By Nick Assinder BBC News Online political correspondent

Environment Secretary Margaret Beckett has moved to calm some of the anger directed at the government by the pro-countryside lobby.

She told her party's Blackpool conference that Labour was addressing problems in rural areas that the previous Tory government had not even acknowledged.

And she pledged to press ahead with reforms to revive countryside communities and improve the environment.

Beckett on Labour's rural record

With one eye clearly on the Countryside Alliance's "Liberty and Livelihood" protests, she told delegates: "When the Conservatives left office, Britain's rural communities were as devastated as the rest of the country.

"Between 1983 and 1997 an average of 30 village schools in England were closing every year. By 1997 only one in four parishes had a daily bus service, and a third of all villages had no shop.

Police fund

"Today a Labour government is working to deliver the goals of the rural white paper and to produce high quality services in rural areas," she said.

She insisted unemployment in the countryside was already down by two fifths since 1997, with long term youth unemployment down by over 75%.

"An investment in rural healthcare is underway. A new rural police fund to the tune of an extra �30m stands alongside �70m a year for rural buses and an extra �80m a year for small schools which particularly benefits rural areas."

Marchers made their voices heard

She said 400,000 people had been taken out of fuel poverty with another 400,000 to be taken out in the next two years.

"And across the country we are addressing issues whose existence the Tories failed even to acknowledge."

Turning to the much-criticised Johannesburg environmental summit earlier this year, she said she accepted that since the previous earth summit in Rio a decade before "the momentum was lost."

Master plan

"Then came Johannesburg - not a new earth summit but the down to earth summit," she said.

"It was never the intention to draw up a new master plan in Johannesburg, there's nothing wrong with the master plan we already have.

"But at Johannesburg we sought to create what some have called a new Marshall Plan for the environment."

Specific targets were set to meet environmental goals, she said.

And she said the environmental programme represented: "the greatest challenge the human race has ever set itself.

"If delivered it would mean a revolution in the lives of the poorest people on the planet and the start of a revolution in our approach to the planet itself.

"We dare not fail."