The challenges rural services face are unique and funding needs to reflect that - Carl Les

The gardens go from strength to strength, with a new curator Fiona Slight finishing off projects started previously under Paul Cooke and introducing her own vision, the Bettys outpost ever popular, the Harrogate Arms, RHS’s food outlet building its own loyal client base. New housing developments are all around, and the RHS is hoping that many new residents will become members. If you have that quality of attraction easily available right on your doorstep, why wouldn’t you. Last year the gardens attracted over 500,000 visitors for the first time. A remarkable success story.

A longer trip was made into the Dales, to Grinton and the beautiful church of St Andrew, where our Scrutiny of Health Committee was meeting. This committee is the way that on behalf of our 630,000 residents North Yorkshire Council can both work with and hold to account the NHS and its numerous parts. The issue here was the imminent closure of the doctors’ practice in Reeth and the impact that will have on the community. It was an extra meeting hurriedly convened because of the urgency, and arranged for an excellent venue in the Dales to allow easier access.

It gave the communities an opportunity to express their concerns, fears even, and also for the ICB, the Integrated Care Board, who commission health services, to put their case about the difficulties involved. A solution appears to have been found, not to everybody’s satisfaction it must be said, and it may be a temporary fix rather than a sustainable solution, but it is a better position today than we thought was the case two weeks or so ago, thanks to the interventions of the Council, local Member, and our MP Rishi Sunak. It was the right thing to do to hold this meeting, and to hold it where we did.

The agenda item was entitled Resilience & Continuity in Rural Primary Care. Change the final two words to any service delivered in rural areas, and this brings into context the dilemma we face as a constant. The quantum is small, for instance the Reeth surgery looks after only 1,600 patients, a small number in GP workload, and the funding that goes with that workload, yet the geography is large.

Distances matter in rural areas, even in good weather, as they affect connectivity, and more modern and excellent ways of connecting client with provider are more scarce because of “market failure” ie it costs too much for a provider to provide at a required rate of return, and importantly sometimes our demographics do not support an appetite or ability to connect in that way.

Similar issues of size and scale affect our rural schools. Leaving aside consideration of small primaries, vital though they are, as they have peculiar issues of size that affect their roles like mixed age classes and single gender schools even. That renders the idyll of the Miss Read books as unviable in educational terms, I am told.

Our small secondaries can serve geographic areas the size of cities, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham even. All credit to those that get Ofsted ratings of Good, and Outstanding, when seen against the requirement, expectation and duty to deliver the same breadth and depth of curriculum as that provided by much larger schools, and where there are challenges in recruiting specialist staff often for part-time roles. Not every opportunity is seen as a Heartbeat one. Our new housebuilding demands from government will help, but likely only marginally.

As ever, funding is the key. These schools do not fit easily into the National Funding Formula, and there is limited benefit from the Minimum per Pupil Level Funding criteria contained therein.

We have few levers to pull ourselves. We have continued to include a small sparse factor but perversely the popularity of some schools works against this as since 2024/25 the DfE says a school with more than 350 pupils on roll is not eligible. Also we have the ability if not always the capacity to step in with one-off capital assistance.

Rural schools are fundamental to their local communities and sense of place. The nationally consistent funding formula puts many at risk. We have previously asked for a ‘super-sparse’ funding factor for schools with 450 pupils or less and where the average road distance is greater than nine miles, three times the standard distance. We believe this would benefit 12 schools nationally, including some in North Yorkshire, so promoting resilience and continuity.

Coun Carl Les is the leader of North Yorkshire Council.