Can Community Empowerment Reduce Opposition to Housing? Evidence from Rural England

Abstract

This paper explores the potential benefits of giving local communities a greater role in planning for housing—an approach being pioneered by the government in the UK. That new government has embarked on an ambitious programme of reform, including dismantling the ‘top-down’ system of planning for housing and replacing it with a ‘bottom-up’, community-driven approach. This paper explores the implications of this new approach to ask whether it can be effective in reducing opposition to new housing. It draws upon evidence taken from a study into opposition to small-scale housing schemes in rural England, and broader literature related to opposition to development.

Acknowledgements

The research on which this paper is based was funded by the Commission for Rural Communities. The author wishes to thank Jo Lavis, who coordinated the project at the CRC, and Angie Essom, who carried out the interviews. Any misrepresentation of interview data is entirely the responsibility of the author. The author also wishes to thank Olivier Sykes and Alex Lord, along with the editor and two anonymous reviewers, for their comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

1. Settlement boundaries—also known as, inter alia, village envelopes—are used in English planning to define the growth limits of settlements; they are usually lines drawn on plans around the existing built form, intended to prevent sprawl.

2. Council tax is levied by local authorities in England on households within their boundaries. The more expensive a property, the higher the council tax ‘band’—so lowering the band would reduce council tax bills, something these opponents would not apparently welcome, perhaps perversely.