An independent review commissioned by the BBC Trust has revealed a "deficit" in the state broadcaster's coverage of UK-wide rural affairs.

Heather Hancock, former chair of the BBC's Rural Affairs Committee, was tasked with reviewing its performance on countryside issues. She said news and current affairs reporting in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland has an impressive depth of understanding of the issues and a breadth of voices, but that news and current affairs output from rural England does not appear to be reaching the UK network programmes.  

However, though Hancock's review identified an under-representation of rural English life in national programming as a whole, the review did find that travelling current affairs programmes, such as Question Time and Any Questions, often give time to issues and voices from all rural regions.

The rural population in the UK is small and growing smaller; by the 1950s, the country's urban population already accounted for 79 percent of the total, and in 2010, 90 percent of the population lived in an urban area; this is expected to rise to 92 percent by the end of the next decade. Even so, Hancock noted that many people retain a direct or familial link to rural Britain, and that Countryfile remains the BBC's most watched factual programme.  

However, the reviewer did find that "Audiences in urban areas in England appear to consider rural issues [as] not relevant to them."

Contributing to the report, Patrick Begg, Rural Enterprise Director at the National Trust aired frustration at the portrayal of rural regions in mainstream programming, saying, "It really frustrates me that issues like hunting often dominate coverage – for example, there'll be not much on rural affairs all year and then at Christmas a sudden focus on the red coats and the beagles and a spokesman from the Countryside Alliance will be on the telly. This just reinforces the sense of the media portraying rural life as slightly old fashioned and the countryside as a place which is out of touch."

Begg continued, "In reality, rural communities care far more about benefits, housing, the pressures of an ageing population, young people leaving, environmental degradation and the difficulties of transport – all stuff that looks and feels much more relevant to universal national concerns."

BBC relies too much on small number of commentators

Equally concerning is the revelation that the BBC is giving undue weight to a small number of organisations in its rural news coverage. Hancock said, "I found that the BBC relied disproportionately on a small number of external bodies for input and comment.  A wider range of voices would broaden the opinions offered to audiences."

The former Rural Affairs Committee Chair added that Westminster's influence on the news agenda had an impact on what stories were covered and how, that rural viewers felt there was a certain urban bias in coverage of some topics and that conflicts or protests were often the focus of reporting contentious matters, rather than the underlying issues.

BBC Trustee and Chair of the Trust's Editorial Standards Committee Alison Hastings commented on Thursday, "The 12 million people in the UK living in rural areas must have confidence that the BBC is both reflecting their lives and, where relevant, telling national stories from a rural perspective.  We welcome Heather Hancock's overall conclusion that the BBC's rural coverage is impartial and her praise for many areas of BBC programming, but the BBC must serve all audiences.  To this end it must tackle the deficit in its network coverage of rural England, and broaden the range of voices it features on rural issues on network news."

Report author Heather Hancock said, "We are all rural consumers: we eat food from UK farms, we enjoy leisure time in the countryside, we value its biodiversity, landscape and tranquillity.  And every so often, something far-reaching happens in the countryside: the dramatic storms and floods of 2013/14 being a case in point.  This broad and deep impact of rural areas on the whole nation explains why the BBC's coverage of rural affairs matters." 

"Overall, the BBC does a good job in reporting accurate, balanced and impartial rural stories.   However... In England particularly, rural stories and rural lives could be more fully represented in nationwide output." 

Hancock recommended that the BBC appoint an editor to champion rural affairs across the whole of the corporation's output, increase measures to allow regional BBC journalists to get their stories onto the BBC's main UK network news and broaden its list of contacts on rural issues.

Responding to the review, the BBC Executive committed itself to naming three correspondents in regional and local newsrooms across the country to report for network news on rural issues, widening and deepening the range of contacts on rural issues and appointing a senior editorial figure to take on editorial oversight of rural issues. The executive will report on its progress in six months' time.