PROBLEMS in North Yorkshire that cause young people to abandon rural communities are being tackled and can be solved, according a leading regional campaigner and a senior county councillor.

The chief officer of Rural Action Yorkshire, Bill Cross, and North Yorkshire County Council’s executive member for rural services and chairman of Ryedale Strategic Partnership, Coun Clare Wood, spoke out after the Government’s Rural Advocate, Dr Stuart Burgess, warned Prime Minister Gordon Brown the countryside’s long-term future was in jeopardy.

Dr Burgess has gathered evidence from all parts of rural England, that he says shows how deep concerns about the lack of jobs, housing and other facilities are persuading young people to leave the countryside for urban areas.

“Without young people to provide a workforce, rural economies are unable to fulfil their full potential and rural communities can go into a decline,” he said. Mr Cross said North Yorkshire was the second most sparsely populated county in England after Northumberland.

It had scores of tiny, isolated communities where jobs were scarce, often poorly paid, part-time and seasonal, and where house prices had been pushed up by commuters working in towns but living in the countryside.

Together with the lack of fast broadband for businesses and mobile phone coverage, these factors meant young people were moving to towns and cities where they could get jobs and houses.

“It is very significant,” he said of the problem. “These communities are aging more rapidly than the community of England as a whole.”

Speaking about increasing mobile phone and high-speed broadband coverage in North Yorkshire, he said: “There are ways of doing it and there are ways of financing it – if the will is there.”

He praised Dr Burgess for his work in raising the problems of sustaining rural communities at the highest level.

Coun Wood said local authority organisations in North Yorkshire understood the problem. “We are doing our absolute best to try and encourage employers to employ these young people.

“The recession has not helped – it has made things far more difficult,” she said.

She herself represents 37 villages in her entirely rural ward.

As well as calling on policy-makers to demonstrate a better understanding of the challenges facing rural young people, Dr Burgess’s report puts forward solutions – including flexible planning to create more affordable rural housing; new ways to meet employment and training needs in more isolated areas; greater efforts by schools and universities to raise young people’s aspirations; a renewed focus on providing integrated public transport and a push to improve mobile phone coverage and broadband services in rural areas.