Your voice in the Future of Rural England Report
By Caroline Whitney, Director for England
In April 2025, the Community Transport Association took part in one of six thematic workshops held by Defra's Rural Taskforce, focusing on connectivity. We used the session to share the views of our members from across England: the operators, volunteers and local groups who keep rural communities moving every day.
That evidence has now fed into the Government's Future of Rural England Report, published on 16 July 2026. For those of us working in the sector, little of it will come as news. What the report does is confirm, with the Government's own evidence, what our members already experience on the ground: that rural transport comes with a distinct set of costs and pressures that urban services simply do not face.
One of the clearest illustrations of this, from our research, is trip length. On average, journeys made by Community Transport operators in rural areas are 14 miles longer than those in urban areas. That difference is not just a statistic. It shapes the cost of running a service, the number of trips a vehicle can realistically make in a day, and the case for switching to electric vehicles, where limited charging infrastructure and range make the transition far harder in rural areas than in towns and cities.
This is why the report's recommendation to embed rural proofing across government matters so much. If it is done properly, rural proofing should mean that funding formulas, policy design and infrastructure investment all start from an honest picture of what rural delivery actually costs, rather than treating rural areas as a smaller version of an urban model.
It is a principle we have already been applying informally within CTA. Wherever possible, our research and reports aim to present both an urban and a rural picture, because we know the experience of operators and passengers can differ significantly between the two. A recent example is our call to government for additional funding to help operators cope with rising fuel costs, where we specifically asked for rural operators to be given separate consideration, in recognition of the longer distances and higher costs they face.
Seeing rural proofing set out as a formal government commitment is a welcome step. The real test will be whether it is applied consistently, particularly as funding decisions increasingly move to Strategic Authorities under the new devolution powers. We will keep pressing for that rural lens to be applied in practice, not just in principle, and will continue to use evidence from our members to make the case.