EMPAC Research Fellow, Steve Dodd, explores how rural communities are vital to the nation’s wellbeing, yet have unique challenges, and need a solution-oriented adoption of proactive intelligence to stay safe.
90% of England is made up of rural areas, and that 71% of UK landmass is agricultural. Rural areas are important not only to those who live, work and visit there but to the growth and pro-social prosperity of the country as a whole. That is why the National Trust’s managed sites at Arlington Court in North Devon, Wallington in Northumberland, the Peak District and the Yorkshire Dales recently received £5m investment (Garfield Weston Foundation) and community support collectives like Attenborough Nature Reserve in Nottinghamshire and the National Space Centre near Leicester all emphasise the importance of rural initiatives on health and happiness.
In economic terms, the food and farming industry generates over £128 billion a year for the UK economy and over £14 billion in gross value added (16% nationally) through domestic tourism (Countryside Alliance), providing wealth, employment and leisure opportunities. The House of Lords (UK Parliament) in 2020. The report estimated rural areas contributed £261 billion to England’s total economy in 2020 whilst the Welsh government estimate 78% of land in Wales is used for agriculture with its forestry, fishing and agriculture returning £510 million in 2017.
The challenge of policing rural areas
Wallace (2026) reports on how rural areas may not always the idyll of romantic fiction and that they present specific policing challenges with limited resources over large areas https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/rural-policing-in-global-contexts. There is a high impact from domestic violence, fly-tipping, theft, hare coursing, threats, intimidation and anti-social behaviour presenting an additional complexity to deliver policing across vast geographies.
In 2025, the Home Secretary raised the specific impact of illegal off-road bikes and the Minister of State for Policing discussed the challenge of response times and public confidence in the face of violent criminals and offences of armed robbery. The National Police Chiefs’ Council has published a Rural and Wildlife Crime Strategy and is implementing the Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act. Such recent developments build upon previous research from EMPAC’s prior strategic lead, Craig Naylor, (then NPCC Rural Crime lead) at De Montfort University https://empac.org.uk/dmu-host-rural-crime-roundtable/.
How will the money go around?
The current UK Government has made a pledge about a Safer Streets mission, but with budgetary pressures how do police services cope in vast rural areas? Lake Windemere has visitor numbers of 7,000,000 per year, policed by the Cumbria force of 1,383 officers. Dyfed Powys Police has 1,294 officers yet covers two thirds of Wales’s landmass, Lincolnshire 1,198 officers.
Contrast that with London’s Metropolitan force with 34,315 and Greater Manchester with 8,141. Expanding comparisons, Cumbria has 74 neighbourhood officers, the Met 2,131, whereas Greater Manchester has 666 officers assigned neighbourhood duties, with Dyfed Powys coming in at 40, compared against Leicestershire’s 228 out of an establishment of 2,248.
The Minister for Crime and Policing, Rt Hon Dame Diana Johnson, stresses that “too often victims of crime in rural communities have been left feeling undervalued and isolated, whether it be famers having equipment or livestock stolen, or villages targeted by car thieves and county lines gangs…” but just how does policing do the impossible in vast rural areas with so few staff?
Is rural policing funded enough?
The UK Government has highlighted 15 new policing measures at an annual cost of £48.65m and £800,000 for the continued work of National Rural Crime Unit and National Wildlife Crime Unit for a year, both vital in the battle against rural and wildlife crime, yet this is only equivalent to £18,500 per force. Country Land and Business Association (CLA) President, Victoria Vyvyan, points to a need for perhaps more funding when he reports, “Recent CLA analysis found, some police forces lack dedicated rural officers and basic kit”.
The National Rural Crime Network’s England and Wales reported theft of agricultural vehicles and machinery up 29% in 2022 to £11,700,000, whilst NFU Mutual’s estimation of the cost of rural crime in 2023 was £52,800,000.
Is a postcode lottery fair?
Neighbourhood policing has been brought back on to the national agenda after a decade of austerity yet the neighbourhood policing programme has a tough climb ahead of it. The British Retail Consortium quotes 61% of retailers rate police response to crime as poor or very poor; the Countryside Alliance’s rural charter states 50% of people in rural areas do not think police take rural crime seriously. The BRC highlights 32% of crimes in 2024 were reported to the police, likewise the CA states 1 in 3 people who were victim of crime did not report it. Furthermore, 44% of people in rural areas felt intimidated by criminality or criminals in the past year, corroborated by 45,000 annual incidents of violence in the retail sector.
There is an acceptance that our huge metropolitan cities and vast urban townscapes contain the volume of crime but there is less consensus that rural crime is more difficult to confront. North Yorkshire Police cover a population of 830,000 across 3,210 square miles with a 6,000 mile roadway network and 55 miles of coastline. The force covers the third largest geographical area in England and Wales assigning 231 officers to neighbourhood duties out of a contingent of 1,681 (15th smallest). Over 46,000 recorded crimes, 18,624 offences of violence against the person, compared to 280,000 offences committed in West Yorkshire, 333,000 crimes in Greater Manchester, and over 900,000 in London where their community resources stand at: 400, 666 and 2,131 respectively. It is not a competition; as each must be equally protected.
An intelligence approach
Given these challenges one way forward is to grow community intelligence, with an emphasis on communication, partnerships and using local knowledge to enable intelligence-led policing as a structured framework for information capture, recording, process and analysis of a solution-based approach. A Community Intelligence-Led Policing Methodology will sit equally as well for independent forces as it will for those with interoperability arrangements in place, such as sharing information and mutual aid.
Pooling information across specialised units and forces similarly has revolutionised the fight against opportunist criminal gangs and organised crime alike and the same is needed to confront rural crime. Rural intelligence-led policing needs to be proactive and contextualised to its structure in a rural environment:-
- county lines are the relationships between supplier and user networks, [drugs].
- theft is an association between thief, victim and ‘fence’, [quad bikes, farm machinery].
- assault is personal between assailant and victim, [domestic abuse, modern slavery].
Whilst AI and technological advances enhance operational capabilities in the fight against criminal enterprises, it is paramount that resilience, determination, support, understanding, empathy, and a commitment must be exhibited through direct contact actions to reassure each-and-every community, including the rural areas.
Intelligence is the lifeblood of policing
The integration of community patrolling within rural intelligence-led policing will foster confidence, knowledge, awareness, and unity of kinship. Community intelligence needs to be bottom-up to enable a community sourced holistic interpretation of the rural context. A collective relationship, a unifying bond of citizen and neighbourhood officer; restored through agreement, built upon trust, instilled with confidence, reinforced by reliability, security is about re discovering the Peelian principles.
Understanding that rural community intelligence-led policing’s foundations are only possible by the ability of police forces to obtain grassroots word-of-mouth information in live-time, built on a relationship of trust. This means we must put our money where our mouth is and invest properly in rural policing areas.
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