Villages across Somerset risk "dying" if more cannot be done to provide local jobs for young people, a local councillor has warned.

Somerset Council recently published its economic prosperity strategy, which lays out a broad vision for how new jobs and investment will be attracted to the county

Liberal Democrat councillor Matt Martin (who represents the rural King Alfred division) has openly criticised the strategy, accusing the council of "aiming low" and not doing enough to attract high-quality, well-paid jobs to the area.

Without these, he warned, Somerset's villages would die out amid the growing exodus of young people to London and other cities, pointing to recent trends on the continent.

Mr Martin – who lives in the small village of Westhay, between Glastonbury and Highbridge – made his feeling abundantly clear when the council's climate and place scrutiny committee met in Taunton on April 28.

He said: "My problem with young people in Somerset is that they are going away – and the reason for that is largely people like me.

"I came down from the south east, brought my south east money [with me] and bought a house that no-one else could afford to buy in the local area.

"Now, curiously enough, I couldn't afford to buy it – the house prices in Meare and Westhay have gone up because of gentrification, not that we've got money coming in from everywhere else apart from Somerset.

"We're seeing in Somerset now the problem that they've seen in Italy, Spain and France for the last 15 years – and that is villages dying.

"In France, you can buy villages – not houses in villages, you can buy villages, because people like me have gone there and bought the houses up, raising the price of houses. The young people, not being able to buy, have all left and the old people have died.

"We're seeing that in Somerset now – we're on the edge now and I'm very aware that I'm part of the problem. I came into Westhay and did exactly that.

"Now Westhay is full of people like me, with one farm that's sort of working and one farm that's not really a farm at all because the farmer killed himself."

Mr Martin's division includes numerous villages between Bridgwater, Glastonbury and Highbridge (including Middlezoy, Othery and Wedmore), along with key sections of the A372 and A39 arterial roads.

He opined that the lack of high-skilled, high-paid jobs in Somerset was leaving local people with few options but to either commute out of their area or leave the county altogether – an echo of the so-called 'rural exodus' during the Industrial Revolution.

He said: "If we do not retain jobs for young people, Somerset will go. Our ability to put florid words around a problem is good and noble – but we need to get spades dug in and work being done, not at Clarks Village or at Leonardo, but in the rest of Somerset.

"Somerset's huge – it has vast tracts of land which are rapidly becoming useless. Farmers can't afford to farm them and no-one else wants to use them until some idiot like me comes in and buys up the farmhouse."

"Warehousing and data centres – is that really the best we can do? Is that what we can offer the young people in Somerset – that if you grow up here, we can offer you a bright future in a warehouse, or Clarks Village, or in retail?

"You wonder why our kids are leaving and going to Sheffield, Birmingham and London? I would.

"You get to 21 years old, you look around you and think: 'What's my future going to be? A job in Clarks Village? I'm glad I put £56,000 into university fees'. This is a problem for now."

Mr Martin also warned that the current enthusiasm for artificial intelligence (AI) was misplaced and would actually lead to fewer jobs for local people.

He explained: "When I was at university a long time ago, my focus was on artificial intelligence.

"AI is useless, and it will remain useless for a long time, so stop talking about AI as this universal panacea – it's not, and it won't be, and I'm telling you that as someone who spent a lot of time working with it.

"AI, as we see it now, isn't AI – it's pattern matching. Let's stop talking about it as this wonderful 'Oz' solution that is going to come in and sort everything else.

"There's a common trope in the IT world called 'the pilot of the future', where aeroplanes won't be flown by people any more – you'll need one pilot, and one dog.

"The pilot is there to feed the dog; the dog is there to make sure the pilot doesn't touch anything.

"We can have a data centre in Somerset, but it ain't gonna give you any jobs, because some idiot like me will be there maintaining 100 or 1,000 servers – and the job of that one person will be to plug them back in when some idiot off-site turns them off.

"They won't be managed in Somerset – they'll be managed in Singapore, London, Birmingham or at the universities.

"Data centres aren't the panacea – they're massive warehouses full of thousands of computers that just suck up power like nobody's business.

"All we are doing is training computers to take over the jobs of the people who are working here. Every time you use AI to do a simple task online because some idiot at Google has given you a free service, you are training somebody to do your job.

"If you want your job in seven years' time, turn it off."

Mr Martin – who previously served on Mendip District Council before being elected to his current position in 2022 – said creating a proper 'University of Somerset' was critical to keeping young people in the county in the decades to come.

He said: "We in Somerset are aiming low – retail, warehouses and data centres are not what we should be giving our young people.

"If we don't give them something better, they are going to go somewhere else, and villages like Westhay are going to die.

"We need a university destination in Somerset – a proper one. As proud as I am of our university college, it's not enough.

"We need to start building a university now to keep young people here. If we don't, in my dotage I'm going to be sitting in my garden done up on brandy by 10am because everybody else in the village has died."

The finalised strategy will be debated further and signed off by the council's executive committee in June.