Leaders Highlight Rural Role in National Resilience

A coalition of rural local authorities has written to ministers, setting out the critical role that rural and peripheral areas can play in strengthening the UK’s resilience and prosperity.

Britain’s Leading Edge, a cross-party group of predominantly rural councils, has outlined how its regions can support national priorities in energy, food security, environment, and defence, particularly against a backdrop of global instability.

Four Priorities For Rural Britain

The letter reaffirms three existing missions and introduces a fourth:

• Powering the UK through expanded renewable energy
• Feeding the nation by strengthening domestic production (with 30% of England’s agri, forestry and fishing businesses in these areas)
• Protecting natural capital as the nation’s ‘lungs’
• Supporting defence and resilience, reflecting the role rural areas play in infrastructure, supply chains and emergency response

A Stronger Role For Rural Areas

The group points to recent global disruptions as reinforcing the need for greater national self-reliance, arguing rural regions are central to delivering this across energy, food and environmental resilience.

They also highlight the often-overlooked contribution rural areas make to defence and wider national stability.

Britain’s Leading Edge is calling for closer partnership with government and has requested a meeting with ministers ahead of publishing a renewed manifesto later this summer.

Read the full letter here