A Midland MP has welcomed reports stating that rural Britain needs far more support to beat poverty and improve local services.

The Government was presented with two separate reports warning that some residents were experiencing extreme poverty, and that rural areas lacked services such as housing, training and care for the elderly.

Mid Worcestershire MP Peter Luff (Con) said: "Poverty is more concentrated in our great towns and cities but it can have an even more devastating effect in rural areas. There is often no access whatsoever to crucial services.

"If we can get the issues of rural poverty and services up to the top of the agenda, I will be delighted." Stuart Burgess, chair of the Commission for Rural Communities and the Prime Minister's official "rural advocate" presented his findings to Gordon Brown yesterday. He made a number of visits across the country last year, including one to Evesham in Mr Luff's constituency.

In the report, he warned that 928,000 households in rural England were living below the poverty threshold.

He said: "This is equivalent to a city the size of the Birmingham conurbation."

But he said the scale of the problem was "hidden by the apparent affluence of their surroundings and the averaging of official statistics."

A separate report warned that many rural areas lacked affordable housing, training opportunities for young people and financial support to care for an ageing population. It was published by the Rural Services Network, which includes county councils in Worcestershire, Herefordshire, Shropshire and Warwickshire.

Graham Biggs, the network's chief officer, said: "We hope that our report will serve as a wake-up call that rural citizens are not prepared to be treated as second class."

The network called on the Government to make a commitment to create more affordable rural housing, review the planning system to increase the availability of land for homes and assess the extra costs of providing services in rural areas.

Public transport is a problem in the countryside, the report said, with many households being forced to use cars.

Rural areas also have a dramatically ageing population and a large number of migrant workers, according to the report, which brought with it increased demands for health and social care that are often more expensive to provide outside towns and cities.

A spokesman for Advantage West Midlands, the regional development agency, said it agreed there were concerns about poverty in rural areas.

However, it was supporting economic development in West Midlands shire counties, including a rural regeneration zone in Herefordshire, Shropshire and Worcestershire, he said.

There was a £53 million fund to support business in rural areas, a £10 million initiative to support market towns and another £12 million allocated to the zone, he said.

"The rural aspect has been something that the agency has focused on," the spokesman said.