Why planning permissions lapse (and how Shelter should be ashamed for opposing planning reforms)

The former Denholme Velvets site

The analysis by Shelter and the House Builders Federation shows that 40% of homes granted planning permission in England go unbuilt. This equates to more than 380,000 homes between 2011 and 2019.

Sadly Shelter's Director, Polly Neate, goes on to say that this finding proves how the problem isn't planning but rather that government isn't giving her friends in the social housing sector billions with which to build houses. And, yes, there's an argument to be had about funding for social housing, but for the UK's biggest and most influential housing charity to be opposing planning reform is both shocking and unforgivable.

More interesting though is to understand why so many planning permissions lapse. I'm sure the anti-capitaist mob will be quick to point at the big housebuilders but this really isn't the case. We know there's an issue with build-out rates on larger housing sites but it's nonsense to say that companies who exist to make money from building houses are going to let expensively obtained planning permissions lapse. So the problem lies elsewhere.

Let me give you a couple of examples of sites that obtained planning permission but it subsequently lapsed leaving the houses unbuilt and the sites empty. And in doing this perhaps we'll remember that this is just another example of how our land market is distorted by the planning system.

Cullingworth used to have a railway station but the line closed in the late 1950s and the land and sidings at the station were sold off. The Cullingworth land was bought by a man called Billy Webb who proceeded to run his chicken slaughterhouse and pet food businesses from the land. In the 1990s the pet food business closed and the chicken factory was sold off leaving redundant buildings on the site of the old sidings. Eventually, the site was cleared and planning was sought and given for the development of 80 or so houses plus a care home. The applicant wasn't a developer and had no intention of building these houses - all they sought was a permission so as to make the site more attractive to a buyer. No buyer came forward (maybe the new owners wanted too much money) and the permission lapsed. And, of course, under the planning system that Shelter's director thinks isn't a problem, there's no guarantee that a new application will be granted permission.

This brings me to a second example. The A629 Keighley to Halifax road passes through the village of Denholme and, as you head out across the high moor from that village there's a site that used to be a textile mill owned by a company called Denholme Velvets. When the mill closed it's owners applied for permission to demolish the buildings and build some houses. This permission was granted, the owners demolished the mill, took away the valuable Yorkshire stone, and looked for a buyer. This was around the time of the financial crash so, surprise surprise, no buyer came forward, the site remained a derelict mess and the planning permission lapsed.

The mill site is in the green belt meaning that when Yorkshire Housing (one of those social housing companies Polly Neate likes) applied to build some affordable housing on the cleared space where the mill once was, they were refused - by the council, on appeal, and in a subsequent amended application. The refusal was because the new housing would spoil the openness of the green belt. The land (it's the picture at the head of this post) sits there growing buddleia and fire weed among piles of rubble while we're told there's a shortage of affordable housing.

Around Bradford you'll find dozens of sites with a similar history - old industrial land cleared of it's valuable stone and left to grow weeds because either the owner wants too much money or else building houses is simply not viable give expectations about decontamination, services and highways. I know of one social housing developer who, having built a mixed tenure estate in inner city Bradford, found that the market housing part of the development wouldn't sell. Despite zero land costs (the social housing company owned the land), the cost of building a family home was higher than similarly sized or even bigger homes in the area were priced on the market. Those homes are now rented out.

Time and time again assorted NIMBYs tell us that we should build on these 'brownfield' sites before a single turf of their precious green fields is dug. And shamefully, people like Polly Neate, indulge such NIMBYs by promising that houses for poor people would be built on these brownfield sites using lots of lovely government cash. The poor people don't get to live in nice suburban communities with good schools and great local amenities, just as before they get dumped in poorly serviced, over-dense inner city estates away from the nice places where the NIMBYs (and probably the executives of big charities like Shelter) live.

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The problem is the planning system not the house builders

Pundits are still getting it wrong about why we need planning reform. Here's Liam Halligan in the Telegraph:

The fundamental problem isn’t, though, as the Government suggests, “a lack of land with planning permissions” – for around 80pc of residential planning applications made are already being approved. The real issue is the ever-lengthening delays between permissions being granted and houses actually being built.

The galling truth is that the big, powerful developers which hoover up most new planning permissions have long staged a deliberate go-slow, making higher profits overall by producing fewer homes so prices keep rising. Unless ministers acknowledge and tackle this massive market failure, our chronic housing shortage will remain – with all the social and political fallout that entails.

This is, with added Sunday papers polemic, the position of the Local Government Association. It's not planning and the planning system but the 'oligopoly' of national house builders that are the problem. "We approve 90% of planning applications", say the LGA so it can't be down to us (missing the point that between 1 in 5 and 1in 10 of applications get refused - a huge argument for having a fall back location, a landbank, to develop).

Halligan then recognises the actual problem (which isn't the big house builders):

We need to free-up parts of the greenbelt – much of which is urban scrub. Far from being “concreted over”, it has doubled in size since the Seventies – and now covers 13pc of England’s land mass while housing, including gardens, accounts for little more than 1pc. This white paper flunks that challenge too, preserving all greenbelt land.

But then Halligan suggests that it's the influence of developers that has meant a half-baked set of planning reforms when it's the concern about the political effect of a major green belt reform that held back the government's radical instinct. When Halligan says a planning permission should be a "contract to build", all he does is create a situation where we get no planning applications because the risk of loss is too high. It's already true that thousands of potential homes don't survive intial contact with the planning system and never reach the point of applications, let alone permissions. And this situation disproportionately affects smaller developers because the system of allocations under local plans prefers large sites, the sort that have options for development from the big housebuilders.

Even the current reforms, which preserve much of the green belt, face objections from the usual set of NIMBYs - from local councils, from the CPRE, from MPs representing suburban England, and from the planning profession. The depressing thing is that we pretty much know the reason for England's unaffordable housing - urban containment or, in piece of gloriously bucolic branding, the green belt. Wherever in the world we look, we find that the restriction of land availability by urban containment results in unaffordable housing. We see this in California, in Sydney, in Auckland, in Barcelona and in London. Where there are looser restrictions (or none) - in France, in Germany (except for Berlin which is run by idiots) - housing is more affordable.

So long as we retain a system where the supply of land for housing is constrained by regulation and allocated through politically-driven local plans, we will have unaffordable housing, an oligopolistic development system and a lop-sided market. We have (and won't be getting rid of) a local plan system that, since its introduction in 2007, has favoured large allocations so as to reduce NIMBY objectors. Remember that every local planning authority is seeking to reduce the number of homes they need to build and to minimise the number of sites so as to limit the negative political impact of housing development. These decisions are wrapped around with nice words about infrastructure, sustainability and partnership but, in truth, if you can deliver your borough's housing needs through a dozen sites rather than 50 then you will do so because you'll have eliminated 80% of the NIMBY objections.

Instead of creating a bogeyman for the NIMBYs - "it's those wicked bad housing developers to blame" (how many times did I hear that during my 24 years as a local councillor) - folk like Liam Halligan should be urging support for the government's reforms. It's true they don;t go far enough, it's true they probably won't fully resolve the problem of build-out, but they are a big move in the right direction and represent the first baby steps towards a properly functioning land market, the first requirement for a housing market that meets needs.

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Two Cheers for the Great Planning Reform 'White Paper'

 

It was billed as the biggest reform of England’s planning system since the 1947 Town & Country Planning Act. I’m not sure it quite lives up to this billing but the proposals in the ‘White Paper’ are substantial and do represent a huge change to the way in which the system operates. Crucially, by delivering certainty to developers, the proposed changes represent a big shift away from the current tendency to resist development. There is still a fundamental problem that the government has chosen to dodge – how land markets operate – but there are a lot of good proposals that make for a positive change:

1. Simplifying the local plan process is probably the biggest plus for the ‘White Paper’ – this process takes too long, is based on voluminous and often contradictory analyses, and is too detailed. I am taken with the suggestion in the ‘White Paper’ that Examination by a Planning Inspector could be replaced with a local self-examination – this would potentially reinforce the position of the local planning authority in the new system and avoid the sort of Mexican stand-off we’ve seen, for example, with the Sevenoaks local plan
   
2. Granting permission in principle on allocated sites not only gives certainty to developers but it also reduces the power of NIMBY groups to prevent or, more commonly, delay development. I remember a planning committee chair describing the refusing of a permission on a site where he knew it would get granted on appeal as a ‘fine’ for the developer’s (in his opinion) bad behaviour. Permission in principle prevents this sort of arrogance from planning authorities.
3. Anyone who has waded through a local plan or two will be struck by the lack of maps. Trying to find a digital, searchable document showing the boundaries of Bradford’s ‘green belt’ is a real challenge. It will be a real step forward to have local plans presented on an online, searchable map rather than in a suite of hard to manage documents uploaded to a website.
4. Reducing the need for public consultation on individual planning applications (it’s allocated to a zone and therefore we know, ceteris paribus, whether the principle of development is established) allows public consultation to focus on the principles in the plan rather than the marshalling of often NIMBY objections to development
5. Streamlining environmental assessments further reduces the risk of delays and this is helped further by proposals to speed up appeals and to reduce the tendency of politicians to push the decision to a quasi-legal process so as to avoid blame for the decision

These are big changes but not fundamental alterations to the nationalised system created by the 1947 Act. The most significant change in the ‘White Paper’ is the proposal for just three zones – growth, renewal and protected – rather than the bewildering list of classes, designations, and allocations under the current system. And while the principle of zoning is a good one, the government has chosen to include an essentially arbitrary land use designation, ‘green belt’, within its description of ‘protected’. This maintains the myth that ‘green belt’ exists to ‘protect’ something rather than the more prosaic truth which is that ‘green belt’ exists to prevent urban extension.

National policies (from flood protection through habitat concerns to National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty) will mean that a considerable part of England’s land area will fall automatically into a ‘protected’ definition. Adding ‘green belt’ seems to have been done to fend off possible objections from suburban MPs  - the words of Philip Davies, MP for Shipley could have been uttered by a hundred or so other MPs: “My main priority is to stop Bradford Council from constantly concreting over the Green Belt in my constituency”. Not that (at least judging from the view out my window) this concreting is happening but MPs know that there are votes in “Save the Green Belt” (and votes to be lost by not saving it).

The problem is that, having ducked the ‘green belt’ issue, government then recognised that the planning system would still act to prevent land markets from operating efficiently, especially in areas where property values (and land values) tell us there is a large unmet demand for housing. It isn’t a secret that most of these areas are those with extensive ‘green belt’. We have retained the related myth that urban containment acts to increase the reuse of urban land when we know that this isn’t the case. The ‘Create Streets’ idea that modest densification is possible on a street-by-street basis is very appealing on paper but, as anyone who has looked into highways adoption will know, getting the necessary agreement is unlikely verging on impossible.

Planning authorities under the new system may need to zone some ‘green belt’ as ‘growth’ but, as with the current system, the allocation will be precisely matched to the housing need assessment with the result that there is no downward pressure on land values – the places remain unaffordable (and affordability is only addressed through either subsidy or social rent). Meanwhile other authority leaders roll out a different myth: that the barrier to brownfield development is the lack of government funding (“If Government fund the viability gap on brownfield developments they will find that many development opportunities will be unlocked on unused brownfield land all across the district”) when the problem is a lack of actual demand for housing.

There is a related problem in that the government proposes flexibility on design codes running the risk that this will be used to prevent certain forms of home (e.g. small homes, flats or large family homes) rather than to facilitate the ‘beauty’ that the government is so keen on. Design codes are an excellent idea but not (as we have seen with US zoning systems) when they are used to exclude minorities, prevent affordable housing, and increase development costs.

I doubt that the changes in the ‘White Paper’ will address the affordability crisis because the land market will remain dysfunctional in both high demand and low demand areas. It will make for a more reliable development control system and will reduce the power of NIMBY groups but, for all the talk of ‘build, build, build’, we will still have a system that puts the interests of current suburban fringe residents ahead of housing for a new generation.

 

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Our planning system (not development rights) reinforces poverty and supports the wealthy over the poor

 With the government announcing a further relaxation of planning controls (or an 'extension of permitted development rights' as it is usually described) there has been the entirely expected outcry from a host of organisations. Bodies representing councils, planners, architects and even the always reliable NIMBY lobby have leapt to the defence of people not having rights to develop their property.

The decision to end the need for a planning permission to extend homes upwards, to replace redundant commercial or industrial property with housing, and to convert empty retail premises to homes has been variously described as "disgraceful" (RIBA) and "a serious error" (RTPI). Alan Jones the president of RIBA even went as far as to exonerate the planning system of any failings:

“There is no evidence that the planning system is to blame for the shortage of housing, and plenty to suggest that leaving local communities powerless in the face of developers seeking short-term returns will lead to poor results.”

This opposition to planning liberalisation (hardly surprising from a set of people so invested - financially and intellectually - in the existing systems) has been given a little fuel by the publication of a report commissioned by the government and undertaken by the planning departments of UCL and Liverpool University. Of course, it's worth stressing the words 'planning department' here when considering how to read the report but it does criticise some of the impact from the previous liberalisation of development rights, usually dubbed "office-resi". This report, we're told by fans of a more intrusive planning system, explains how extended permitted develoment rights (PDRs) resulted in substandard housing, a new generation of slums.

Interestingly the actual report stresses that the situation is "more nuanced" than shown by "some previous research" and "newspaper reports". The authors conclude, having visted 639 schemes under new PDRs and previous change of use planning permissions, that in terms of exterior design, amenity provision (parking, open space, etc), links to transport and deprivation levels there wasn't much difference between developments under the two planning regimes:

Looking across all categories of change of use and all 11 local authority areas considered, rates of making exterior alterations, such as new windows, doors, balconies and cladding, are broadly similar between planning permission and PD schemes. In terms of noticeable additional amenities, such as provision of parking and open space and facilities for refuse and post there are no obvious differences between planning permission and PD consented schemes overall. There was also little difference between PD and planning permission units in terms of energy performance or council tax banding (and hence potential property value). In terms of access to services, transport and green space, and in terms of general level of deprivation within a neighbourhood, there is overall little difference between PD and planning permission schemes.

The only substantive difference lies in 'space standards' - put simply, developments under relaxed PDRs delivered significantly smaller homes. There's a clue in the report as to why this might be the case when they observe that "...there is still significant variation between the percentages meeting the standard between each LPA." Local market conditions are as much to do with the development of homes with reduced space standards as the extension of PDRs (although the latter has made this easier).

I have quite a lot of sympathy with those arguing that these developments amount to a new generation of slums (although I would go further and argue that this applies also to developments that go through a full planning process) but the reason for this is to do with land supply not the planning permission system (plus, to a more limited extent, the impact of changes to the benefits system in respect of single people under 35). In and of itself the lack of planning 'controls' doesn't automatically result in this sort of development - indeed this is what seems to be the case in the study.

The two factors that are more important that the PDR regime (with the location determining which is more significant) are: (1) the continued lack of land supply for new housing as a result of the local plan system, green belt and other constraints; and (2) the benefit regime for those under 35 that sets a cap at the Local Housing Allowance (LHA) shared accomodation rate.

Taking the benefit effect first, we can see how this contributes to hidden homelessness (sofa surfing, lodging, etc) and street homelessness. There is too little available to rent at or near the LHA shared accomodation rate. In many places this will be confounded by young people in work who also cannot find affordable accomodation so remain as de facto 'hidden households'. The reason why places like Bradford city centre have been popular for those seeking to meet this need is that they have a surplus of poor quality office accomodation, very low yields on commercial property, and a collapsed housing market. While provision under relaxed PDRs doesn't resolve the difficulties that this local environment might create (crime, drug abuse, street drinking, deprivation and poverty) is does meet an otherwise unmet need - one that the existing planning system has struggled to meet.

The impact of too little land supply is, however, the primary contributor to our housing crises. This isn't to say that other factors (job insecurity, finance availability, market velocity) aren't also important but that five decades or more undersupply of land meant too few homes being built, higher house prices and the emergence of an often problematic private rental sector. Bear in mind that the choice for a potential tenant of a sub-standard bedsit built under relaxed PDRs isn't a lovely spacious flat but an equally sub-standard bedsit in a converted four-bed semi (and remember that most small HMO conversions are allowable under existing PDRs).

Where these structural elements are absent from the housing market then the relaxing of PDRs would create far fewer problems. It is notable that the UCL/Liverpool report shows developments in wealthier areas like Richmond and Waverley are more compliant with space and quality standards perhaps because the flats are either for market housing or else that they are meeting a wealthier part of these areas' unmet housing need. The problem isn't the regulations - and when the head of RIBA thinks there's no evidence showing the planning system contributes to housing shortages, we really do have a problem - the problem is the general lack of housing supply either as a consequence of other government regulation (eg the housing benefits system) or else as a result of local government severely constraining the land available for development.

The right criticism of the government shouldn't be to defend a planning system that has prevented us meeting housing need but rather to argue that liberalising PDRs should be done in the context of liberalising land supply. Small, poor quality housing is the inevitable consequence of our current system. We see it in how HMOs are squeezing out family housing in inner suburban London. We see it in the extent of flat-sharing, sofa surfing and temporary accommodation. And we see it in the problem of illegal lets and the abuse of sub-letting.

All of these problems either exist because of, or are made worse by, the chronic shortage of housing and the planning system's inability to meet that need. The voices at the LGA and among the assorted planning vested interests attacking the government's efforts to meet need are doing so by defending a planning system that actively prevents the provision of homes and the meeting of housing need. If these organisations were arguing that it's foolish to liberalise PDRs without green belt reform and having a vastly increased land supply, then they might have a point. Instead they're arguing for the status quo - a current system that damages economic growth, fails to respond to need, protects the environment poorly and, above all, reinforces squalour and poverty by supporting the interests of the wealthy over the interests of the poor.

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Sorry Network Homes, land seizure is not the solution to the lack of land supply

Well I guess it's a start that some people involved in housing are talking about land.

Land is becoming an ever-bigger barrier to new supply. Land makes up over 70% of the value of existing homes (up from 50% in 1995) and is a high input cost when building a new home.9 As the cost of construction varies relatively little across the country, when we talk about unaffordable market homes, in many ways we are discussing the high cost of land in some areas. This is at the heart of the housing crisis.

So we find asserted at the start of a report by Reuben Young and Kayleigh Pearse for Netwrok Homes. It really shouldn't come as a surprise to make this discovery or to see, as the authors do, that the operation of our land market is central to resolving the problems within our housing markets. The authors also recognise that land value is not evenly distributed because there are "...fewer homes in high demand areas than there are households who want to live in high demand areas..."

The demand for housing land is still determined largely by the market - land in Bradford city centre has low, even negative, value whereas land in suburban London and exurban Surrey is eye-wateringly expensive. Supply of the land, however, is not determined by the market but by the planning system. So it's curious that the authors, while acknowledging the impact of planning ("...large swathes of greenfield land around cities are politically determined undevelopable, and planning permissions everywhere are rationed by a political approval process...") then choose a solution that ignores supply constraints.

Allow local councils, Homes England, and the Greater London Authority to compulsorily purchase land at existing use value. This would be instead of the much higher ‘hope value’. This will let public bodies cheaply assemble land for housing which would be challenging for the private sector to do because of fragmented ownership or other difficulties. It would also deter speculation on land, because landowners would know that their land could be bought without consideration for making a future profit. The result would be more homes, and cheaper land for everyone.

It all sounds lovely doesn't it? The greedy landowner doesn't make huge gains from that "hope value" and benign local councils reap the benefit. Of course those public bodies would have to seize the land (let's describe compulsory purchase properly) in order to build the homes. Now, leaving aside the potential for all sorts of essentially corrupt political shenanigans, the whole process still requires that same local council to make housing land allocations through its local plan. Our authors glibly state that all this will give a "...greater incentive for landowners to bring forward land at lower values..." - essentially local councils wave a big stick at landowners with threats of seizure. Again the potential for political games and even corruption is legion but the fundamental problem - policy constraints on land supply - remains in place.

There is no need for these land seizure proposals. If you want to reduce the value of housing development land then the way to do it is to make more of it available, to resolve the problem with those "..large swathes of greenfield land..." in places where demand for housing is high. The proposal here simply dodges this problem - there's still the political issue of where housing goes regardless of whether or not you give the local council powers to seize the land. We are back to cramming more (affordable) houses onto land that doesn't have much value because its not where people want to live but is where it's politically possible to allow the houses to be built.

The resolution of the land price problem doesn't come by artificially making the land expensive then artificially making it cheap again, the resolution lies in taking from politicians the power to decide which land is or isn't available for development. And that power sits with the planning system not the market for land.

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Build, build, build (just not in our back yard, obviously)

Create Streets

Build, build, build was the cry. Another one of those incontrovertible three word slogans beloved of political copyriters:

Boris Johnson has announced the most radical reforms to our planning system since the Second World War, making it easier to build better homes where people want to live.

Such exciting times. After all, where people want to live is easy to discover - look at Zoopla or Right Move and track those places with the highest house prices. All those lovely, clean, safe Home Counties market towns, the Cotswold villages nestling in that glorious countryside, spa towns like Harrogate and Bath. These are the places where people "want to live" and planning reform will take away the barriers to people being able to do just that - hallelujah!

Then, in what passes for detail, we see the truth, "build, build, build" isn't about houses in places people want to live, it's about cramming more houses into places where people don't want to live. The "most radical planning reforms since the Second World War" amount to just four things, none of which add anything to development land supply let alone housing land in the home counties or rural Wessex:

1. Changing use classes so you can switch from being a shop to a cafe without needing planning permission (with a long list of exclusions obviously)

2. Extending 'permitted development' rights to more commercial and industrial buildings allowing them to be turned into housing (adding to the office-resi rights that are helping create a new generation of high rise slums)

3. Allowing commecial propery to be demolished for housing without needing planning permission (which is fine but you do wonder where the commercial premises will be when every business park in Surrey is housing)

4. Letting us build an extra storey on our house so long as the neighbours don't object

We're promised, in addition, a pile of government cash to "free up brownfield sites", "to deliver affordable homes" and to cover up the reality that when it boils down to it the rent's too damned high. Plus a 'policy paper' on further unspecified planning reform (it was going to be a White Paper, then a Green Paper, now a Policy Paper - next week it'll be a consultation).

This is, to put it mildly, rather underwhelming - even the £12 billion for affordable homes only gets us 180,000 (say the government - at current build costs I make it 100-120,000 but there you go) new houses. A whole load of sound and fury accompanied with frissons of PR joy from the think tanks and housing organisations that stand to benefit from some of this government largess.

We aren't getting meaningful planning reform because (read the Tweets and press releases of Conservtive MPs, regional mayors and council leaders) to do so means facing up to the barriers that this system presents. For the MPs it's a simple matter, they can march their local residents up to the top of the hill crying "save the green belt" knowing that, when the housing gets approved, it won't be their fault. A moment's thought and honesty from those MPs and they'd have told residents that we need the housing, the land is allocated for houses and that's what you'll get.

You can't reform planning because there are 150 Tory MPs who will oppose any reform that threatens the precious green belt (the same goes for all the other parties by the way this isn't just a Tory fixation). And any planning reform intended to deliver "better homes where people want to live" has to put an end to at least some of the urban constraint that the green belt represents.

So "build, build, build" will spend a lot of money, will tinker with the rules so it looks like "radical reform", and will oil the wheels of a planning and housing system that doesn't work. Young people in London, Bristol, Bath and Brighton still won't be able to buy a nice home with a garden like their parents and grandparents. Worse, their employer now expects them to work half time from home when that means balancing a lap top and some paperwork on a cheap IKEA side table shoved in the corner of a bedroom in a shared flat.

In a recent survey over half of working age residents of California's Bay Area said they were thinking about leaving the area (probably the world's least affordable housing market). Without meaningful planning reform this is where London is headed. If build, build, build means 'OK build some houses but over there on that crappy industrial site not near me' then it's not planning reform and we'll still have a housing crisis when the cash pot's empty.

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A few thoughts on why planning reform is hard, contentious and probably won't happen

There is a welcome and long overdue attention to the need for Britain to have a planning system that works. The government has said it wants to return to "first principles" and there are hints that those near to the top of government recognise that planning systems act as a drag on the economy. Various think tanks have published reports looking at planning reform (and, in a related way, how we might fix Britain's housing problems). We can categorise these reports and their recommendations as follows:

1. Those who don't see the planning system as the problem but argue it's about 'financialisation' and the lack of 'social' or 'affordable' housing. These problems can be fixed through a mix of massive government subsidy for building those social and affordable homes, modern rent controls, and regulations to limit 'speculation' and foreign investment.

2. Those that recognise the problems with the planning system but reject its wholesale reform in favour of tinkering with the local plan approach ('we need more strategic planning') and the granting of land seizure powers to government or government agencies. A feature of nearly all of these proposals is 'land value capture' where local government or development agencies seize development land so as to 'capture' the value uplift consequential on allocation for housing in a constrained system

3. Those who see densification as the solution, preferring the maintenance of strategic constraints on land supply (such as green belt) combined with greater flexibility in development control. Some advocate a now traditional Le Corbusier 'cities in the sky' model while others want a new tenement model dubbed 'create streets'. Critically this approach focuses on house prices and rent levels plus the quantum of house building (regardless of factors like social infrastructure) rather than land supply and land value. It seems to be popular with a lot of government technocrats.

4. Those who see planning reform at the national level with the need for a wholly different planning system. The argument is often that this isn't deregulation (hinting that somehow this is bad) but "correct regulation". Most commonly these approaches want to replace our current system with some sort of zoning - Japan is a popular model.

5. Those who reject the premise of a planning system - the 'first principle' that government should be the arbiter of how landowners use their land. This is an argument for deregulation that replaces the presumption that you need a planning permission with an assumption that unless some sort of valid protection that can't be mitigated exists then the landowner is free to develop.

This typology is limited but I hope it helps understand why any planning reform debate is fraught. We can also appreciate that the planning system is hated and distrusted by nearly all those who have to work with it - local councillors, developers, homeowners, builders, environmentalists and housing organisations all loathe the experience of dealing with the planning system. Yet, at the moment when changes are proposed, we see the same people leaping to the system's defence.

At the heart of all this is something that really matters but that we don't ask often enough: Why do we have a planning system? What is its purpose? We sort of shuffle our feet, um and er a bit before, usually with some platitudes, we say something along the lines of "well you have to have some sort of system don't you?" This, of course, doesn't help very much at all even when the intelligent person um-ing and er-ing can cite Ebenezer Howard or quote Jane Jacobs. There's a sort of emotional attachment to the idea that cities, highways networks, towns and even the countryside cannot operate well without a benign planning system.

The biggest justification for planning, of course, isn't about Ebenezer Howard or Jane Jacobs (let along Le Corbusier with his 'human robots' systems) but rather the commonplace desire not to let your neighbour do something you don't like. You'll recall from your geography lessons at school ideas such as 'ribbon development' and 'urban sprawl' were presented to you as problems, things that (in some unspecified way) were bad and needing control. You might, if you studied geography beyond 'O' Level or GCSE, have encountered Central Place Theory and that tidy, Germanic model developed by Hitler's favourite geographer, Walter Christaller. Geography needed to be ordered, structured and directed so the bad things (sprawl especially) didn't happen - hence a consistent and state-directed planning system would decide where the houses go, where the factories go and so forth. These vital development questions would in the parlance of planners be 'controlled' or 'managed' rather than left to something as vague and nebulous as the market.

Three thoughts dominate modern planning (other than how to get the system to actually work):

1. The Howard model of development, that everything happens at the level of community and that therefore we should 'plan' those communities using an ideal model

2. Jane Jacobs' commentary on city living with its focus on density, 'eyes on the street', walkability and (in a contorted adaptation of her ideas) that cities should be planned and structured as activity-filled, dense environments

3. Having a hierarchical strategic 'national' or 'regional' plan where the need for residential, commercial and industrial space is mapped in a manner lifted pretty much straight from pre-war German and Italian (plus a little bit of Soviet) models.

If we return to 'first principles' it has to be in order to challenge these three presumptions - planned communities, densification and strategic direction - plus the mistaken idea that it is the state's place to decide on how land is used. We must ask instead how we get closer to the ideals of strong communities, walkable places and an effective spacial map without in doing so making it more difficult for the market in land and development to operate efficiently. Plus an urban environment that reflects how people actually live. We should note, in thinking about this system, less regulation always benefits the economy but that we may have other considerations (safety, environment, heritage) that might not survive a purely market-led approach.

What is clear, however, is that the objection to 'sprawl' is largely down to emotive snobbery rather than any negative effect from that sprawl. Today, the first objections to suburban development in England are environmental: either 'you're concreting over green fields' or 'you're promoting a car culture'. To this we can add the sudden recognition that wildlife exists (it's amazing how suburban fringe residents suddenly become incredibly keen on orchids, bats and badgers when there's a housing development), and tearful paens to a lost bucolia for fields and hedgerows.

For the urban planning elite, nodding to their architect friends, there's a persistent 'suburbia is naff' theme within the preparation of plans. There's a frisson of sexiness to talk of 'city living' and London and New York based housing thinkers get excited at Edwardian terraces and Brownstone row houses - 'we can build like that again, real streets with dense housing, it'll be great'. Except that this forces on people a lifestyle (no car, flat living, no private outdoor space) that frankly they don't want.

Others trawl the world over looking for places to emulate. Fans of zoning as a planning system wax lyrically about Japan's system but ignore some core geography in doing so (Japan doesn't build houses to last a long time because Japan has lots of earthquakes and Japan has a declining population making its numbers of empty properties very high). We'd be much better looking at Houston or Ile de France if we want a zoning system that operates well in places with a growing population and a less problematic geology. But Houston and Paris, of course, have vast and distant suburbs featuring dispersed employment, poor public transport systems and a car-dependent culture. Even without mentioning the dreaded word 'sprawl' we can see that, while these systems work, they don't work in a way that fits the predetermined, dense city model that the zoning fans want.

The main problem with planning seems to be that planners want to direct people towards different behaviours (walking not driving, commuting to CBDs not fringe business parks, living in apartments and using parks rather than having a house and garden). So long at this is the manifest purpose of the planning system, then not only will it fail to support economic growth and fail to meeting housing need but it will also continue to be very unpopular with everyone except the planners.

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We need to plan for cars not against them.

"...condemning their residents to car-dependent lifestyles."

Just about every bit of published thinking by transport and planning organisations contains some version or other of the statement above. We are told that the car is a uniquely awful thing, that the idea of personalised and individual transport is bad, and that we should create places that don't require people to have or use a car.

The snippet above comes from a report by "Transport for New Homes" that looks at the government's plans for what it calls Garden Villages. Now I've some sympathy with criticising these mini versions of a new town because it seems an especially expensive way to deliver local and social infrastructure when all of it is already available in existing small towns and villages. But I'm not joining into the "cars are bad" message that dominates much of what passes for transport and planning thought these days.

There are, when it comes to thinking about cars, two dominant thoughts from these planners: firstly that car infrastructure creates new demand for car journeys; and secondly that car infrastructure takes up too much space. I'm quite purposely setting aside the environmental arguments since we have an established route to eliminate carbon emissions from vehicles over the next thirty years. Coupled with the continued improvement in the efficiency of existing engine technology, the car really doesn't represent a major contributor to carbon emissions over the long-term.

It's long been noted that, ceteris paribus, the creation of new road infrastructure does not, at the system level, eliminate congestion. It is strongly argued, therefore, that new roads create traffic. What is never asked is why this happens. After all, most journeys (by whatever means) are done for a purpose - to get somewhere, to visit something or someone, to deliver something. We can, therefore, assume that the new traffic on the new road represents activity that would previously have been foregone because the congested roads acted as a disincentive. Moreover, moving from congestion at a capacity of X to congestion at a capacity of 2X represents a huge contribution to the economy (on the assumption that most of the things being consumed as a result of the previously forgone journey have an economic value) not to mention people's liberty.

When people argue against new infrastructure because it would generate new traffic, they are in essence arguing against economic growth, choice and freedom. Such folk prefer to suppress activity purely on the argument that the very fact of cars on a road is a bad thing. Yet people's preferred method of travel beyond the very local (or the very distant) is to use a car. The private car provides flexibility, storage, responsiveness and, perhaps more significantly, tends to take us from where we are now directly to where we want to be at the end of the journey. The purpose of not allowing new road infrastructure is to use the suppressed demand to try and force people into using other forms of transport. Not only is this illiberal but there's very little evidence that it's stated aim of modal shift is met.

Alongside this suppression of demand and use of congestion as a lever to force modal change (without, it might be said, any appreciation of how much non-car infrastructure would be needed for this to make any difference), is the idea that cars take up too much space. Some of this is a reflection of road networks in dense urban environments, you'll all have seen the cute infographic shoing how much less space bicycles and buses use compared to the monstrous evil that is the motor car. But it's also a reflection of the familiar NIMBY arguments against development - "you're concreting over the countryside", that plaintive cry of NIMBYs opposed to roads.

The land cover atlas of the UK is produced by Sheffield University tells us that the UK's highway and rail network covers just 0.05% of the nation's land area. This is just slightly more than the area given over to fruit orchards. For a further comparison, 9% of the UK's land area is peat bog (these are very important, bigger and better carbon traps than the rainforest). We think that roads take up a lot of land because we spend a lot of time on those roads. Next time, however, you fly (assuming they've not sopped us doing that too) into the UK have a think about what you see out the window. It isn't a vista of an endless built up environment but rather one utterly dominated by open country side - 92% of the UK is not urban, industrial, highways or rail. The idea that cars take up too much land is, quite simply, an urban myth.

The anti-car ideology that dominates transport and urban planning is extremely damaging, against the economic and social interests of the population, and based on a false proposition that we can easily switch from the car to other modes of transport. This isn't to argue that we shouldn't invest in infrastructure for rail, bus, cycles and walking, but rather to suggest that our transport investments need to reflect the actual expressed preferences of the public (not from polling but from their actual daily consumption behaviour).

There are many reasons why Garden Villages are a lazy planning policy cop out but "car-dependent lifestyles" aren't one of them. Much more important is dislocation from existing social networks and the creation of new community infrastructure rather than making better use the infrastructure that's already there. By increasing the catchment of local centres (villages and small towns) we improve the sustainability of those places - sensible urban extensions inproportion to the existing community can achieve this whereas the Garden Villages envisage (even if they fail to deliver) a new centre with new social infrastructure. But attacking these developments purely on the basis that people who go to live there will prefer to use a car is wrong and perpetuates a damaging, one-eyed, public transport obsessed transport planning environment.

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Let's build some prefabs and call them "Homes for Heroes" (Boondogglers gonna boondoggle)

Hey, let's build some prefabs

Nothing like a good boondoggle is there!? And right now the best way to get your boondoggle off the ground is to play the "Essential Workers are Heroes" card:

An alliance of housing associations, offsite manufacturing firms and many others across the property sector has launched a call to the private, public and charitable sectors to join together to build low cost Homes for Heroes, to thank our heroic essential workers who’ve kept Britain going during the coronavirus outbreak.

The proposal, from G15 (part of a group of housing associations and construction businesses who plan on solving the housing crisis without changing planning policy), is to build 100,000 prefabricated homes for the "NHS staff...care workers, teachers, refuse collectors, delivery workers and many more" who have helped us through the pandemic. Splendid stuff.

So what's wrong here? Well the first thing is (as wise readers will have spotted), those "essential workers" (we'll use the official boondoggle term from now on - "heroes") are already living somewhere and are in work. These, for all their heroism, are not society's destitute.

So what's going on here? What is this coalition of housing landlords, construction companies and consultants trying to achieve? For sure we need more houses - homes for all sort sof people not just heroes. Since 1997 we've had a planning and housing policy run by NIMBYs with the result that, particularly in London, the sort of professional and managerial folk who 30 years ago stood a fighting chance of buying a house can't do so any more. And let's be clear, this isn't a result of the market failing but entirely down to the stupidity of government.

Between 1997 and 2010 the area of England covered in 'green belt' doubled and, even worse, new national parks, world heritage protections, environmental protections and wildlife desigantions arrived. Couple this with cheap money and governments prepared to pander to relatively wealthy potential buyers and you get the situation where most graduate, professional, hard-working folk look at the housing market and retreat in despair to paying an inflated rent to a private landlord.

Into this space gallop our "Homes for Heroes" champions - "we'll stick lots of prefabs on land owned by local councils and rent them to you cheaper". And that's great until you realise that all this is only possible because the taxpayer is coughing up the subsidy tht allows for cheap social rents. Those heroes get to live in "good quality affordable homes which are well designed, energy efficient and digitally connected". Even better the homes will be "equipped with private outside areas and access to high quality green spaces". Elysium-on-Thames (except for the fact that this all reads like the sales blurb from a park homes company).

This is a boondoggle, a proposal designed by businesses that make money from rents or building homes with the express purpose of securing government grant to secure those rents and that building business. And, to achieve this, the group making the pitch has made a specific appeal to public sympathy for "heroes", those essential workers who've helped us through the coronavirus pandemic. Forgive me for finding this exploitative and unjustified.

If these organisations really want to do something about getting more and better housing, maybe they should ask how we got here in the first place. How the indulgance of suburban NIMBYs by politicians has resulted in one of the world's tightest urban containment tourniquets, the London Green Belt. We hear nothing from these supposed housing campaigners about making it easier for anyone - not just big housing companies with fat government grants - to build houses. I guess we shouldn't be surprised - that would kill the "suck up to government" business model after all.

So forgive me if I don't cheer for these "Homes for Heroes". It's a boondoggle, a bald attempt to exploit the current crisis to extract grant from government made by organisations with an interest in either building or managing the resultant housing.

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