The social and political environments in which communityled and self-build projects must operate are complex and challenging. The government's Housing Minister conceded in his address to the UK's National Community-led Housing conference in 2017 that there remain barriers to what local collaborative and community-led projects might achieve, admitting that ‘the biggest barriers are almost certainly cultural’. As has been explored in the foregoing pages, fundamental to the UK's house building and planning culture is who decides what local people's key needs at the grassroots level may be, and what actions are, or should be, mobilised as a response.

This publication has presented substantial detail on how local housing and neighbourhood projects have challenged the conventional decision-making frameworks that have traditionally assumed a legitimacy to act on behalf of local communities, rather than enabling decisions to be undertaken by the households resident in their areas. As summarised by the Policy Exchange:

Ironically, the recent central government willingness to lessen fiscal restrictions on local authorities may, however, give greater impetus to mainstream opportunists who are readier to support local authority-controlled development arrangements or new local housing companies than to other community-directed ones. ARCH (the Association of Retained Council Housing) is loudly promoting the profile of an invigorated council housing sector: ‘councils are once again leading the charge to help increase supply to reach the Government's ambitions to deliver 300,000 new homes a year’. Senior local authority voices can already be heard questioning whether there will be any need for further community-led initiatives. If there are to be new opportunities for statutory sponsored housing delivery to meet what has been defined as ‘local needs’, then why bother with alternatives?