But, for too many people, country living is more challenging. As in the rest of the country, house prices in the Yorkshire countryside are being pushed up well above average, as wealthy city dwellers move to rural areas in search of a better life.

As a result young families are being priced out of their local communities. The average cost of a first home in the region's most rural areas is £120,000 compared to £97,000 in its major urban areas. Yet rural wages are significantly lower than urban ones – around 20 per cent less.

Low paid rural workers in the Yorkshire and Humber region must pay on average almost nine times their salary for a first home, compared to major urban areas where similar homes cost just over six times local wages. In the region's most expensive areas – Ryedale and Harrogate – first homes cost more than 10 times the average local annual wage.

With affordable homes few and far between, those who do the work in rural areas – from tradesmen to teachers, shop workers to farm workers, increasingly are being priced out of these villages.

As an MP who has lived and worked all my life in a rural community, I am approached almost every day by constituents unable to afford a home – working people, now even young professionals. So I was delighted to be asked by the Prime Minister to review how we nurture a living, working countryside – because I know how stark the situation has become.

It's understandable that we want to protect villages from over-development to maintain the character and landscape of the countryside. But we are at risk of throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Too many villages are dying because the people who sustain them – tend the fields, keep the shop running, pull pints in the pub – can't afford to live there. Without the people to do the work and the young families to use the services such as schools and buses, our villages become dormitories for the rich and retired.

The countryside is at a crossroads. For many villages and hamlets, the choice is between becoming sterile gated communities that are neither mixed nor inclusive, or building the small number of affordable homes needed for the families who work in these communities to continue to live in them.

I am not talking about concreting over the countryside. In many villages, it will take just a handful of well-designed homes, earmarked for local people and kept affordable for generations, making all the difference to the sustainability of the community and its services.

My proposals will make it easier for communities themselves to make this choice. Where such small affordable housing proposals are supported by the community, are to meet local need at an affordable price in perpetuity and are appropriately designed, the planning system must not stand in the way. This "Community Led Affordable Housing" initiative involves the local community at the earliest stage of planning, and offers new encouragement to landowners to release the necessary sites at an affordable price.

It is not just about affordable homes for local people. We also need to make sure that there are better opportunities for the people who live in these small rural communities to find quality work and build successful businesses.

Most rural businesses are very small. Indeed, in the most rural areas, 31 per cent of people work from home, compared to eight per cent of city dwellers. But all too often, as soon as these businesses start to show signs of success they are moved on to industrial estates in or around town. The planning system should not stand in the way of these small and even home-based businesses growing by taking on their first employees locally.

Beyond the small villages and hamlets, our market towns are facing a different choice. Increasing demand means many market towns here are growing fast. Current planning practices too often meet this demand with endless new anonymous housing estates and retail parks ringing
our country towns.

Alternatively we could follow the example of a handful of places
that have pioneered a different approach. They have challenged planning practices to deliver genuinely attractive new neighbourhoods and community extensions, which actually enhance the existing town, with a mix of shops and community facilities and work places and open spaces.

During the review I visited Easingwold in the Vale of York, where 164 houses have been built on a NHS Trust site. Rather than build on the land closest to the existing centre, the housing was built on the hospital site and a wonderful large area of public open space created for the community.

Yet this only happened because of the fortuitous location of the old hospital, a single landowner and some genuinely imaginative thinking. I am proposing changes to the planning system to make these kinds of gains for the community standard practice, not lucky chance. It is time to stop doughnutting our lovely country towns with bland housing estates and retail parks, and start creating real, attractive neighbourhoods again.

To build a vibrant, living, working countryside, we have choices to make and they need to be made now without delay. Let's create places people want to live, and leave vibrant and lasting communities as our legacy.

Matthew Taylor is the Liberal Democrat MP for Truro and author of the Government-commissioned Living Working Countryside report that was published yesterday.