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Thank you for letting me know. I would also like to let you know that your magazine is very popular with our students. Many of the students at this school are from a rural farming background and it has been fantastic to have some reading material that appeals to them, particularly the more reluctant readers.

Mrs Kathryn Durkan, LRC Manager, John Port School

John Port School, Derbyshire

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Affordable Rural Housing - another whitewash report

Affordable rural housing is an important issue for the readers of Practical Farm Ideas. Farmers need to employ help, either part of full time, or contractors, and these people need somewhere to live. Attracting people to relocate to the village means that amenities for working people are needed. Like schools and so on.

Taking just the first of these recommnedations:

· a fundamental change in the way the need for affordable housing is addressed in rural areas – so that it is delivered through a plan-led approach as part of mainstream policy in regional and local spatial strategies;

What does it actually mean? What does it mean to a normal regular farmer or other person living in the countryside?

Looking at the case studies, I see there's a local school re-opened with seven children three pre-school. The experience of people in rural areas is that schools are closing, and not just ones with 7 children, but ones with 50 and more. My readers will ask - "If it happens in Lindisfarne, why can't the same happen here?" Your report suggest, implies, that there's a policy from Mr Prescott's office to keep rural schools open, yet the actual policy is to close them. There are more being closed than kept open.

The policy has been to continue to sell public housing, so by now the stock has been depleted to the extent that in many rural areas none exists. Do planners allow farmers to convert buildings, have mobile homes and so on? Is this policy? My readers would tell you "no". The policy of planners is sto be very negative about many developments, and obstructive in their demands.

I invite you to convince me that this whole programme is nothing more than a government whitewash - at considerable public cost - aimed at providing politically correct policies, couched in such obtuse terms as to be complete gibberish to the man in the street.

To get back to my original point. Farmers, contractors, farm labourers - the people who use FARM IDEAS as a source of inspiration and a help in keeping their rural businesses afloat - have a need for affordable housing in their rural areas. In very many areas there is no difficulty in providing this. The land is there, the builders are there... etc. The problem is that the Law, for decades, has not allowed it to happen. High priced new developments seem to get the go-ahead. Low cost, duller, less interesting housing gets turned down.