Housing crisis, rural housing crisis – where to build, what to build?

The UK clearly has a problem in building or recycling homes and many recognise that we are facing a long-run housing crisis. Estimates vary about the actual backlog and what that means in terms of annual build rates, but the big picture is that we have not been building enough for a considerable period.

Homes are needed for a shifting population given demographic change, population increase and locational pressures – all of which matter in terms of proposed solutions. Thought is needed about the deliverability, type of housing, and who it is for (i.e. tenure). This is particularly so in rural areas, where the issues are magnified and ‘build, build, build’ is not tenable. Solutions to the rural housing issue require more care; the issue is not only one of quantum. The idea of ‘concreting over’ rural England is clearly a no go and unlikely to fundamentally address affordability of open market housing.

Conversely, zero development in rural England is also not a position held by any credible voices. It is accepted that it is actually a good thing to build some homes in rural areas and indeed rural communities and economies can benefit from new housing. It can be part of an integrated solution to address service decline, employment and local vitality.

At the recent Conservative party conference the idea of each village building a small number of new homes was put forward as a policy initiative. The suggestion of spreading housing thinly (the dispersed model of development) across the country is not new and there are reasons why, whilst the idea seems good in principle, it has not been realised in practice. These are both economic and political.

If we look back, one element of the thinking behind the neighbourhood planning policy, adopted via the 2011 Localism Act, was to enable communities to plan for development in and around their own neighbourhood. This critically involved communities looking at housing need and planning for typically smaller sites in their patch. This has been a pretty successful policy across rural England, but it is also true that small sites often struggle in terms of their financial viability. This acts as a very real barrier on a lot of sites.

The next issue is of rural housing affordability. What does a sprinkling of housing units achieve in a local market? The gap between earnings and housing prices, and providing small numbers of open market housing doesn’t really solve the rural housing affordability issue, even if those are deliverable. Here the tenure of housing is important and genuinely affordable housing is key.

The limitations of relying on private sector developers are made really apparent here – many developers just cannot make the margins. The model of small, relatively expensive sites just doesn’t represent good business. However, if we look back prior to 1980, there was a widespread policy of sprinkling public sector housing across villages – an approach that may need to be revisited to break the affordability conundrum.

This, alongside a revived and reoriented purpose for neighbourhood planning, seems sensible. It’s an approach that aids thinking in an integrated way about the role that affordable housing can play in supporting more resilient rural communities. This means actively replenishing lost public sector housing to deliver affordable units scattered across rural areas in a way that is unobtrusive and much more acceptable to local populations.

Gavin is a co-author of the recent book Rural Planning Futures (Routledge, 2025). He has written extensively on neighbourhood planning, including the book Neighbourhood Planning in Practice (Lund Humphries, 2019).

To speak with Professor Parker or any of our academic experts, email pr@henley.ac.uk