State of the Countryside 2008 provides a comprehensive description of social, economic and environmental conditions and changes across rural England, highlighting the main challenges and future trends for government and other organisations. 

Website of Publications: http://www.ruralyouth.com/C2B/document_tree/ViewACategory.asp?CategoryID=20

Rural Impetus Winter 2007/08

In 2003 the Government introduced a ‘Social Network Payment’ providing a ‘stop gap’ (£150m per year) to maintain ‘the broad size and shape’ of the current post office network. However this funding ends in 2008.

Defra’s departmental report sets out Defra's progress against its broad range of Public Service Agreement targets.

Each chapter in the 2008 departmental report is available to download as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file, see the links below to the different sections. It can also be downloaded as a single PDF file.