You know the song.
Three Lions. 🦁🦁🦁 A summer tournament. Half the country singing “it’s coming home” at a television, hoping that this time, finally, the thing we have been waiting for might arrive.
It is a line about hope. About belonging. About the ache of nearly.
This #RuralHousingWeek, I want to borrow it and mean something different by it.
Because in hundreds of English villages, “coming home” is not a football chant. It is a quiet impossibility.
It is the grown-up child of a farm worker who cannot afford to live near the place they were raised. It is the teaching assistant, the carer, the apprentice mechanic, the publican’s daughter, all needed in the village but unable to stay in it. It is someone with family, work, memory and responsibility in a place, but no realistic way back through the front door.
Home, the actual place, with the people who know you, the lanes you grew up walking, the school gates, the church bells and the bus that comes twice a day if you are lucky, is right there.
They just cannot afford to live in it.
That is the version of “it’s coming home” worth talking about.
Rural England has a particular kind of housing crisis, and it does not always look like the urban one.
There are no obvious tower blocks. No visible queues. No single skyline that tells the story. The crisis is often hidden in plain sight, dressed up as picturesque. A village can look thriving from the outside while quietly losing the people who make it work.
The maths is brutal. Rural house prices have run far beyond rural wages. Second homes and holiday lets reduce the number of homes available for local people. New affordable homes are often built too slowly because small rural sites are hard, expensive and complicated to bring forward.
The result is simple and damaging. The people who staff the school, care for older residents, serve in the shop, work on the farms, volunteer in the village hall and support local services are pushed out to the nearest town. They may still come back to work, but they cannot come back to live.
Bit by bit, the village changes. It becomes a place that depends on people who can no longer afford to belong there.
This is why affordable rural housing matters.
Not as an abstract policy issue. Not as a number on a planning return. But as the difference between leaving and staying. Between visiting and belonging. Between “I used to live there” and “I am home”.
The best way to understand rural housing is not to start with a spreadsheet. It is to start with people.
On English Rural’s case study page, one family describes being forced out of the village where they had deep family roots before finding stability, affordability and a renewed sense of belonging through an English Rural home. That is the rural housing crisis in one sentence: people with a real connection to a place priced out of it, then able to return because an affordable home existed.
Another story tells of a resident who had been living in a horsebox after losing her home and job, before finding a way forward through an affordable home in the village she knew and loved. That is not a marginal housing issue. That is hidden rural homelessness, made visible.
There is Anne in Halstead, whose affordable home gave her family space, privacy and the chance to remain close to their local support network. There are Abi and Gabriel in Roxwell, who found lasting security after years of instability in the private rented sector. There are Maria and Mike in Shepherdswell, whose home gave them the security to stay in the village they loved and feel settled again.
There is Chris in rural Dorset, whose story shows how the right housing support can help someone move from hidden homelessness towards dignity, stability and hope. There is Gordon in Staple, who found independence, security and a true sense of home. There is Franc, whose story is a reminder that safe, stable housing can be the starting point for recovery and a different future.
These are not side stories. They are the story.
They show what rural affordable housing really does. It gives people a safe place to live. It keeps families close to support. It helps people rebuild after hardship. It allows younger households to remain in the communities where they live and work. It turns the idea of “local connection” from a policy phrase into something human.
Here is the part that should give the chant its meaning.
It works.
At English Rural, we manage over 1,600 homes in nearly 200 villages, built and managed with a deliberately local purpose.
Most exist because of a model designed for rural places. Rural exception sites allow small numbers of genuinely affordable homes to be built on land that would not normally receive planning permission, on the clear condition that they meet local need. Local connection criteria mean these homes are for people with a real link to the parish, such as those who grew up there, work there or have family there.
The clue is in the name.
These are homes for the people of the place.
That matters because affordable rural housing is not just about providing a roof. It is about keeping communities alive. When a young family can stay, the school has pupils. When a care worker can live locally, older residents are better supported. When someone who has fallen into homelessness can rebuild their life in a place where they have roots, recovery becomes more realistic. When people can stay near family and informal support, the whole community is stronger.
The case studies on English Rural’s website show this clearly: affordable rural housing helps people remain in their communities, rebuild after hardship, support their families and look ahead with confidence.
That is not romantic. It is practical.
A home in the right village means a shorter school run. A job that becomes possible. A grandparent nearby. A support network that does not disappear. A tenancy that gives someone the breathing space to plan beyond next month.
We sometimes talk about rural communities as if they are mainly landscapes. Views. Fields. Quiet lanes. Places to protect.
Of course, the character of rural England matters. But villages are not museum pieces. They are living communities, and living communities need people of different ages, incomes, jobs and backgrounds.
A village cannot run on scenery alone.
It needs children for the school. Workers for local businesses. Volunteers for the hall. Customers for the shop. Families for the football club. People who are there not just for a weekend, but for the ordinary, everyday life that makes a place feel like itself.
That is why affordable rural homes are so important. They help keep villages mixed, useful, rooted and alive.
And this is also why the phrase “local connection” matters so much. It is not about keeping people out. It is about making sure that people who already belong to a place are not permanently priced away from it.
The reason “it’s coming home” lands every time is that it is about belonging.
It is about something that feels like it should be possible, but keeps not quite arriving.
That is exactly the right emotion for rural housing, and exactly the wrong outcome to accept.
For too many people in rural England, coming home has become a hope rather than a plan. A memory rather than an option. A place they can point to, but not live in.
Affordable rural housing changes that.
It turns “coming home” from a wistful phrase into a literal event. A van turning into the village. A key in a door. Children walking to the local school. Someone rebuilding after a difficult chapter. A family staying close to the people who support them. A resident no longer hidden, temporary or insecure, but settled.
This Rural Housing Week, that is the homecoming worth fighting for.
Not nearly.
Not next time.
Home.
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