This comes back to the valuing of unpaid work to a certain degree, in that in the past, particularly in smaller towns and urban villages, there were women who had time to support people in the community, caring for their neighbours and helping by volunteering. With the need for women, as well as men, to go into the labour force to maintain their families, people do not have the time to do the level of voluntary activities in helping their neighbours as they have in the past. So one of the underlying problems that has arisen is that these communities are no longer sustainable. You have commuting villages, where the elderly do not have the social support networks they may have had 20, 30, or 40 years ago.
So the Sustainable Communities Act and a number of rural government policies are attempts at trying to find mechanisms with which to make communities more self-supporting—and also in terms of ecological objectives, which I won't go into, because they are not pertinent to your inquiries at the moment, I suspect.