Protecting our countryside

By Alex Perkins, Liberal Democrat Canterbury City Council Leader

The City Council has been working with its partners to ensure our local countryside is properly protected. We have some outstanding areas of natural beauty in our patch and the Kent Downs deserve and are now receiving special attention. As a result we have signed up to a specific management plan for the Kent Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. This means that we will have the policies and powers that allow us to concentrate on the primary purpose of conserving and enhancing the natural beauty of the landscape.

We also want to make sure that our local villages receive similar protection, but in a way which will allow us to help to raise the quality of life in rural areas. This means ensuring that any development in rural areas has to be well designed, in keeping with and in scale with its village setting, but most importantly that it is sensitive to the character of the countryside and local distinctiveness.

The key thing, it seems to me, is to ensure that the life is not sucked from our villages because of their proximity to larger towns. We have to fight to ensure that our village shops, and most of all of course, our village post offices are safe and that their future is ensured.

We have seen constant erosion of the integrity of local villages over the last twenty years. In several places the local schools were branded “uneconomic” by Kent County Council and closed down. Then the rural bus services began to be withdrawn. Often the shops and businesses quickly followed.

Currently there appears to be a sustained attack on our rural and local post offices. Although others and I have asked for a definitive list of all those that face closure none is forthcoming. Instead we find what appears to amount to random closures without lengthy consultation or economic justification. To close a local post office and shop is to tear the heart out of a village community. It can even serve to destroy it and convert a once happy and thriving rural village into a dormitory for nearby towns and cities.

In the same way we stood together against the hospital closure and the SWERF incinerator we have to join together once more to protect our rural environment. We live at the very heart of the garden of England. We are, if you like, its trustees, and it is our duty to protect it for future generations.

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