This paper provides a critical perspective on England's housing crisis, characterised here as a concentration of wealth in residential property which is driving up prices and reducing access to the homes that people need. Housing has become a wealth machine and government has arguably lost sight of its social function. It is important that planning draws a functional distinction between housing as an asset, and housing as a social good. The paper ends by considering how a decoupling of housing's 'home' and 'asset' functions might be achieved through land-use policy.

The most significant episode in the assetisation of housing (underpinning its financialisation) is often understood to be the economic restructuring that took place during the 1980s – particularly deregulation of the banking sector and credit liberalisation. Research has reported on the housing ‘investor subject’ that emerged during this time, as an integral part of the transition towards financialised economies. This article provides new evidence about the housing consumer subject, and its place in this transition, by drilling into UK housing policy history and its discourses around the consumer relationship with housing. Using archive data from the Parliamentary and National Archives alongside interviews with key informers, we illustrate three cases of housing policy development in which the consumer demand for, and relationship with, housing is discursively reconditioned. We conclude that the housing investor subject was pursued in housing policy reform and its discourses well before the 1980s and the economic reforms commonly identified as the causes of financialisation. In addition, these discourses are found to have been reconditioned in order to align with broader macroeconomic policy concerns of the time. The article therefore provides a rare view of assetisation from within the state apparatus, revealing how housing policy and its discourses around consumption became functionally integrated within wider macroeconomic goals.

This paper examines housing investment pressures and the local planning response in St Ives, Cornwall, where a Neighbourhood Development Plan introduced a principal residence restriction affecting all new-build homes in the locality in 2016. Ostensibly, the objective of this policy is to reserve new-build housing for local residents, thereby delivering improved housing market access for those needing to live and work in the area, who are seen to have greater claim on local resources. However, our study of the development and anticipated impacts of 'Policy H2', drawing on semi-structured interviews, highlights concerns amongst long-term residents and working households as to the economic impacts of the policy relative to its impacts on housing access. Greater support for the policy was found to exist among in-migrant and retired households, who view the policy as a means of slowing development, preserving local character, and defending property values. Evidence from prior experiments with residence restrictions in the Lake District and in Wales suggest that an overall reduction in house building (triggered by a shrinking of the market of eligible homebuyers) and a shift in demand by investors from new homes to the second-hand market can elevate house-prices and reduce overall housing affordability. Local needs planning policies may be politically expedient, with local politicians responding to a call to action, but they also carry the risk of unintended consequences.

List of figures vi List of tables viii List of cases ix Preface x Acknowledgements xiii 1 The village housing challenge 1 2 Housing markets, planning and land 19 3 Private and public responses: the past 41 4 Planning, community action and neighbourhood planning: the present 89 5 Planning, land, tax and finance 6 Self-build and custom housebuilding, off-grid and council-led development: the future 7 A future for villages References Index vi List of figures 0.1 Urban and rural housing affordability. xi 1.1 Village of Great Chart, Kent.

A combination of development constraint, low wages in seasonal employment and market intrusion by more affluent households generates housing access and affordability difficulties in many rural amenity areas. In response, residents' groups and public planners have sometimes sought to prioritise 'local needs', restricting the occupancy of new housing to key workers or others deemed 'local'. Drawing on examples from England, this paper illustrates how these downstream interventions are often rendered ineffective by the upstream and structural drivers of housing access inequality, revealing a need for upstream reforms focused on community control of land and the tax treatment of housing.