rural economy and how much more it could do, I think is totally vindicated in the work that we've done. There is so much more that could be done with the right connectivity, both physical and digital, the right housing, the right skills in some in some areas as well. So, I mean, the the it's it's great that the two organizations are are are thinking the same way from a slightly different starting point. And I guess the question for me is well, some of our listeners might be might be familiar with the term rural proofing, but basically what it means is looking at the impact of policies on rural areas, ideally at the beginning of the policy design framework, my experience both in government as a civil servant and now out of government for the last six and a bit years in the CLA is that if it is thought about at all, it's an add-on at the end of the process. Oh, let's make sure that we haven't forgotten anything, which is way too late. So, do you think the concept of rural proofing is still useful? Is it dead? Is it is it something that should be revived in a different way?

SPEAKER_01 14:55

Absolutely, I think so. Because I mean, we had the government publishing its rural proofing annual statements, which basically said, Oh, we did this policy and it helped everyone in towns, villages, and rural areas, which is just to me a throwaway statement. It doesn't say that they considered that policy from the very beginning around what should we be doing. And I think absolutely the government should be doing it. And we talk a lot in our organization, we've done some work looking at language and how we frame things. And rather than actually pitting rural against urban and saying, well, we need this and we need this, and and who should have funding, actually, we started saying things like, well, everybody should live in a warm, safe home. Therefore, to deliver affordable housing, we need to make this policy intervention in urban areas and this one in rural. Well, everyone should be able to access the internet at a minimum level. And therefore, we need this intervention perhaps in our cities, and then we need this intervention in our rural areas. So it's about framing the language rather than saying it's rural versus urban and look at this, but actually saying, well, everyone should have access to the health and care that they need. And therefore, to deliver that in rural areas, we might need a different approach to rural. So for me, it's it's really important and it's vital, and it's something that we haven't really been doing as a country and really looking at that and saying we're going to need different policy interventions for different areas of the country, and we might need them in different areas completely to the rural versus urban as well. But actually thinking about well, how does this policy impact everyone or the groups of people that it that it's there for? And is it benefiting everyone in the same way? And if not, how do we tweak an air of it to support, for example, communities living in rural areas? But for me, it's vital, and I don't think that we're doing it enough at national level at the moment. And some of that comes from that understanding, some of that comes, particularly, I think, in government at the moment, around that perception of what it's like in rural areas. Lots of times you speak to people and they say, Well, I went there on holiday, it was really nice. It is really nice in the summer where there might be more buses, or you don't need to get to work, or you don't you don't need to work from home because there's no connectivity and your children can't access services. But actually, the reality of living in our rural communities can be very different to that that people experience when they go there on holiday. And I think it's having that real understanding of what's happening that's vital and that we're sometimes missing.

SPEAKER_02 17:10

And have you come across good examples of government departments that are thinking, it's starting to think in those terms? For example, do you think that the Department of Health is starting to think about the health services, particularly given that the population in rural areas is likely to age faster than in urban areas? Are you seeing green shoots?

SPEAKER_01 17:34

I'd like to say yes. We certainly saw it with the 10-year health plan. The government actually saying we need to be putting health services within our communities and actually taking some of those services back out to communities, which I think is a good step. But it's about then understanding, well, where are those diagnostic centres going to be? Are they still in our urban deprived areas? Or we have we had, you know, got one in the middle of Devon so people can access it. It is about understanding that. But it felt like with some of their policy, they were starting to see, yes, we need to be doing things a bit differently so that we're reaching people. We've contributed a bit. The chief medical officer's doing a report, his annual report this year is on small towns and rural areas, and we have contributed to that about the wider determinants of health, things like living in a warm, safe home and what that can do to people's mental and physical health, about being able to access services and the importance of that and the importance that transport plays, and giving younger people that the ability with that social mobility to study courses that they want, to go on to further education, to higher education, rather than being limited by, well, I can only do that course at that college because that's the only one I can get to within a 50-mile radius. So we're starting to see those kind of conversations take place. We gave evidence to the House of Lords Select Committee on Social Mobility last year looking at that particular issue for our young people that live in rural areas and how do we support them? And transport is one of the big issues that can kind of enable that for them.

SPEAKER_02 18:58

Thank you very much. I mean, just to conclude, I think it's great that our organizations are on the same page on so many issues. And I really very much look forward to continuing to work with you and the RSN to make the case to government and to reinforce all those messages and all the needs as well as the fantastic opportunities. So it's thank you very much for your time. One final question: what's your favorite place in the countryside and why?

SPEAKER_01 19:27

Absolutely. I think both our organizations together, you know, representing the land use and the agriculture and things and the services that we support, you know, it can be a powerful voice with government. And the more rural voices that come together, the stronger we are. So my favorite place in the countryside would have to be my home. So I live in a village in Devon by the sea. When you drive into the village, there's a point at which you turn a corner and you get to see the sea. And for me, that's my happy place that really grounds me. I have a young family. I'm not sure my teenagers love living in a rural place now that there's no transport and an evening and a weekend, now that they're looking for part-time work and things. But actually, I love my home and the community. It's a very lively community there. So that would be my happy place for me.

SPEAKER_02 20:10

That sounds very delicate. Thank you very much for your time, Carrie, and see you soon. That's all right. Thank you. Bye bye.

SPEAKER_00 20:18

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