A lovely example of the costs of bureaucracy

Of course this isn’t what Phineas thinks he is telling us but it is true all the same:

The new strategy could be especially useful in helping support more ambitious housebuilding on tricky small sites. In London a “small site” is defined as a piece of land that is under 2,500 sq metres, about the size of nine tennis courts. These plots are too modest for major developers to take an interest in, so often just sit empty. However, the potential to better use vacant small sites is enormous. The architecture practice RCKa estimates there is enough land stuck in small sites to build 850,000 new homes in the capital alone. It recently conducted a survey of Lewisham identifying space for up to 9,700 new homes across more than 3,000 potential small sites.

Why are such “small” sites not viable for the large developers? More pertinently perhaps, why are there not small developers who choose to build on sites of such scale? Because the bureaucracy - that interminable fight through the local council to gain planning, the demands for most of the profit to arrive as social housing and on and on - means that no small scale builder can survive. It’s necessary to be operating at a large scale to pay for all of that. You simply have to be a large organisation, building at scale, to be able to afford the army of your own bureaucrats necessary to fight the state.

So, abolish that bureaucracy and small scale builders will reappear and those 850,000 homes will be built.

850,000 houses missing in London alone. That’s what the current planning system denies us all. Probably a good idea to fire the bureaucrats and have the houses instead.

Tim Worstall