The economic costs of British planning | LSE Event

It is 40 years since Paul Cheshire began to investigate the economic effects of our land use planning system and 20 years since Kate Barker published her first review of the impact of planning on housing supply. Their insights have helped us understand what can be done to ensure decent housing for all and boost productivity – but, after three failed attempts at significant planning reform – we are now in a time of economic stagnation and facing a housing affordability crisis that is only becoming more desperate as interest rates rise.

This event will bring together some of the key contributors to this long running debate and underline LSE’s commitment to engage in this important public policy issue.

Speakers:
Stephen Aldridge
Dame Kate Barker
Professor Paul Cheshire
Lord Wolfson

Chair:
Professor Lord Layard

#Housing #Events #London

Full details/attend: https://www.lse.ac.uk/Events/2023/12/202312051830/planning

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Uh well welcome everybody uh to this session on land use welcome those of you who are here uh those of you who are online um I’m really thrilled to be chairing this session because this is a topic whose hour has at last come uh Paul here has been working on it for

About 40 years uh as he said just now of failure and he’s now achieved success because this is now a big issue as I’m sure you all know with both the conservative party the government interested and the opposition interested never have we gone into a general election with planning as one of the

Central issues so we’ve got this wonderful lineup uh to discuss at first we have Paul cheser professor of economic geography at the lsse um he has been the great uh bold undaunted voice of reason on this subject for so many years uh the green belt and all of that

That we’re going to discuss um and now at last he’s got people to listen next we have Kate Barker Dame cage uh Kate is one of our most distinguished economists in public life in Britain uh she was three times I think she’s the only person who’s been three times member of the monetary

Policy committee at the uh Bank of England and she managed at the same time to lead two reviews on this subject uh one on housing and one on lands land juice so it’s wonderful to have her here then we have Steven Aldrich um he uh is a a really wonderful

Uh civil servant who started in the treasury cabinet office commissioned many good things including some of mental health even I remember he’s now has been for many years the uh Chief Economist at the department now calls uh leveling up but it includes of course housing um where he has been a really

Wonderful uh advocate for a reasoned and rational approach uh to problems of housing land use she’s also a great defender of well-being which is why I love him and uh finally we have Simon Wilson Lord Wilson uh he is the chief executive of one of our favorite stores that I’m

Sure we’ve all been to next uh and he’s also a member of the House of Lords on the conservative bench so welcome to all of them um they are going to talk for precisely 12 minutes each I think they’ve all been practicing um and um I need to make some practical uh

Announcements also for Twitter users the hashtag is I think it’s called hash that sign yes hash lsse planning uh the event is being recorded and will hopefully be made available the podcast uh provided the no technical difficulties um as usual sorry I’m not speaking from the mic am I um as usual

There’ be a chance uh for you to get uh your questions later um and for the online audience so be thinking about that and please uh be submitting your questions via the Q&A feature at the top left of your screen um the question should be submitted to me and please include your

Name and affiliation and we’re especially Kean to hear from students and alumni so uh with no more from me uh let’s start with the most well thank you very much indeed for that uh Steph see what happens when I press a button nothing wrong thing wrong

Button there we go right button so just to summarize thank you very much for that introduction it’s very nice to be here and it’s very good to be talking about this subject which I’ve been doing a lot in the last few months and Steven’s already heard quite a l of this

I think quite recently uh so what is Central is the growing housing affordability crisis to access to housing is Out Of Reach but it’s not just that it has serious welfare implications it has adverse distributional impacts and it generates highly perverse incentives problem underlying problem is Supply restriction primarily VI our

Planning system though we managed to do it in other ways too so the real cost cost of housing have been going up over two generations and the quality has been going down now what I want to urge on my economic Economist colleagues including CP is that this is a problem we should

Be taking very seriously not just as housing in the housing context but because of its damaging wider economic impacts indirectly it impedes labor mobility and reduces glomeration economies and the productivity of the UK economy but it directly by its controls on location for commercial uses and by

Its restrictions on the supply of Office Buildings increases the cost of commercial space which feeds straight through to Lost productivity and I’m just going to talk about two improvements that uh I’ve been thinking about for some time one is a strategic repurposing of the green belts to create

More publicly accessible open space and to improve the environmental impact both of green belts and of Housing Development by releasing land near commuter stations for housing and the second is to move to a rules-based planning system which in fact the conservatives to do them credit tried to

Do last in August 2020 but it got completely abandoned uh when everyone went apit on the back benches of the Tory party after the chesman bar election so that was lost so the reality is the house prices have more or less doubled in real terms in every Decay

Since the 1950s that doesn’t Just Produce homelessness but it’s a major source of inequity between the old and the young I’m a huge beneficiary and I’m sure most people on the on the panel here are huge beneficiaries of the escalation house prices but it’s extremely damaging for the young and it

Damages social cohesion it generates this this conflict between the housing Haves and the housing Have Nots so those born in the 1950s 70% owned a house by the time they were aged 34 that is now down to 34% it reduces total GDP by reducing labor Mobility to more productive

Locations so in the United States sh and Moretti well known paper Pugo and dunon have estimated something like a 13.7% loss of total output in the US as a result of restricting Mobility to the east and west coasts however you think how restrictive we are in this country

No one has done the work in this country but it’s probable that the results are the the implications are significantly greater certainly it reduces the glomeration economies in places like Cambridge or Roxford or London they so increases supply of lab of Labor the costs of of Labor Supply in London and

The southeast which results in these foregone losses it also has these perverse effects that between 1995 and 2015 for example land mainly land houses on it increased as a proportion of people’s personal assets from 49% to 62% according to uh Thomas piy uh housing or rather the land under houses

Was worth about the same as total GDP for all the period between 1700 and 1960 but it’s now worth three times as much as annual GDP uh High rate of return on on on housing and that’s mainly the land because whilst house prices have increased fivefold in real terms since

1955 the price for putting of land for putting houses on has increased 15 fold over the same time and the result of that is you have smaller houses you have worse design you have poorer construction because all the money in house building actually has to go on the

Land and it has a direct uh hit on productivity for example very few people it’s a very nerdish interest of mine there’s something called Town Center first policies introduc used in England in 1996 forcing particularly retail to go to Traditional High streets and town centers now Christen and I published a

Paper in 2015 showing that for a big supermarket chain that had actually had the effect of causing a reduction in total Factor productivity of 32% that’s a big hit to a big industry H and I managed to get hold of some data some data for a big clothing retailer

And that actually was worse a 47% loss of productivity directly as a result of uh Town Center first policies which other research we’ve done and others have done shows actually don’t produce the the out the a the payoff that they were supposed to do directly reduce his employment in town centers for example

In retail so this this slide here is one of my old favorites some of you may have seen it before um what it shows is the real price of housing land since 1892 up until the price series was abolished by the coalition government when they came in in May uh

2010 uh saved £50,000 uh and what you can see is that you know you can make more land Mark Twain was wrong you can make more land and we did because we built Railways first of all we built Suburban Railways then we built the tube system and then we built roads

So the supply of land As Cities grew bigger was quite elastic and the price of land for houses didn’t rise in real terms until the late 1950s what happened in 1955 the Metropolitan Green Belt was imposed now the Metropolitan green Bo wasn’t imposed in order to generate a wonderful green environment It’s a

Wonderful rhetorical successful political name but has nothing to do with green environment at all actually it was imposed by a Tory minister uh dunan Sands in order to keep potential labor voters out of the home counties and so it extends from the North Sea London green Bel extends from the North

Sea all the way to the edge of Al it’s a huge area but what you can see is that lad to a huge increase in the real price of housing of housing land times 50% and it also led to an increase in house prices but also of course because you’re

Restricting Supply and making it very in elastic it increased the volatil increased the volatility and it’s not just that this uh is an issue of supply of restrictions on land Supply it’s also we have a discretionary system having a discretionary system injects uncertainty into the development process so lo and behold countries that

Have a discretionary planning system now and behold they’re all they’re former British colonists we exported our planning system lucky people in Canada they got a discretionary system as it is in New Zealand so all the biggest increases in real house prices are in those those countries including the UK

Uh you know places like Germany or Switzerland are really quite sensible that’s over a long period of 50 years so you know we have one of New Zealand is worse Oakland all those sheep in New Zealand Oakland’s got a green belt bigger than London’s Green Belt but there you

Go so I did a simple calculation that if you look at how many houses we’ve built in the last 30 years we’ve built over 3 million fewer than we built in the previous uh 30 years it’s Supply Center for cities did a paper earlier this year where they did a more

Sophisticated attempt to look at how many houses we would have built since 1945 had we behaved like Germany or Holland or or France and they calculated that we had a short fall of about 4.3 million houses that we hadn’t built since 1945 and not only that but where we do

Build houses we build them where they’re least unaffordable so if you add up all the houses built in barsley and Doncaster in the 40 years ending in 19 in 2018 there increase of 23,000 in population but they managed to build 56,000 houses on the other hand Ox in Cambridge you had nearly 100,000

Increase in population only Built 29,000 houses so we build far too few H houses and as far as we do build houses we build them in the wrong place so two possible suggestions for improving the situation they’re not Solutions they’re simply things that could be done at I

Think zero cost and would improve the situation considerably so green belts as I said are not green L lungs the biggest land use in the green belt is intensive Agriculture and intensive agriculture is one of the least environmentally friendly uh activities that we have in the in in the modern world and British

Agriculture particularly environmentally unfriendly and it’s private land you don’t have access except on on on foot paaths but on the other hand people have to Leap Frog across the green belt in order to be able to afford space so that hugely increases commuting Journeys and it also means that what houses we do

Build build are built in sort of small additions to outline Villages so all that housing is then car dependent uh for for for people who live there uh so green belts essentially only benefit those who actually live in them and here’s what a green belt looks like so

This is uh nice picture I like these pictures so this is a what is it a golf course no it isn’t a golf course it’s an abandoned golf course and lots ofand course what is that that’s a zone six station with service to London Bridge

Every it takes 35 minutes and this is a junction on the M25 you could hardly find a better place to build houses there was an application to build a very modest development of 800 houses turned down in the green belt uh and what’s this this is another abandoned golf

Course not quite so obviously a golf course as the previous one this is at the end of the Jubilee line in stanmor can’t build houses there either and these are my two of my favorites this believe it or not is Tottenham hail almost in the middle of London a big

Interchange shabby Car Wash application to build affordable 250 affordable houses there in 2016 turned out not because it’s actually in the green Bel but because the inspector thought it might possibly at it’s nor exity possibly be the green Bel and here’s where building stopped in 1939 North Northwood was getting built

Out war came stopped developing left land there and it’s place for horses people can’t live there but horses can so adopt green belts to serve green purposes identify and preserve immunity or environmentally rich land we need Open Spaces we don’t want to build over vast tracks of the countryside that are

Beautiful or people benefit from but then permit development on land with no immunity or environmental markers within 800 meters of Commuter Rail stations because it’s far too expensive to build new rail links it’s too expensive our we simply won’t do it given how much it costs particularly given the planning

System that’s another story costs 10 times as much per kilometer to build a kilometer of Railway line in this country as it does in France can’t can’t imagine why uh so we could make better use of what we have and that is environmentally much better so then take

Out of that land that you identify 10% for green new Green Space which is actually going to be accessible for wildlife and and Recreation so we worked this out in a paper we did for the center of cities uh we found uh that that just for five cities in the UK you

Could identify 47,000 hectares of land which was within 800 MERS of commuter stations 45 minutes to Major employment centers and on that land depending on the densities you assumed you could build 1.7 to2 million houses uh but that would actually only take 1.8% of the green belt anyway hard you know hardly

Notice it in terms of loss of green belt but it would actually be an improvement in environmental terms because you’d have all this extra Green Space land that you would then make accessible uh and uh so environmentally positive and it would encourage rail-based development rather than uh than

Car-based development so this is just a picture of what we did for London I was Hurry Up This pink stuff is Green Belt Oxford you run into Oxford you run into Cambridge uh the green bits are things you shouldn’t build on that’s areas aren’t standing natural beauty except

This week they call something else they changed the name last week uh natural National Landscapes that’s what we call this week uh and here’s where our Central St so all these other ones are stations which are within 45 minutes of Central London where and they you can’t

See it but it identified how much land was there so that’s one thing that you could do very easily that would generate enough space with good Communications to employment of roughly 2 million houses now another little point this is a question of discretion I said that it’s expensive to have a discretionary

System because it generates uncertainty I’m going to illustrate this with a piece of research I did very recently because Christian and I Christian hilber and I had already done some work back in the fact following on from Kate marker’s review that demonstrated that there was a shortage of supply of office space in

London generating at the worst case in the West End of London the equivalent of an 800% tax on construction costs hugely increasing so office space in Birmingham for example was 50% more expensive than it was in Manhattan that wasn’t because the building costs in Birmingham were

Very high uh so why is that it’s because we’ve got height restrictions it’s very difficult to build High how do you get a taller office built uh office building built well you game the system you employ someone we call a trophy architect after tell in a moment so what

The shadow what the secretary of state with then Lord Prescott God bless him uh so what he said when approving The Shard on appeal as secretary of state was we’ only approve skyscrapers of exceptional design for a building of this size to be acceptable the quality of this desire is

Critical the proposed Tower is of the highest architectural quality and how did he know that he knew it because it was designed by Renzo Piano who’d won two of the most prestigious architectural lifetime achievement awards in ever given so what we did was we you know one of the things you find

Is that London has got remarkably few skyscrapers that’s over 100 uh 100 meters tall as Gabriel would tell you uh so you know Paris has got uh brisban in Australia small provincial City got six times as many skyscrapers as Paris Paris in 2010 had eight times as many as

London the only thing that London has is a incredibly High proportion of trophy architect design skyscrapers so 25% of all the skyscrapers in in in London are designed by these trophy Architects compared to Chicago the home of modern architecture 3% or Brussels zero why because trophy Architects successfully G

The system and persuade uh the planners or not the planners the politicians that this is a wonderful building should be allowed and we showed this in an article published in 20120 took a sample of $2,000 Office Building Sales across London this shows you how little of London you can actually build tall on

This pinky stuff is conservation area huge tracks of Central London conservation areas can’t build anything there at allove above the existing Sky level and then these are the sight lines so my favorite is a sight line from Richmond to St Paul’s because you actually can’t see St Pauls from

Richmond despite the sideline because the air is so murky the at least 360 days a year so what did we find we found that trophy Architects if they designed the building could get an extra 14.3 floors on on their buildings and they also got a higher price per square meter

And how did we know it was the trophy architect effect because we compared it with Chicago because in Chicago they have an unre restricted or Hy hyri is almost non-existent you can build anything that the zoning system says you can build and on average uh Sky uh

Offices in in Chicago are 30 stories taller than they are in London however when a someone gets a A Trophy architect gets their award lo and behold in London their offices grow by 14 more more than 14 floors whereas in Chicago nothing happens in fact they shrank but it

Wasn’t statistically significant this is my last slide whichard so to sum up you can look at it and I won’t tell you what it says we need to do something well I was um I was going to say I feel very small following that but

Now I’m behind this thing I realize I am so I am very small and hardly any of you’ll be able to see me but you’re not missing much um the first thing I want to say is that it’s a trfic privilege to be asked to speak at an event to Mark Paul’s

Achievement in serious data work on housing and planning I really don’t know anybody who’s done as much as as Paul in proper data terms I certainly haven’t I’ve written reviews but I have not tackled the data to anything like um the um technical way in which Paul has and

Very few PE and very few people have so his articles on quantifying the cost of restrictive planning on rents retail efficiency and of course housing completely overshadow what I’ve been doing to try and think about housing Supply and policy so when I 20 years ago

And I was at the bank of England I was asked by the government to work on reviews of Housing and planning I should say this is the sort of period at the bank in the Years 2000s when nothing much went on and we didn’t change interest rates very much and the

Financial system looked completely calm we rather missed a gathering storm so had plenty of time to work work on housing planning um I became very much aware of the wealth of academic work in this area and particularly at the Lac my own work as I say had been very much

Less academic but I did some different things after I’d worked on the reviews and indeed after I’d left the bank so I worked in a number of uh for a number of boards in the public sector I was on the board of what was then the homes and

Communities agency I’ve also been on the board of a building society and at a major house Builder so I may be less expert than Paul at handling data but I have looked at the issues around planning and housing from a number of viewpoints and I’ve got some appreciation of the messy and sometimes

Murky world of development in fact I often said that the reason I went on the board of a house Builder was I was interested to see whether the housing the behavior of a house builder in practice was the same as I thought it was in theory and unusually an econ

Economist I found that it was I was very I was quite surprised so I think the but the importance about the work is it’s not just about the economic cost of an overly restricted planning system it’s often putting that cost in in human terms Bull’s work on retail the Town

Center first was important when I when I did the work and actually he didn’t mention the I’m not even sure whether it still exists I’m somewhat out of touch you didn’t even mention the needs test on retail po which I um suggest suest it should be abolished because when I was

Doing the work on housing on planning I discovered that in order for anybody to open a retail store they had to prove that there was a need for an extra chemist or Bookshop or whatever which is a frankly deeply um uncompetitive thing and it was instructive when I looked at

The respondents to the final review to notice that incumbent retailers were not very keen on the dis disposal of the needs tests and retailers interested in getting a foothold were really quite enthusiastic about it and I think it’s also fair to say that since then changes in consumer Behavior having any event

Rather repurposed High streets and the imperative for physical retail units to have scale and low costs of land has probably increased so the good intentions of planners often become costly attempts to hold back the tide I think a very natural question is why pulls done all this work which just

Shown you these figures that demonstrate that huge benefits can come from a less constructed planning system I did some top- down reviews there been a wealth of other material but yet there’s been no real progress on handing Supply in particular I don’t by the way think I got everything right in my housing

Review I did think at the time that I’d managed to get housing Supply into the minds of politicians and actually it has generally remained in the public debate um the subsequent housing ministers the 300 or so of them we’ve had um have generally talked about Supply even if

They haven’t been very necessary very very good at setting targets and it matters that ministers think Supply matters Supply is a crude total however isn’t the only thing that matters but unders Supply is such an important structural undercurrent in the housing problem prices and rents of course tend

To be cyclical Paul showed you some pretty sharp ups and downs in some of the prices but the point is if you don’t build enough in each successive cycle the average for house prices and the average for rents compared paed with incomes will rise if Supply is structurally inadequate but it’s really

Hard to land this point squarely with the public why is that I think first of all as a local area at any point in time it’s actually quite hard to discern The Beneficial effects of building houses and the evil of not building houses the appeal to longterm economic and social

Benefits never seemed quite way the points raised by people who don’t want the houses built and say my Road will be busier I won’t get a GP appointment anymore and day-to-day observation can really conceal the economic damage so question I asked people when leading the review was if we’ve been under supplying

Homes in Britain for England for so long lot of this discussion is about England where have all the people gone and I’m going to sort of talk about this by talking about the 2010s so at the beginning of the 2010s the office for National statistics said that they thought we would need about

210,000 house houses a year to be built because they thought that’s how many new households would form we actually only Built 170,000 houses a year during the 2010s so that’s 40,000 short or over 10 years 400,000 now it’s manifestly clear we don’t have an extra 400,000 people who

Are homeless and sleeping on the streets the numbers are numbers well not very good and very very much less than that so what actually happened well what didn’t happen was the um on projection for total population was was pretty much right um if you look at back what they

Expected in 2010 and what we actually got when we had the census in 2021 they were pretty close but the on projection for households was of course wrong because households you know rather tediously don’t form if there’s nowhere for them to form so what happened to these people well 70,000 young people

People a year and young people is 20 to 34 extra stayed were live stayed living with their parents and that is a and that is a pretty big part of the explanation of why the households didn’t emerge in addition we actually succeeded in bringing 10,000 um homes empty homes a year back

Into use actually we have one of the lowest rates of empty homes in the UK of among the among the oecd I it’s worth saying this because it’s often produced as an answer to our problems so what’s the damage does it matter that we had all these people still living at home

Well those people who didn’t have a extra child living at home and I enjoyed my son living at home throughout the 2010s and might think there’s not much damage at all but this is a large number of young people who’ve had to delay independent living and they’re very

Likely working in the wrong job as far as their skills are concerned because their area of job search is clearly limited it’s limited to where they can get to from their par parents house and that is very damaging to productivity now Paul would look at this question he would identify and quantify correctly

What the damage to productivity is which I have not which I have not done but it is clear to me that there is some quite in quite in addition to the social strain on family life and the delaying of people um getting together their girlfriends and getting and getting

Married unless obviously the working of Demand versus supply of course drove house prices up and meant that those who did move out out we all find that that market housing buying or renting would all be that little bit more expensive for everyone there is also probably some

Very real social damage it’s one thing for me to laugh about the time I spent doing my son’s washing up but people in social housing are often overcrowded to start with having to accommodate older children is a is a genuine problem but again perhaps this is a problem that is

Not terribly visible to the kind of people who protest about new development it ought to be a matter of of concern to us all that in England the social housing stock today is over 100,000 lower than it was in 2001 affordable rent may have a role to play there’s a

Clear shortage of a secure form of tency I should say that um quite a lot of ukrainians come in 2022 to live in with people in our village who were lucky enough to have extra homes for them and when they came to the end of the 6

Months many of them thought well we’ll just apply for housing and we’ll be given a house and it was a big shock to them to discover that in fact it didn’t quite work like that in Britain because there was no there was no social housing to be had Paul also referred to the

Volatility of the market this is a this is a real this is another problem so in England the net Supply numbers fell to a low in 2013 of around 130,000 it then revived to that High 240,000 um still well below the 300,000 which has become the usual Target for

Government ministers then of course it was kned down down by covid to 220,000 it’s picked up a bit since then but it’s likely to fall again when the numbers come out next year because of the big rise in mortgage interest rates this Market volatility which is partly the

Result of a constrained system has really difficult impacts it impacts on capacity when the market turns down and you have to cut back on new Supply you immediately lose skills in the building industry and my experience at Taylor wimpy suggests that people who’ve been found another job inside and not always

That Keen to go outside brick Clan you tend to lose smaller Builders because they can’t cope with the volatility so you end up with a Housing Industry which is very dominated by big Builders so you need to have Peaks that are well above the the um ongoing requirements you

Might also think can it be addressed I perhaps won’t go into this question now because I worried I too may go on for too long but I think we might want to think again about the mix we use of fiscal and monetary policy in crisis and um so I’ll leave that to something

That somebody might want to ask about Richard said right at the beginning that there’s much more interest in this now I’ve been to two events um in the last week one um from run by the productivity Institute and one run by the resolution foundation and

At both there was a lot of commentary on H on planning holding us back referring to house to both housing and business I’m leaving business issues here to Simon wolson now it’s great to hear that there’s renewed Focus but it does worry me first thing is that there’s a tendency

Just to throw out the ter term planning we’re held back by planning what do they mean national government policy the lack of local plans they far too few local plans the way in which planners on the ground balance competing interests in taking decisions the uncertainty how local voices are heard and considered

And if time isn’t taken to think about why there hasn’t been more progress we won’t succeed we will simply be back here again in 10 years there are some Obviously good ideas that are emerging I can completely agree with Paul about the green belt not just bits but think about

The whole purpose and acknowledge the damage around Oxford and Cambridge just in passing Paul you referred to the fact that um in London they built the green belt to stop labor voters moving in iume the green belt around Stoke was to stop conservative voters leing in that’s not

Such a funny funny joke now we have now that Stoke too has a lot of conservatives bigger spatial areas we need to plan over bigger spatial areas we need to plan bigger I actually more than Paul probably believe in planning and you need to plan over big S you need

To plan over bigger areas we have to plan for the right things you also then when you planed for them have to check they’ve happened I’m surprised by how many local authorities don’t really check that things have happened um and also if we plan over larger areas and

Force numbers down to local authorities they’re left helpfully with someone to blame local authorities need someone to blame it would also encourage people to think about the infrastructure we need Paul talked about Cambridge Michael go said we need another 250,000 houses near Cambridge that may or may not be right

Sadly applications for as few as 1,000 houses are being turned down in Cambridge now because there is an inadequate water and the reason there is inadequate water is because the water regulator decided that there wouldn’t be lots of houses built around Cambridge and didn’t let Anglia water invest in

Them um new towns are very big Urban EXT iions are clearly going to be needed land prices and an assembly will be difficult it will need a lot of political will the other thing that will need a lot of political will it’s forcing local authorities to produce

Local plans goodness knows it is one thing that the conservatives have tried to do but it’s been very hard been very hard to keep going I’m perhaps a bit less persuaded by Paul about the rules-based system but this is partly because I suspect that when we the planners had finished making the rules

We H that it wasn’t any it wasn’t really any it wasn’t really any better anyway I’ll wind up now Richard I think it’s as important as good ideas planning is beset by recurrent bad ideas one of the things is we only have smaller households forming we only need small we

Only have a need for small households um so we only need to build little houses and this is because planners think in terms of need and they don’t think in terms of demand older people apparently should move to smaller houses I suspect this would have limited impact Builders

Are blamed because they land Banks or fail to build out permissions and it doesn’t really matter how many reviews you have saying that’s not true it still comes back as an idea empty homes I already commented we have relatively few of these and then a desire to speed up

Planning it’s certainly true that some authorities offer a bad service but I actually think it is true we care about what’s built we care that somebody had a look at the application and it looks right what we need is more toothpaste in the tube we need more applications

Coming coming forward the time they take to decide is is not so relevant so what will matter here is government purpose localism brutally has failed in high demand areas the imperative of climate change versus opposition to pylons and solar Farms is showing up the failure of individuals to consider externalities I

Hope that this will Galvanize the next government but I hope it will also Galvanize them to look at a proper evidence base the kind of work Paul does and not rely on the Shand of bad ideas very good thank you that was very interesting thank you Kate 12 minutes yes yes

Yes right thank you and um it’s a real pleasure to to be here um I fear some of what I say may uh repeat what you’ve already heard but um it’s fantastic we’re having this this event I um want to begin by saying that I often often

Think that land use planning doesn’t get the attention it should though there are exceptions it’s true but in general I don’t think it’s mentioned as much as it should be and certainly really gets top billing though maybe that’s changing in debates about economic growth productivity performance Trends in the

Distribution of wealth and much else yet I’ve learned it’s crucial I say that in substantial part because of the work of Paul chesher and a few other Stewarts of the economics of land use planning so I’m delighted therefore to be able to say a few words about housing and land use planning and

To be able to celebrate the 40 years of work Paul has devoted to this subject Paul has long been at the Vanguard um of the application of Economics to our land use planning system but always clear about the need for a system of land use planning to correct otherwise serious

Market failures HSE workers drawn out again and again as he has this evening the potential costs and unintended consequences of how we’ve designed our current system I know I’ve learned an enormous amount from him and his work as have many others and that’s profoundly influenced my see my thinking and

Certainly the advice that I’ve given in my job Paul brings together empirical rigor and robustness Clarity of thinking and insight and effective use of the written and spoken word I’ll say more about his um academic work on land use planning and housing in a moment but

First a few words about his career it’s a fantastic career so the starting point was in 1964 if not earlier when he earned a degree in economics from down in College Cambridge a stepping stone to serving as an economist at the then Ministry of overseas development his

Academic career began a bit later in 1970 as a lecturer at R reading University from where he steadily built his academic reputation earning the prestigious Donald Robertson Memorial prize in 1989 for his work on major Urban regions delving with Steven sheeper into the complex realm of of

Urban economics to shed light on the costs and benefits of land use planning earning the Royal economic society’s prize for the best paper in The Economic Journal in 20 2004 for work on capitalizing the value of free schools taking forward pioneering work on incorporating price signals into planning decisions which culminated in a

2005 paper on the introduction of price signals into land use planning decision- making still highly relevant to this day winning the European Regional science Association un European investment Banks prize for Lifetime contribution to Regional science research in 2009 was awarded a CBE in7 17 for his services to economics and housing and

He’s advocated radical yet pragmatic solutions to the housing crisis such as his 2019 proposals in homes on the right tracks which is taken us through today and which argued for freeing up land near Railway stations in the green belt for Housing Development currently ameritus professor of economic geography here at the London

School of Economics is the author of co-author of more than 100 papers so I’ve barely scratched the surface of his work Paul has um led the application as I say of economics and economic analysis to our land use planning system and its impact on housing and other outcomes

Thanks to him we’ve got a much better understanding of the housing challenges we currently face and crucially how and why they have Arisen those those like me who work on these issues are greatly in his intellectual debt a distinctive feature of this country though as Paul has shown again this evening similar

Trends can be observed in other countries that have adopted aspects of our land use planning system is that housing has become increasingly unaffordable over time so in 1997 the ratio of median house prices to earnings was 3.5 in England in 2022 it was 8.3 in some parts of the country the

Changes are even greater so in London and the southeast the ratios have risen from 4 4.2 respectively in 1997 to 12.5 and 10.8 in 2022 as a consequence the UK has some of the most expensive housing in the world and the resulting decline in housing affordability has had various effects so

Over the past 20 years the overall rate of home ownership has fallen to 64% from a of 71% um and though and though stable in the latter part of that period in the past decade there have been more outright homeowners than owners with a mortgage which is a very significant

Change in the postwar period as Paul and others have said young people have been particularly hard hit whilst home ownership rates amongst the over 65s have been steadily Rising for decades home ownership rates among 19 to 29 year olds fell by 2/3 in the period 1989 to 2013 from 23% to 8%

Though there’s been a subsequent recovery to 12% over the period to 2021 that still means that young people are half as likely to own their home today as young people 30 years ago this has led to an increased number of concealed households as uh Kate referred to with a

Number of adults living with their parents Rising by nearly uh 700,000 in the decade to 2021 and we see Rising housing costs adding to pressures at B the bottom end of the housing market of an expanding private rented sector and increasing pressures on homelessness which in turn put growing Financial pressures on local

Authorities so why has this happened well the empirical work that Paul has done and the evidence here has assembled shows powerfully that housing Supply housing Supply constraints are the main driver as Paul has said in a seminar with Christian hilber in my department just last week and again this evening

It’s the supply side stupid Paul’s early work notably his 1989 paper British planning policy and access to housing introduced a concept of scarcity rents planning system by restricting land use for various purposes creates artificial scarcity between 1975 and 2022 house prices in the UK increased by 142% in

Real terms whilst house building fell 46% from Believe It or Not Over 378,000 units in 1970 to just over two two 205,000 units in 2022 cumulatively Paul and others have estimated there’s a shortfall in housing Supply in this country of over 4 million unit since the passing of the 1947 tan

And Country planning act a quite remarkable statistic and why perhaps to this day increasing housing Supply remains at the heart of housing policy as the cumulative backlog in supply has risen so have house prices housing affordability has deteriorated as real incomes and the size of the population have growned increasing the

Demand for housing against a backr of constraint Supply in a 2002 paper the Ware economics and land use planning Paul and Steven Shepard looked at the economic costs and benefits of land land use planning in Southern England this revealed a negative net effect with costs amounting to almost 4% of annual household income

The data on which that study was based is now 40 years old and the cost of households today were most certainly greater these supply side impacts of our land use planning system have been compounded as both Paul and Kate have pointed out by Case by case development

Control as opposed to zoning and second by the decision uh by placing decision making at the lowest tier of local government which is perhaps more vulnerable to capture by nimes Paul has has shown moreover that not only have we not built enough houses those houses we have built have tended

To be constructed in the wrong places um famously Paul has noted that um Barnsley and dast only repeated this this evening buil um just over 56,000 houses over the 40 years to 2018 while Oxford and Cambridge had only 29,000 houses built by contrast the population growth was

29,000 in Barnsley and over 95,000 in Oxford and Cambridge Paul observed a few years ago that green belts are a handsome Subs to horsey culture and golf since our planning system prevents housing competing land for golf courses stays very cheap as a result more of s

Is now used for golf courses he observed than has housing on it of course shortfalls in housing Supply aren’t the only potential drivers of rising house prices and falling housing affordability falling interest rates over a long period might have added to demand tighter regulation of mortgage availability will have attend uated that

Effect but Paul and others workers shown that falling interest rates alone cannot explain the rise in house prices some have expressed concern that the growth in the private rented sector and the increasing availability of buy toet mortgages has added to hzy market demand and displace firsttime buyers whil of

Course there may be such effects Paul’s work suggests to me that the cumulative shortfall in housing Supply Supply substantially dwarfs the number of firsttime buyers who might might have been displaced by housing demand from private landlords it’s also worth noting that um restrictions on housing Supply create price risk for house builders impacting

On their operating model and driving L land banking and other behaviors that compound the supply elasticity in elasticity uh arising from the land use planning system so there’s a key Insight here that whether it’s growth in the private rented sector and bu to let mortgages concerns about second homes and foreign buyers

Behaviors such as land banking these are fundamentally perhaps symptoms of the supply side issues that we’ve discussed rather than causes of them Paul’s um work has also shown as we’ve heard this evening that the planning system also has significant effects on non-residential property uh markets so in his 20 2007 work office

Space Supply in Britain he drew attention to the regulatory tax effectively placed by the planning system on office supply that that research demonstrated that Britain has the most exens expensive office space globally due to the regulatory tax imposed by the planning system which constrained Development Office base in

Birmingham was found to be 44% more expensive than in Manhattan High housing and other property costs have led not only to Rising housing unaffordability but impacting NE negatively on productivity economic growth and wealth inequalities a lack of um housing density around our core cities and transport nodes limits effective City

Size hampering productivity gains that could be realized through increased agglomeration economies and as Paul has pointed out policies such as Town Center first have empirically demonstrated negative effects on total Factor productivity additionally house prices and worsening affordability have contributed to increased wealth inequality so on average between 2018 and 2020

Individuals in the richest 10% of the population ear a third of their total wealth in property whereas individuals in the poorest 10% had no property wealth at all and wealth inequality has been increasing both across regions and generations so regionally medium individual wealth is almost £60,000 higher in the Southeast than the

Northeast which’s largely explained by property owners and property values and today’s younger Generations are far less likely to own their home than previous generations so today’s 30-year olds are half as likely to own their home as those age3 in the 1980s fundamentally Paul’s workers pointed to the need to reform of our

Planning system and in a series of papers and studies has made various Innovative proposals first I just s briefly highlight three first the use of price signals to inform land use plans second his proposals for stations in the greenb which he’s talked us through today and thirdly his insights

Into the regulatory tax effectively resulting from um from restrictions on office development so in summary Paul’s work has significantly informed their understanding of the planning system impacts on land use housing affordability in quality productivity and economic growth his research has encouraged policy makers Scholars and urban planners to reconsider and refine

Existing approaches emphasizing the importance of balancing regulatory measures with economic principles to achieve more Equitable economically efficient and sustainable Urban Development his career stands as a testament to his unwavering dedication to unraveling the complex his complexity of urban economics and land use planning and as a beacon of intellectual rigor

And Innovative thinking so it’s been a real pleasure to talk through his work this evening and look forward to comments and discussion thank you very much now I sense that um that I I sort of did a rough calculation that we were asked to speak for 12 minutes which really

Meant 15 minutes which gives me about three minutes um before we switch to uh to question so I’m in the very fortunate position I have to say um of most of the previous speakers having said what I was going to say anyway so I can cut out

Large SES of my my speech and say that I agree wholeheartedly with everything that that has been said before before before I go into the details though I just um there are two things I want to say the first is I want to answer the question that I know will be on every

Single one of your lips this evening every single one of you will be looking at me with one question and I’m going to answer it now get out the way this is in fact an ex suit top of the range available online um for the gentleman in

The room you can look as good as this um and as smart um for as little as £99 um so I just want to get that out of the way first um second uh the second thing I wanted to really say is that rather than sort of go through the

Litany of complaints and problems with our planning system that we have which have been explained extremely well I want to just to kick off with one fact and that is that in the small sort of village that I live just outside Milson keing um an acre of agricultural land is worth about

£15,000 um an acre of land with open Planning Commission for housing on it will be worth about1 A5 million and if you want to understand the nature of the problem um that we have in the UK that one statistic sums it all up because that’s where all the money’s going all

The money that could be invested in better quality homes in more spacious homes in the homes that we want to live in in the infrastructure that is needed to support those homes including the schools and the GPS surgeries that are needed for new homes all of that money

Is swallowed up in the land but it’s worse than that it’s worse than that because it’s not just the cost of the land the cost of getting the planning permission itself can cost up to 10% of the cost of any development that we’ve been in just really been about getting

Lawyers and planning consultants and the time the time taken is often not is not even included as a cost but as we return to a a world where money is no longer free it will become increasingly apparent that the two or three or four years can take to get planning

Permission for relatively simple development um a warehouse we’ve recently built it took us much less time to build the shed than it did to get planning permission for the shed and time is money and all that cost leads to worse homes worse shops worse offices um poorer

Infrastructure and that leads to a very ironic effect it leads to the effect that we have that people lose faith in new has they begin begin to think that actually new buildings are bad and therefore we need more planning to stop it and you end up with planners saying what we

Really must do is only build that which is needed because it must you know anything else answer that about food do we or holidays we’re only going to have the holidays in Britain that people really need um or the food that they really need and we don’t do that in any other

Market but in housing because the assumption is under under Underneath It All Is that new homes houses offices places of work and Leisure are bad we need to constrain it um and I think what this all comes down to is one very simple thing and I’m going you know it’s

A great privilege to be here in the London School of Economics I you know I I have to say sitting up here with all these sort of great minds and speaking in the London school economics I I had that whole sort of slight impostor syndrome thing is like here as me

Talking to the you know all these economists but it strikes me that this is a classic case of what we all know and that is that planned economies don’t work you know the you you know you you can fall back on Stalin’s excuses you know first of all blame the planners

Then blame the plan then blame everyone else doesn’t matter you know doctors officers kulacs whoever it is and in the case of our planning system it seems that that’s what we’re doing we we’re you know we go from saying oh it’s just the wrong plan um or the system needs

Tweaking or it’s the people in it it’s the developers the evil developers the evil planners the evil counselors whoever is you know all the actors get blamed and eventually after a while you know of seeing the same play with lots of different actors in it you conclude

Actually you know it’s not the it’s not the actors that are at fault it’s the play It’s the whole system needs to be rebooted it comes I think it’s what Paul was saying about a rules-based system but actually we need to stop calling it planning because something as complex as

Difficult as where 65 million people live work um shop enjoy their Leisure Time something as complex as that cannot be planned top down it’s as simple as that um planners do not have the right incentives they don’t have the right knowledge um they don’t they are not

Able to no fault of their own but they’re not able to innovate experiment try new things in a way that are um a prop a vibrant evolutionary Market can and of course they constantly suffer from political interference um which has been a you know whether that political

Be interference be we don’t want your sort of jobs which I have been told um by a plan I don’t want to embarrass chiester but you know there we go um um I don’t want to um you know and I won’t actually um one town I won’t I won’t EMB

There was one town where the chief planning officer very nice man you know Ed Highly Educated hardwork dedicated man dedicated to his plan wanted us to build a shop on one side of midst sorry did I said um well now that side of midon was the side that the motorway

Wasn’t on um and the catchment from that area 20 minute catchment from where he wanted us to build this shop was about 15,000 people build the other side of town close to the motorway and it went to about 100,000 but he wanted us to build where people

The wrong way the wrong end of the oneway system and on a piece of land wait for it that wasn’t going to be available for five years CU currently was a station that’s where we were going to put our shop and although that sounds

Absurd that is um that is I think a just one example of how planned economies don’t work and how planners aren’t able to function and I say that with no criticism of planners who in my experience actually worked terribly hard and tried to do a good job but are

Basically trying to do do the wrong thing um you know um so the alternative and let’s just start with the scare story because the scare story is that the alternative to a ruthlessly planned system is a free for all freefor all concreted over end of Britain you know

It’s we’re all going to basically be garages and for courts um because there’s only one alternative to planned economy and that is a free-for-all laer fair but of course um that’s not true there’s you know free markets are not lay Fair they can be regulated they are

Regulated by both the rule of law and specific regulation for those particular um markets and it works extremely well um and before I move on to my suggestion as to what how this you know the sort of principles of this sort of system might might look like I want to start want to

Address one very uncomfortable thought and it’s one that I think we all need to square up to and that is that when you buy a home with a beautiful view you don’t buy the view it’s not yours all that land around your house you buy your house your

Property you don’t buy you know you happen to have a view for 20 miles you don’t buy that view now I think you have the right as a homeowner someone who lives in a house to insist that other people around who build around you don’t do so in such a

Way as to undermine the value of what you’ve bought but that’s not quite the same thing as controlling and having a say in everything that goes on in the land around you and that’s the way people feel in the village in which I live there is a campaign called save our

Sheep Fields it’s not our sheep Fields belongs to some poor man who wants to just build a few houses on it but there’s a save our sheep field um that has not only appropriated what’s best for that field but has appropriated the ownership of it as well it’s our sheet

Field um and what would be a great development with six new homes on it is being ruthlessly opposed by people whose the value of their home won’t be affected one iota buy it and the problem with the system where home owners and Property Owners take unto themselves the

Rights of ownership of all the land around them and begin to talk as if they should control what is built the problem is that it is hugely regressive because in essence what we’re doing is we are putting the power of Greater property ownership in the hands of people who

Already own property we’re transferring wealth from those who don’t own property to those who do from young to old from north to south um and that is incredibly dangerous so my view is that we are going to have to have a a big debate and

I my guess is that it will be the students in this University people who are studying today who will see a solution to this this is there is no quick fix to this but we need to have a proper argument a proper debate about what sort of system we have and my view

Is start at the other end start where all markets start start that the land that you own you can build on but there are principles to to what you’re allowed to do in the same way there are principles to how you drive your car or how you produce food or how

You make clothes and those PR the two key ones in my view should be the love your neighbor principle it’s an old one but a goodie um and that is that you can’t build anything that will damage your neighbor’s wealth and secondly the carry away principle that if you’re

Going to build new houses shops um and offices you need to pay for the infrastructure to get it to the point at least where it’s no worse than it was before layer on top of that a regulatory environment with building standards that ensure that the houses are built to the

Right quality that don’t damage the environment that are safe and suddenly you have a framework for a dynamic Market that is driven by genuine needs and those people who understand them best which are the people who put their hands in their pockets to do the building but which is controlled in such

A way that it doesn’t damage the legitimate interests of all the other people who’ve invested in their homes and workplaces and it strikes me that if we start there we can build a much better system than one that starts with a flawed engine the 1947 act just doesn’t

Work repeal it start again come up with something much much better that achieves the aims that we can all agree on and on that bombshell I’m going to finish thank you okay W um we’ve had wonderful presentations um abute Cornucopia um and we haven’t got a lot

Of time so I proceed the following we will have three questions from the floor we will have three questions online uh and then we will have all the authors respond to whichever question they want to answer and to each other and that’ll take up the remaining time so uh who wants

On look at that um chapion orange make it a question and short and say who you are okay um my name is zakar LSC alumnas um as you rightly mentioned there is a clear market failure um in the housing I wonder if the system um isn’t

Functioning as it set out to be um as in as it should be if you look at housing allowances for example doesn’t the current government stand to benefit if it gives them out um assuming that it may or may not be the one to pay it afterwards okay thank you that the back

Johnson uh the government thanks the government recently abolished section 21 now what impact is this going to have on both sides the private and the the renters that’s what I want to know what impact is going to have for abolishing section 21 lady here yep sorry are you a

Lady no sorry it’s just ch sorry excuse me yeah sorry couldn’t hear said uh yeah sorry Charlie Al down from bed uni a quick question regarding uh primarily uh do uh Professor Chester’s point on development around Railway networks uh or more Railway hubs um you uh and also

Where we’re building wrong um you seem to say uh that because we’re developing on this sort of Cheaper land um that is outside of the more metropolitan areas that’s an inherent market failure uh how would you say that interacts with sort of the arguments by uh Dr I think I

Forget his first name but uh Dr obman that we should be buil primarily targeting our house building into cities out other than London in order to make uh to drag them up to productivity value rather than keep dumping uh stuff into London uh also I’m really sorry I

Couldn’t ask a question of you Lord wolston uh it was a wonderful lesson in oratory okay now Martin you’re going to read can we answer those three first and I think we have forgotten my questions okay right from online we have Kate uh circular economy adviser from

Norfolk uh she asked how can we make sure that the buildings if we do get permission to build on land the buildings that we build are sustainable uh given the amount of building that could take place um Oliver RR in the guardian uh sorry this question is from Jeffrey Thomas

Oliver rain white in the guardian reported on the state of Britain’s housing Uh current um and Jeffrey asks who exactly will build high quality house hous is what do we have in the labor market and the last question from online is a former counselor John cartilage uh

Who opines his time as counselor trying to uh get buildings made on green belts and other pieces of land and he asks how can councils resist pressure from their electorate in order to get buildings put for you thank you so much now so many issues raised by the speakers and by the

Questions um why don’t we can we just proceed in this order stepen going first okay um and and you you’ve got I’ll be brief you’ve got maximum three minutes I’ll be brief um I’m not sure I picked up all the questions but um uh just just

To answer a few of them U there’s a question about speak into the mate there was a question about section uh 21 so this is about um reforms to the private rented sector and the circumstances in which landlords can um retake possession and the positive thing about that of

Course is the security that it is to tenants but very very briefly um it won’t of course in itself do anything to increase housing Supply and the um the main theme of this um session is the crucial importance of increasing housing Supply if you want to do something about

Housing affordability that may take time um but ultimately whether it’s uh private rated housing or or housing for sale we need more H houses um there’s a question about uh London versus other cities um my own view is that we need to be very careful in in a leveling up or

Other context in thinking in sort of what I call um Zero Sum gain terms um I’m sure as Paul PA has pointed out that there would be important gains to London’s economy from allowing the right sorts of development uh in and around the the the capital but that doesn’t

Rule out taking measures to do things in our second tier cities which several reports in the past few weeks have shown are lagging behind in productivity terms and there are important things that you might be able to do whether it’s through intraurban transport improving the density of housing provision to enable

Those cities to earn the sorts of glomeration economies that we see in London and thus improve their productivity performance and the living standards of the people who live there on the quality of U built housing I would just note that with land prices accounting so much of the price of a new

House um um inevitably inevitably there are pressures to keep down the construction costs house builders can’t do anything about the price of land so you know there’s a terrible tension there if there was more housing Supply if land wasn’t as expensive I suspect there would be beneficial effects on housing

Quality um and then um there was a question finally a question about how do we how do we persuade the electorate um to support the building of more houses um as several people have said there might be something here about what is the relevant electorate there too

Much too many decisions taken at to local a level might um a roll for um uh more upper tiers of local government enable uh future the interests of future Generations better to be taken into account for example but I’ll stop there thank you okay I’ll try and say a little bit

About um the quality of Housing and I’ll say it because of my time with a house Builder I think I’ll say two things to start with one is nobody really or we certainly didn’t set out to build really rubbish houses but actually building if you’re building 14,000 houses a year the

Truth is quite a number of them will have problems and they’ll have problems because it’s really hard to keep an eye on every contractor and make sure they put the screws in the cupboard that they’ve then put something in front of and you can’t check that they’ve done it

And sometimes things just go wrong I mean Paul talked about trophy Architects but sometimes um it it simply goes wrong so on the worst development um that Taylor wimpy ever built was designed by Richard Rogers it was under the 60 pound housing thing that John Prescott produced we tried very hard to build

Houses for £60,000 and I think we spent about that much again remediating them but so I think it is possible to build for good to build for good quality I’m slight and I and this but it does depend as others have said on getting the total package right and this may mean arguing

Down land prices and how we tackle that issue is extremely difficult and I don’t think I have a good answer I do however think that it it can be done with more regulation because if you have regulation in place about how many affordable houses you have to build how

Many um points you have to pin in for electric cars how much you have to provide for climate change and all the builders need to stick to it it does get passed back into land prices land prices are not just something that god-given they are the result of a

Bargain in the system and actually I think it’s a regulatory failure that land prices have risen so high thank you okay yeah I’m only GNA just two questions first of all um oh very good I’ve got a mik man here um so first of all the the question about quality um I

Think this is really really important because in any Market my view is the only thing that really ensures quality is competition because if you got no choice on the house that you buy then you know you you buy whatever whatever’s there but if there’s competition why would you build a rubbish quality house

Because you’re not going to sell it so the only you know it all comes down to the same principle that highly competitive um free markets that are properly regulated produce better quality product at lower prices because the best people produce great quality because that’s their job and if they

Don’t um as you’ve all seen with my suit today if they don’t produce great quality um like my is great quality then they won’t look as good as I did tonight and then they won’t get offs back to the lsse so the market is working secondly um Dr oberman’s um point about really

What we need to do is to get people to live where he wants them to live I find that I find that really very odd um but it’s one that sort of pollutes the whole economic debate okay just just checking because I’m sorry doctor apologies but the idea

That somehow we’re going to improve the productivity out of people outside land or indeed of the country by forcing people to live places where that is not their ideal choice is entirely wrong faed and we’re much better to say let the people go to the productivity rather

Than try and force the productivity to go to the people because the latter won’t work sorry doct thank you so much now Paul you you you started this off started yourself all roing decades ago uh you’ve had some comments from uh members of the panel uh

And you’ve had some questions uh give us your final words of wisdom well I’ll try to do that for their wisdom um I mean I’ve heard some very interesting and a lot of what has been said tonight I agree I think it was you Simon that pointed out that one of

The outcomes of our system is a huge transfer of real assets to people in the southeast of London and away from people in the north build you know we can already see we’re building more houses in in the north per capita it’s much easier to build houses in in the north

Than it is in the South because there’s less nism in the north because they want the jobs to build the houses but it also means that if you lose your job in harleypool your feet are nailed to the ground because you cannot possibly afford to move to somewhere in the

Southeast where there may be jobs so it really does restrict people’s life chances by being not able to move to areas where there’s more opportunity so the major moment at which people move is when they go to university and then they can stay and they do

So we should be building more houses in Manchester we should be building more houses in leads but we should be buing far more houses where they’re least affordable so give a map of affordability the house price to median income ratio and Ma tells you where you should be building houses because that’s

Where they’re scarcest and people can’t afford them um now I just come back to this question about uh pressures from councils now I I was just asked actually by Steven or he he he sort of fabricated me into writing a a paper comparing International planning systems uh I have

Some sympathy what youve said about planning and the all part we’re almost at the area in moment of breous R where you fed bread to pigs because it cheaper so you know you find land you can build a house on and barn it and it’s not 1.5

I pounds of hectare if you’ve got no planning regulations if it’s no obligations it’s 40 million pound per hectare now that is a price Distortion of a most extravagant type because of the rationing of something which is in scarce Supply so but there is pressure and our planning system is is very

Distinctive because it’s ours we think of it as a natural given god-given thing it isn’t it’s a this very strange construction that was the result of the 1947 act which I agree with you is deeply flawed and the result is that the only voice is the local voice sensible

Planning systems like in France a have a rule-based system so in France I wanted to double the size of my house in the countryside so what did I did I read the local plan it was a democratically elected plan three years previously saying what you could do setting down

Design guides Etc I read the plan 14 days later I had planning permission because I was asking for something that plan said I could do think of the cost saving that that generates but it’s just as Democratic and it therefore eliminates a huge amount of the process

In the system so first of all we need a rule-based planning system again the French or the German or planning systems it’s a it’s a reciprocal process you have National obligations on local planning on local communities and local communities then their views have to be taken account in the National planning

Guidance so it’s a two-way process which is legally enforcable whereas in this country it’s a it’s a it’s a verbal contract which isn’t worth the paper it’s written on nobody knows the government has the mppf they don’t have a clue whether it’s actually being followed or has any influence on what

Local planners do or don’t do because there’s no way of knowing and there’s no comeback if they don’t whereas in France you have you have a an expectation that there’s conflict of interest between local people who bear the costs of development and The Wider interests of

The general public or the region or the country which says we want affordable we want more houses so they’re more affordable so you have to you have to reconcile these interests and our system only reflects the local interest so local people as you were explaining have

A veto almost over what happens and it doesn’t matter whether it’s actually within the plan I remember a wonderful case of a a proposal to build a 17 story block of uh Flats in in in nearis cottage it’s but one of the few places in North London that isn’t I regulated

And was perfectly within the plan but the hamston society said no so it didn’t get built so we have a discretionary system where half the time if there is a plan and only 33% of local authorities even have a plan now because uh the present government has taken away any

Real uh pressure to have a have a plan and they’ve also taken away any pressure to allow houses to be built by abolishing the affordability uh test because it was a mutant algorithm apparently um so so the people you know in Seven Oaks my example you you had

Mainst but 7 Oaks doesn’t want houses so they don’t have a plan so if any house is built in Seven Oaks they can blame whiteall because it’s only going to go through on an extremely expensive appeal process 10 years after the original application at huge cost so so why do we

Build crappy houses which we do you know our houses are increasingly rather like cars in Cuba they’re held together with old bits of ticky Tack and tape and they’re very very leaky here they’re obsolete because we don’t build new houses new houses are environmentally much better than old houses which comes

Back to the point that came from Norfolk the sustainability of our old housing stock is appalling the uh the the carbon footprint of our housing has increased from 13.5% of total carbon emissions in this country 30 years ago to nearly 20% now because we don’t build new modern energy efficient houses stop

There have you said everything you want to Say well I think this has been an amazing evening and uh the topic is is so important and it’s been wonderful to have uh such a range of views from such expert people um so thank you all for coming all of you online um and don’t go away and do nothing keep

Agitating I think this is an area where public opinion could really have some influence uh and it it’s just beginning to come into the political debate so please go at it go go Harris your MPS about this issue Harris anybody you know ministers journalists um work on it if you’re

Choosing a thesis topic I mean this is an incredible important issue for the well-being o of the people of this country um so please worry away at it like a terer thank you all very much