Clive Aslet: Little sympathy for the suffering of rural Britain

With so much talk of the divide between town and country, it is easy to lose sight of the needs that country dwellers share with their urban counterparts. Country people are just as anxious to see improvements in schools and hospitals - particularly as they have to travel rather further to reach them - as city folk.

With so much talk of the divide between town and country, it is easy to lose sight of the needs that country dwellers share with their urban counterparts. Country people are just as anxious to see improvements in schools and hospitals - particularly as they have to travel rather further to reach them - as city folk.

Many of them are pensioners, and acute poverty can live cheek by jowl with affluence. So the fundamentals of this Budget will be as warmly received in the countryside as anywhere else. However, rural Britain will look in vain for evidence that the special difficulties of the country have touched the heart of government.

Last week, it seemed that they might have done. Tony Blair had a go at supermarkets for having the farming industry in an "armlock". This seemed to indicate that he recognised that countryside communities, who would have been marching through London next week if it were not for the foot-and-mouth outbreak, have a point. It may have led some country people to hope that the Chancellor would think likewise. However, the word "countryside" was not mentioned once during the Budget speech.

Farmers who are having their herds destroyed because of foot-and-mouth had their promised £150m "agrimonetary" compensation confirmed. Since the purpose of agrimonetary compensation is to protect farm subsidies - calculated in euros - from the effects of a high pound, farmers would be justified in thinking that they should have had it sooner.

But this Chancellor, awash with money, could surely have extended his generosity towards the many other businesses that have been caught, through no fault of their own, by the crisis; many haulage companies, abattoirs, butchers, bed-and-breakfasts and horse businesses have had no income, and no doubt some will close as a result.

Farmers, who use large amounts of energy in heating pig units, poultry barns and greenhouses, will soon be smarting under the climate-change levy, which comes into effect on 1 April. It will push up fuel bills by 10 per cent. At least the Chancellor did not announce the threatened compulsory disaster insurance of £500, mooted by the Treasury at the beginning of the foot-and-mouth outbreak. This would have represented 10 per cent of the average farm income last year, which was only £5,000.

Country people will be relieved that petrol duty has been frozen, with a reduction for greener varieties and other sops to hauliers and the fuel-protest lobby. For ordinary families, though, the cost of running a car is still a major item in the weekly budget.

It was always an anomaly that new building was zero-rated for VAT, while the repair of old buildings attracted VAT at 17.5 per cent; this favoured developers who built on greenfield sites. Equalising VAT at 5 per cent for both activities is overdue. Almost every village in the country will be relieved to hear that a new grant will treat repairs to churches similarly; the burden of maintaining an old church falls heavily on small villages. First-year capital allowances of 100 per cent for making flats over shops will help the regeneration of market towns - so important to the future of a sustainable countryside. The 20 per cent reduction in tax on bio-diesel suggests a new use for redundant farmland - growing the raw ingredients.

Generally, country people will be relieved that the Chancellor avoided the sort of sideswipe that the Government was prone to deliver to rural areas during its first years in office - not necessarily intended as anti-countryside, but apt to knock it off balance all the same. (Even the minimum wage tends to play badly in rural areas, where incomes are low and many occupations, particularly to do with horses and other animals, are more a way of life than a job.)

So nothing positively harmful for the countryside; but at a time of unparalleled suffering for rural Britain, no great sympathy either.

The writer is editor of 'Country Life'