Many people believe in the rural idyll; you throw away your townie shackles, you buy a place in the country and you live off the land, like Tom and Barbara Good but on a decent scale. The reality of working from home when home is in what townies condescendingly call "the sticks" or "the middle of nowhere" can be different.
It can be good for the right person, of course. Bruce Ballard, managing director of Paddock IT Solutions, used to work in central London but following a redundancy he moved back to the countryside and started up by himself. At the time he was close to Oxford, Thame and Aylesbury so customer availability wasn't an issue.
"We might have had more Oxford clients if we'd been in the middle of it but it was never really a problem," he says. Driving to clients was easy and at that point broadband internet wasn't a difficulty. "We didn't use broadband as much as we do now. If someone had a problem they would ring us," he explains.
The lifestyle was a powerful pull. "I'd been spending two and a half hours a day in the car," he says. "So I worked out I could spend half of that walking the dog and the other half in bed." A seasoned commuter, he simply decided spending so much time travelling was difficult.
Then broadband became important and it quickly appeared obvious that BT wasn't going to prioritise the countryside. "It's now 2002, I needed decent broadband, we lived in a small village and BT told us they were never going to put broadband in. We were rural and therefore only required dial-up."
BT points out that a lot has changed since 2002: "BT is the only company to have invested billions of pounds to make copper-based broadband widely available in rural areas," it said in a statement.
Determined not to miss out, Ballard teamed up with two like-minded others, found some funding and got together a wireless broadband distribution system. "We had connections to a village and a business park, which we built ourselves," he says.
They had better broadband than some towns had at the time, he confirms, although this involved eight months spent primarily up a ladder.
Now, 10 years later, he's moved somewhere less rural, west of Oxford, but history is repeating itself – he's unable to get BT Infinity: "They're playing the same foot-dragging game as they did with the move up to broadband from dial-up," he complains.
"They said, it's a rural exchange, we'll never do it." For a tech company using the internet to control people's desktop computers remotely, this wasn't good enough. Ballard was aware that an internet company called Gigaclear was installing in the next village. "Basically I banged on Matthew Hare's [Gigaclear managing director] door and said I didn't care if I had to run a trench with a spoon down to his cabling, I will have this service, and I forced a cheque into his palm."
He now has industry-standard internet and can get on with his rural idyll in peace, supporting his clients remotely.
BT confirms that although it plans to have fibre networks to 95% of UK premises by the end of 2017 and that tens of thousands of buildings are coming on stream every week, Ballard's premises were not commercially viable to connect and were not included in the Broadband Delivery UK scheme with which BT was working. People with similar difficulties should contact their county council to ascertain what options are available, a statement said. "Many countries are finding it extremely difficult to bring fibre to rural communities. However, according to analyst firm Point Topic, whilst superfast broadband is virtually non-existent in rural parts of France and Italy, the UK is ahead of the European average for rural superfast broadband coverage," it adds.
It's also been difficult for Lindsey Annison, a single mum of twins. She returned home to Wensleydale in the mid-1990s, discovered that there was a living to be made on the internet if you knew marketing, ran up a £1,600 bill through the old dial-up system and spoke to her bank manager about setting up a marketing business. She soon started campaigning about rural broadband because provision wasn't sufficient – but the lifestyle didn't match her hopes either. It started with a power supply surge to her house, which wiped out her computer (something that can happen in towns but which is highly unusual) but that was only the beginning.
"Our local police at that point had a 600 square mile patch to cover," she says. "No copper in an urban area is going to be able to imagine just how much that is." Security was an issue, then. There were other downsides. "Living remotely makes networking much harder," she comments. "You're always a long way away from services, suppliers, customers, the market." She doesn't accept the idea of the countryside as a utopian vision. "It's bloody hard work, to be honest."
Add cost of supplies being larger because of distances (threatening to make manufacturers uncompetitive), difficulty with child care, service costs, distance to training where necessary and you have an increasingly tough landscape. On the plus side, Annison decided not to move to Birmingham because one advantage of being outside the mainstream is that her children's school class sizes are tiny: they get the attention they need. "I was given the chance to move to Birmingham. I researched it for six months and the schools were just so big; I felt the twins would do better in a school of 48 kids, and they probably did."
By this time the rural areas were installing broadband – like Ballard, many of them had to build their own. There were other lifestyle boosts. Annison says: "I've lived in many cities and I'm just not that keen on having lots and lots of people around, so one compensation is not having many neighbours." Ideally she'd like to change. She'd like the rural benefits but to be closer to the M6, in Lancashire, for connections to customers.
She'd also like an area that regenerated itself a little more rather than filling itself with holiday homes. When she moved to Cumbria in the early 2000s, she explains, her village had a garage, a village shop, a post office, a pub and a school – and now there's just a school. "Everything else has had to close, and that's a huge issue," she says. Holiday cottages mean a fall in demand for services in the off season – and if there's no demand for public transport for half the year then the county council will close the bus service. "Places in Northumberland and elsewhere are campaigning to keep bus services but because of austerity the local authorities are stopping them, and this is becoming an issue for employers. If your staff are coming to work on a bus, and the service is cut, you find you need to buy your staff a car or pick them up."
Then the tax take from the employer goes down and hits the rest of the economy.
Nonetheless, for the right person it's a great life. Ballard enjoys it and so do many others. Just how long it remains sustainable if something doesn't happen about broadband and some of the other costs is another thing entirely.
Content commissioned by Guardian Professional on behalf of Direct Line for Business.
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