The last two chapters have explored how representations of the countryside have been translated into national and local planning approaches – informing the system of statutory landscape protection and shaping attitudes to ‘preservation’ – which lend support to protection in a context of increasing consumption of the countryside. However, interwoven throughout this chronology of policy frameworks have been various attempts to take stock of, and reflect upon, policy outcomes. These reviews have provided a series of snapshots of how problems have been defined and the assessments that have been made of the demand and supply pressures in rural localities, including the differential outcomes and consequences for various parts of the population.

Indeed, few topics have been so frequently reviewed, by government, by charities and by pressure groups, as ‘the rural housing question’. For the past 100 years, governments in Westminster (and the devolved administrations after 1999) have been compelled, time and again, to return to the search for answers in the face of mounting pressure to address the housing and economic challenges posed by a restructuring countryside. A range of actions have invariably followed these inquiries into ‘housing conditions’, ‘rural poverty’, ‘affordability’, ‘economic opportunity’ and ‘sustainability’: but none have so far provided a convincing solution, or at least convincing enough to bring this succession of reviews to a halt.

As noted in the Foreword to this book, there seems to be something intractable in this question, which defies resolution, and is perhaps more fundamental than housing conditions or affordability, or rural wage levels. This chapter briefly reviews the reviews, charting the trajectory of concern over the last century. It pulls together a sample of key inquiries from different parts of Britain, examines their central concerns and considers the extent to which they addressed ‘rural fundamentals’ (of the type examined in the last chapter), as opposed to highlighting the rural versions of generic housing problems. Did they advance critical understanding of the rural housing question, or did they instead generate lists of actions that governments might take to placate sections of the rural population: sticking plasters for gaping wounds?

Early reviews are significant and reveal how concern for rural housing, rural economies and rural communities evolved over the last century.