The reason there are no easy answers is because there's no simplistic
situation.  It's not the commuter in the countryside displacing the
farm worker, there's a whole shitload more to it than that, as a
result of this there's not even a single "it" to complain about,
e.g. another side is cheap affordable housing in rural areas eating
the countryside and turning merging villages into identikit towns.  If
there's a single cause it's population increase, which is the root of
much of all such issues.  My own village is about to sprout several
new identikit housing estates to add to the ones that appeared in
recent years, and is now joined together with the neighbouring
village.  I don't give much of a toss but the locals don't want it,
but at the same time don't want their kids to have to move to town.

Plus of course I hear of villages in holiday destinations where
complaints about houses being bought for inflated sums so that locals
can't afford them, well it's the locals who sell them to the rich
second-home bods, and then go and buy an expensive house in a village
somewhere and get moaned about by the residents of the new village!

We seem to be an island of scapegoats ;-)

A postitive attitude from the planners is the first step. While it
might be nicey-nicey for villages (ours wins Britain In Bloom most
years), there has to be industry. Our village has a small industrial
estate at one end (proper industrial, not imported teddy bear
distributors and so-called "country" shops) which keps the locals
in work, in the village, and the townies out - why, who knows, thus
keeping the village alive. Belle mixers are slap bang in the middle
of the Peak Park providing dozens of jobs, but were it not for the
owner being prepared to fight his corner it would have gone a long
time ago. Planners are supposed, by Goverment edict, to be encouraging
rural enterprise, but they pay far more attention the wingers going on
about the value of their property than they do to people who live and
work there, the very ones using the village facillities.
We also have loads of quarries, and there is constant winging
(mostlty from incomers) about lorries and the landscape being
ruined, despite the thousands of jobs quarrying supports, and the
fact that the whole lanscape that they love so much has been created
by quarrying in the first place.
We have 4 pubs in the village (one each!) for th time being, a shop
and a butcher. They are kept going by the very people the wingers
are trying to put out of jobs, as the village is a real, working
village, not all pertty-pretty and full (or rather empty) of
weekenders or away-all-day types who pride themselves of buying
their shopping cheaply in the supermarket on the way home.
Then there's the social side of it - I keep seeing loonies on
the telly who "get a better job" to "improve their lifestyle",
and then leave for work at 5.00am, returning at 9.00pm and
somehow think this benefits their kids - yet they never see their
kids in the week, and often live in ghost vilages with no life
as they are deserted; the shop, pub, school, village hall etc
all having gone. Quite how that improves anyones life is beyond
me.

Richard

Unfortunately, I seriously doubt that any government scheme will actually
achieve anything other than to add to the burden of the least able to pay.

It shouldn't be necessary for a large slice of the workforce to commute *at
all*.  But they do, still.  

I agree about the price thing.  However, for the last 100 years or so the
agricultural industry has been getting increasingly mechanised and automated
to the point where 1 person now runs a farm that used to employ 100, and
while most of this happened a long time ago, it's still ongoing even in your
and my working lifetime - take hay bales, for example - when you and I first
started working with 'em small bales were the norm, most often stacked and
dealt with by hand and big round bales were unusual.  Now it's unusual to
find anyone making small bales, apart from to sell to the horsey types, and
mostly handled by machine I expect at that.