We’re not asking for sympathy, but we do want to be listened to

‘I hear the same question from farmers, shopkeepers and families across rural Wales. ‘Why does government never listen when the countryside speaks?’

Victoria Bond is director of Country Land and Business Association Cymru

I hear the same question from farmers, shopkeepers and families across rural Wales. “Why does government never listen when the countryside speaks?”

It’s not shouted or waved on placards. More often, it is asked with a tired patience. The kind that comes after years of raising the same concerns and watching them get ignored.

Across rural Wales, that patience is beginning to wear thin.

There is a growing sense that the great promise of devolution has somehow passed the countryside by. That the project meant to bring power closer has instead left many communities feeling just as distant from it as before.

Power changed its address. The countryside still feels just as far away from it.

More than half of rural Welsh voters believe devolution has made things worse for the countryside. Not better. Worse.

And this is not a complaint confined to one corner of politics. The sentiment cuts across party lines. Even among Labour voters, 44 percent say the same.

That should make politicians stop and listen for a moment. Because the debate in Wales is moving firmly in the other direction. Welsh Labour is pressing for more powers for the Senedd. In England, the same party is championing a wider programme of regional devolution.

Yet in the only nation where Labour has governed under devolution since the beginning, a large part of the countryside is asking a much simpler question.

What, exactly, has it delivered for us?

For too many communities the answer feels uncomfortably thin.

Decisions about farming are made by people who rarely set foot on a working farm. Planning systems move at a pace that suffocates rural enterprise. Policies arrive wrapped in good intentions but often written with an urban imagination of how life works.

Meanwhile, the countryside is treated less like a working economy and more like a backdrop. A landscape to admire. Somewhere picturesque to visit at the weekend. Beautiful, yes. Important, apparently. But rarely understood.

That misunderstanding has real consequences.

Rural Wales produces food, sustains small businesses, attracts visitors from across the world and cares for landscapes that define the nation itself. Around a third of the population live outside the main towns and cities.

Yet, productivity in rural Wales now sits roughly 35% below that of urban areas. For our free daily briefing on the biggest issues facing the nation, sign up to the Wales Matters newsletter here

Behind that number is a story that people in the countryside know all too well. Businesses that want to grow and cannot. Young people who leave because opportunity lives somewhere else. Communities that feel their ambition is quietly discounted before it is even heard.

Talk to people across rural Wales and you hear something very different from the polite pastoral image often projected onto the countryside.

You hear ambition.

You hear farmers talking about innovation and food security. Business owners talking about building enterprises that keep wealth in their communities. Young families talking about the future they want to build where they already live.

What you rarely hear from government is a vision that matches that ambition.

That is where the real test of devolution now lies. Not in constitutional debates about who holds which powers, but in whether those powers are used to unlock the potential of the whole country.

There is a clear place to start. As Wales heads towards the May Senedd election, we are calling for a rural economic strategy that finally treats the countryside as a serious part of the Welsh economy.

The priorities are straightforward. Let rural businesses build and expand without years trapped in planning. Give farmers long-term certainty so they can invest with confidence. Back tourism as the year-round industry it already is.

The countryside is not asking for sympathy, it’s asking to be heard. Increasingly, we’re asking how much longer we’ll have to wait.