Barriers to housing and services blight village

The Department for Communities and Local Government has published its report of Indices of Multiple Deprivation for 2010, and the Creeting St Peter Journal has uncovered a statistic that probably comes as no great surprise to villagers, in that the village falls within the bottom 10% of the more than 32,000 LSOAs (short for lower-level Super Output Areas, or in our case, District Council wards) in England on the index of barriers to housing and services.

The index is calculated with reference to the distance to key services (post office, GP, primary school and general store), as well as the availability of affordable housing. And villagers don't need to be reminded that we don't have any of these things here in Creeting St Peter. There is no doubt that the absence of these services has an impact, especially on elderly residents and those without access to their own transport.

All of this falls against a background of declining rural services. Figures provided by the Rural Development Commission, the Countryside Agency and Suffolk ACRE show that the number of rural parishes with a post office has fallen from 58% to 44% in England, and even faster in Suffolk, from 57% to just 33% since 1991.

The proportion of rural parishes with a general store is down from 25% to 14%,  and whilst Suffolk has retained more village pubs than across England as a whole, that may have something to do with the emergence of gastropubs, as reliant on food sales as they once were on local drinkers.

The Creeting St Peter Journal will be running a series of reports on the rural economy, following on from the Suffolk Foundation's recently published report, 'Hidden Needs', looking at the impact of social and economic change on Suffolk villages.