The Adam Smith Institute. and London YIMBY, have released their submission, written by London YIMBY founder John Myers, in response to the Government’s Planning for the future White Paper:
The Planning for the Future White Paper presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reform England’s antiquated land use planning system.
The United Kingdom has failed to build enough housing near to where people want to live, reducing job opportunities, and driving up housing prices. This is because of a land use system that fails to allow sufficient high quality development.
Fixing England’s planning system would help address overcrowding, intergenerational unfairness and level up access to good jobs. It could even boost GDP by more than 20% in a decade, allowing the United Kingdom to overtake Germany’s economy.
Politics is the critical obstacle to more housing: understandably, many homeowners do not want unsuitable new developments near them. If the Government is to succeed where previous reform efforts have failed, they will need to emphasize win-win solutions that ensure more supply of housing while maintaining public support.
The White Paper has rightly concluded that transitioning to a more predictable and efficient rules-based system – with locally-selected zones of different kinds – can reduce the costs of development, and that strengthening design quality can help build popular support for a good supply of homes.
The targets proposed in the White Paper are highly ambitious but many concerns are unwarranted. Widely published estimates exaggerate many local requirements by failing to account for constraints proposed in the White Paper, such as for green space or historic buildings.
Nevertheless, concerns that targets are being forced on unwilling local councils combined with lessened local discretion risk sparking opposition. If the reforms are to be sustained, it will be essential to combine them with policies to build public support for building more houses.
If the Government wants to increase the supply of housing in high price areas while maintaining public support, they should:
Introduce street and block votes: Street or block residents should be able to set design rules to ensure high quality and, if they choose, graceful densification. This is as mooted in the White Paper. If a street opts for greater density, all the homeowners can benefit from a capital gain in the value of their property. That would ensure building is win-win for residents, enabling the Government to reach ambitious targets. This approach should be immediately implemented in a number of pilot areas with high prices.
Enable land value tax on future large sites: Allowing councils to gradually introduce a land value tax on future large sites would give councils and local people more confidence that targets will not be missed for reasons beyond their control. The tax could be assessed by the ‘Harberger’ method, where the landowner sets the value of the undeveloped portion of the site but with the proviso that the local authority can purchase the land at the price stated. That would also help test a potential reform for the future abolition of SDLT.
Publish target allocations: Publish indicative allocations of the proposed new local housing requirements, showing how they will be adjusted for constraints such as green belt and historic properties.