By Kevin Bocquet BBC North of England correspondent

More rural areas could get their own officer

For many years, Malcolm Beck looked forward to giving up work.

After a lifetime employed by the food giant, Unilever, he and his wife moved into a comfortable retirement cottage in the North Yorkshire village of Skelton.

It should have been the happiest time of their lives but instead it has turned into a nightmare.

Mr and Mrs Beck's lives have been made miserable by a gang of young hooligans who gather every evening on the village green opposite their two-storey cottage.

Mr Beck said: "Sometimes, there are as many as 20 of them. They get their kicks hurling missiles over the wall at our house. Sometimes it's rotten apples. Other times, they throw stones and on one occasion a brick.

"We're terrified we'll be hit, and we recently had to have most of our windows replaced. My wife went out to remonstrate with them. She asked them why they were doing it, and a young teenage girl told her: 'It's because you're old.'

'Broken glass'

Intimidation and vandalism are on the increase in villages all over the UK. Crime is increasing more quickly in rural areas than in cities.

Some burglars are now more likely to target remote properties in the countryside, than risk brightly-lit urban areas.

Mr Beck said: "We were recently woken up by the noise of someone trying to break into the house next door to us. It was 2.30 in the morning. My wife raised the alarm, and the burglar ran for it.

"A week later, we were lying in bed, when someone threw a claw hammer through our window. The whole bed was covered with broken glass. We were terrified."

Mr Beck said the police told him it was probably a revenge attack by the burglar.

I spent 30 years working in West Africa, and lived through six coups and one full-scale revolution, and I felt safer in those days, than I do today in my own village Malcolm Beck

To cope with the increase in rural crime, Home Secretary David Blunkett has announced a scheme for communities to pay �10,000 towards the cost of having their own police officer on the beat in their village.

The Home Office would then contribute an equivalent amount. A Home Office spokesman said they wanted to make it possible for individual villages, estates and communities to have their own officer.

Residents in Skelton welcomed the scheme, but Mr and Mrs Beck said it was unfair to ask villagers to finance it.

Mr Beck said: "The policing precept on our council tax increased by 76 percent last year. We already pay for a police force. Why should we pay twice?"

And some crime experts also question how effective such a scheme would be. A recent experimental scheme under which an officer was placed in the village of New Earswick near York was cancelled a year early.

Unfulfilled expectations

Stuart Lister, from Leeds University, who helped compile a report into the scheme said: "The villagers welcomed it and hoped it would make life in their village much better.

"But it failed to fulfil their expectations, mainly because the officer kept getting called away to other incidents.

"It coincided with the Selby rail crash and the serious flooding in North Yorkshire, and they were typical of the kind of incident the officer was being called to, leaving the village uncovered."

But Mr Beck said something had to be done to prevent rural life descending into chaos.