I remember very well the day that I moved to London in 1989. Nobody suggested to me, a country boy, that I had no right to live there, or complained that I was depriving a native East Ender of a home. It was accepted that young urban incomers like myself migrated to the capital city to seek employment.

It is a very different story when, later in life, Londoners make the reverse journey to the country. Sniff out a farmhouse in the Cotswolds or a fisherman's cottage in Cornwall and urban house-hunters can expect if not open hostility, then an unspoken accusation: what right do you think you have to bring your money down here and outbid local people for houses?

The latest State of the Countryside report from the Commission for Rural Communities has reignited the debate on the effect of incomers on the countryside. Inequality in rural areas is increasing, it claims, as urban dwellers aged 30-64 migrate in search of a quieter life. The presence of 94,000 second homes in rural areas, it goes on to state, has helped to drive house prices as high as 9.7 times household income.

Given that the Commission for Rural Communities is a quango set up by government to act as an advocate for rural dwellers, it is hardly surprising that it should come to this conclusion. In 2006 the commission produced a report on affordable rural housing which advocated creating a new planning class for second homes - which would require owners to seek planning permission before buying a cottage as a bolt hole.

But is it really desirable that the countryside be effectively reserved for those lucky enough to be born and bred there? I have been back living in the countryside for some years now and can see that villages need incomers just as much as cities do. So often it is energetic incomers who keep the sports clubs and village fairs going - not to mention provide business for local builders and organic farmers.

True, if a village lost all its cottages to outsiders who used them for a couple of weeks a year, it would effectively cease to exist. But in practice this has not happened in any part of the country.

Cornwall is the county most associated with affordability problems caused by second-home owners. Yet, according to the Office for National Statistics, even there only 2,253 out of 12,227 properties deemed to lie in “sparse” village are used as second or holiday homes - and many of those are holiday lets that bring valuable money into the local economy week after week. In “less sparse” villages just 2,284 out of 38,899 homes are not used as main homes. In any case, it isn't just rural areas where prices have been driven upwards by the presence of second homes: there are 61,000 second homes in urban areas.

The vast number of incomers to the countryside come to reside there full-time and spend most of their money there. As the Commission for Rural Communities observes, there is now a greater number of business start-ups per head of population in rural areas than in urban ones. This is not because increasing numbers of enterprising yokels are entering the hay and straw trade; it is because city dwellers who have established themselves in their occupations are choosing to spend the latter part of their careers running their own operation from home.

The economic implications of this trend should not be underestimated. As recently as the mid-1990s Cornwall was the poorest county in England, ravaged by mine closures and agricultural depression. The boom times that have followed have made it harder for local people to afford homes in the most desirable villages, yet no one need have been driven from the county: Cornwall retains some of the least expensive towns in Britain, such as Redruth and St Austell. They might not be as pretty as Padstow, but they are only a lump of granite's throw from the sea and they offer a quality of life that your average East Ender might envy.

The Commission for Rural Communities is not wrong to point out that declining numbers of 18 to 30-year-olds are living in rural areas. But surely this is not just because of high house prices. There is also the prohibitive cost of running a car: pretty essential for rural life. A village is a pretty rotten place to live if you are 18. There are few jobs, little nightlife and, in the deepest rural settlements, no one to breed with except members of your own clan.

Do we really want the English countryside to return to introspection and inbreeding? If you think English villages have died as communities, you should go and visit the East German countryside or the more crumbling parts of rural France. There is no problem with incomers there, but not much in the way of civilisation either.

When I hear of the Commission for Rural Communities advocating a purge of incoming urban professionals, I think of the hamlet of Lussaud (population 25) in the Auvergne. Last year it was the subject of a thinly disguised novel by Pierre Joubert who described his adoptive home as like “a hamlet of bandits in the Pashtun tribal region”. As if keen to prove his point, Joubert's neighbours ambushed his car on his next visit home and pelted him with stones.

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