Quote Originally Posted by The Bedlington Terrier View Post
You are absolutely bang on mon ami. Drive up past the LIDL towards Pendle Hill, going past Shawbridge on the left and you will no doubt notice they are trying to connect Wiswell to Clitheroe and not a "Council House" in sight.
Councils have a responsibility to provide "social housing" and usually insist on any new development to include and element of social housing.
Developers are interested in building fancy houses that they can sell at inflated prices so social housing is not seen as being profitable enough - so they do the minimum they can get away with - and in a bent system where developers wield political and economic power they can get away with murder. The thing is that they bought up vast tracts of the rural landscape years ago so they want to profit from them.

But the key questions for me are
1. what's wrong with renting?
Many EU countries have 70% renting and because the rental market is buoyant it is competitive, so quality increases and prices are controlled by the market because there are more rental properties to choose from. Need to change the British "castle" psyche
2. what's wrong with repairing and maintaining urban sites rather than continually pushing into rural areas?
There's loads of brown field sites abandoned and decrepit in most towns so why not compulsorily purchase them and rebuild the urban environment with rental properties? Which would also go some way towards regenerating the high streets?
F*** the rural developers.