English Rural Housing Market Policy: Some Inconvenient Truths?

Abstract

Recent major policy innovations require each English region to agree the allocation of new housing between sub-regional housing market areas (HMAs). Allocations are to be based upon Housing Market Assessments that consider variation between and within HMAs, which will often embrace both urban and rural areas. Measures of the supply/demand balance within HMAs are to determine the distribution of new housing supply but these measures will be sensitive to the way HMA boundaries are drawn. The policy is inclined to direct new housing into urban areas on sustainability grounds so the way the new housing policy affects a rural area can critically depend on whether the HMA it is in is mostly urban. Yet the policy guidance on how to define HMAs leaves many questions unanswered. This paper examines these questions and shows that some can be resolved by critical examination of the policy logic, while others are more technical and call for further developmental work to be done.

Acknowledgements

This paper draws on past research for several funding bodies, undertaken with several other CURDS colleagues (including Simon Raybould who created the maps in this paper). The maps were created by analyses—carried out by Colin Wymer—of 2001 Census data that remain Crown Copyright (although available free on request to the Office for National Statistics). The author is also grateful for constructive comments, on an earlier draft, including those from colleague Tony Champion as well as anonymous referees, and especially the editor of this special issue.

Notes

1. For example, if people find it more difficult to commute from X than Y to Z, then they are less likely to migrate between X and Z than between Y and Z because in the latter case their home moves are more likely to be achievable without at the same time having to change their job or take on a more problematic greater commuting burden. As a result, a migration data-set can be expected to show higher flows between Y and Z than between X and Z: thus the migration data-set is all that seems to be needed to produce appropriate HMA definitions where Y and Z are in the same HMA but X is in a different one.

2. There is now a voluminous literature on different approaches to dealing with this housing mix effect, but almost all of the methods in use require a substantial number of properties for each dwelling type examined, and in order to identify which neighbourhoods or localities have similar price profiles it will be necessary to have that number of observations for each of these small areas.

3. There are two aspects to self-containment of an area's flows: the percentage of all those moving from a dwelling in the area, whose move ends in that area; and the percentage of all those moving into the area whose move had started in that same area. In the TTWA method, it is the lower of the two that is critical for any area. This means that every area will pass the pre-determined self-containment level on both of these two measures.