OUR Market Town Revival campaign report today's highlights the concerns in Hawes about the need to retain public and private services. It is an ever-present worry whether local or national government or corporate Britain will pull the plug on some local service or branch in the interests of efficiency/cost savings.

The effect of centralisation on rural Britain has been reported at length, here and elsewhere, but we need to guard against knee-jerk reactions when changes are proposed to services. Change is always for the worse.

In recent years there have been a number of instances where changes in public services locally have prompted an outcry but, after the dust has settled, there has been little discernible effect on local people's experience of those services.

The internal North Yorkshire police reorganisation of 18 months ago, which cut the number of operating divisions, provoked disquiet about where the local police HQ would be located. Today the service provided by the county force is as least as good as it was with the old seven divisions and the public is hardly aware of the change.

The effective closure of the Duchess of Kent's military hospital to most NHS patients is still the subject of an on-going campaign to re-open it. However, campaigners are handicapped by a lack of any substantive evidence that having the district's general hospital located at Northallerton has caused significant hardship or suffering.

Five years ago, the retirement of Aysgarth's two GPs and the merger of the practice with the one at Hawes provoked outrage in the village. Today the people of Aysgarth probably enjoy a better GP service than they did. That is not intended as a slight on the much-loved Drs Hoyles, just an acknowledgement that being served by a bigger practice has its advantages.

And closer to home, the D&S has been through a few changes in recent years, not least a change of publication day and the placing of news on the front page. At the time those changes were not universally welcomed but today many readers are hard-pressed to remember them when asked what they were. Our increasing sales are evidence that those changes may have been for the better.

Not all change is necessarily for the worse. Rural communities do need to defend services they feel are threatened by re-organisation or straightforward cost cutting. But we also ought to try to accept that not every bureaucrat and corporate high-flyer is hell-bent on the dismantling of services or the pursuit of ever-greater profits at the expense of customers.

Sometimes those much- maligned stereotypes can be motivated by a real desire to improve the lot of those they serve, or wish to serve. Perhaps, before we leap to condemn out of hand, we should give them a chance to explain themselves.