Planning and affordable rural housing :the limits to rational policy

Abstract

This PhD thesis looks at how UK Government policies to deliver more affordable housing in rural areas are being implemented – whether the policies are succeeding, and the social and micro-spatial effects of the policies. The thesis reviews literature which identifies that there is a particular problem with housing affordability in rural areas, and that since the introduction of national planning advice designed to increase affordable housing provision in 1991, delivery in rural England has been consistently and significantly less than the established need. Based on data from five case study local authorities in different regions of England, the thesis concludes that the shortfall in affordable housing provision is not just a technical problem with policy implementation, but in part due to the exercise of three dimensions of power by rural elites interested in the “containment of urban England”. Those rural elites exercise power as follows: 1) The first dimension of power: focusing on decision making, this strand of the thesis argues that decisions made with regard to planning for housing reflect the locus of power in the decision-making process, and that power lies with urban local authorities and anti-development rural elites. 2) The second dimension of power: focusing on non-decision making, this strand argues that the way that planning policy is made facilitates its domination by those urban and anti-development interests, at both the regional and local level. 3) The third dimension of power: focusing on how power is exercised by the shaping of needs/desires by the powerful, this strand of the thesis uses theories of social constructionism and discourse analysis to question whether the failures identified in strands 1) and 2) arise because society as a whole, and the planning system specifically, does not recognise at an ideological level that it is failing.