More than 2,000 English villages risk being “frozen in time” because town halls have ruled they are unsustainable and not suitable for new homes, rural landowners have warned.

Cornwall, Wiltshire and central Lincolnshire are the areas with the most villages that, according to local planning strategies, cannot easily be expanded with new homes because they lack access to services such as post offices and primary schools.

Critics say that the system of branding villages unsustainable is being driven by nimby opposition to development. They add that it is causing a shortage of affordable rural housing and that younger people being forced to move to towns and cities. This means some villages will be inhabited by ageing populations, which potentially stores up problems for social care in the future.

The Country Land and Business Association (CLA), which has analysed hundreds of local authority planning policies, said: “The process effectively fossilises these villages instead of seeking to address the reasons behind why services are being lost, creating a cycle of decline.”

More than 200 villages in Cornwall, more than 100 in south Oxfordshire and 75 villages in Huntingdonshire are among those identified as unsustainable.

The CLA said the approach to planning had led to the stagnation of thousands of rural communities, with research showing that out of the 16,000 settlements of 3,000 people or less, 2,154 villages fall into what it calls the sustainability trap.

More than 4 million people in England live in rural villages and hamlets, which is about 8% of the total population. The CLA says that councils are taking the wrong things into account when deciding where homes should be built. It found that only a fifth of councils considered the availability of broadband in their assessment of whether villages could take more homes, compared with the 92% that take into account the availability of a pub.

Tim Breitmeyer, the CLA’s president, said: “Updating rural planning policy to include connectivity in sustainability assessments means English villages will not be trapped in analogue when the rest of the world is in the digital age and can access much of the housing they desperately need.”

Howe Hill, a village outside Watlington in Oxfordshire, is among those labelled unsustainable.

“The consequence of not being able to build new housing is that we will eventually go into terminal decline,” said Peter Richardson, a Howe Hill resident who wants to sell of part of his acre-large housing to build a new house. “Young people are less likely to stay and we need new families coming in to provide economic and social support.

He said the problem was “nimbyism exposed”, adding that there would be less need to build large extensions to other places if more villages were allowed to build small numbers of new homes.

Martin Tett, a housing spokesman for the Local Government Association, said: “Councils are committed to tackling the housing crisis and delivering the right homes in the right places. “Crucially, this includes councils working with their communities to develop and agree local plans, setting out their vision for developments where they live. As every street, village, town and city is different and will have different levels of need and opportunity for housing growth, it should be for councils working with communities to determine how and where new homes are built.”



