Introduction

In 2002 the annual ‘State of the Countryside’ report (Countryside Agency, 2002) contained, for the first time, a chapter dedicated to rural crime. Its inclusion suggested that policy makers and practitioners were taking greater interest in crime and policing in the countryside than had hitherto been the case in the 1990s (Yarwood and Edwards, 1995; Dingwall and Moody, 1999; Yarwood and Gardener, 2000). Certainly, the introduction of a number of initiatives between 2000 and 2006 implied that Labour gave greater priority to rural policing than the previous Conservative administration. However, while rural policing was made more visible in the policy arena, it is questionable whether the visibility of policing on the ground changed significantly. Further, more recent change in national policing policy suggests that the attention given to rural places may have been short-lived.

The provision of rural policing reflects broader changes in the pattern of service provision and the performance of governance in rural Britain, namely that greater responsibility has been placed on local communities to work in partnership with other agencies to deliver local services (Woods, 2006). Consequently, policing raises wider questions about the changing nature of decision making and governance in rural communities and the extent to which police partnerships represent a new form of governance (Woods and Goodwin, 2003; Goodwin, 2006). This chapter examines policing policy under New Labour and argues that government policy has been propelled by moral panic and rural protest rather than forming a coherent part of the national policing plan.

When examining these issues it is important to realise that ideas such as community, criminality and rurality are socially constructed and contested, with important consequences for rural policing (Yarwood and Gardner, 2000; Yarwood, 2001). In this context, one of the most significant changes in law under New Labour has been the 2004 Hunting Act that criminalised hunting with hounds. A consequence of the Act has been that some groups who had previously campaigned for a greater police presence in the countryside now resent coming under greater scrutiny from the police. Given that Labour's rural policing policy has taken a community-based approach, the Act has raised questions about whose vision of rurality and rural community is being policed and what, if any, are the consequences of contests over these ideas.