There's an interesting paper published recently by Prof Henry Overman of the LSE, entitled "The UK Housing Crises". His conclusion is simplicity itself: "The real solution is straightforward: build more housing." Some things, you think, you shouldn't need a professor to tell you, but it should help to beat down all the plausible special pleading one hears.
What interested me most in the paper is the light shed on the politics of it all, and the current move to 'localism'
Increasing the supply of housing
The under-supply of housing in the UK has been a long-term problem, which the previous government was unable to tackle effectively. Labour was slow to recognise that something needed to be done about the planning system. Once the problem became clear, top-down regional plans were introduced, which tried to force local authorities to build more housing.
These plans were very unpopular with local authorities in parts of the country that needed more housing and were quickly abolished by the coalition government. The new ‘national planning framework’ intends to replace the topdown system with more ‘localism’ and a package of financial incentives to encourage development – with a target of 240,000 new homes to be built each year (see Nathan and Overman, 2011).
These reforms should be welcomed for a number of reasons, but the government may yet regret the immediate abolition of regional plans
He welcomes this move to localism, but is he aware of how completely local authority identified representatives of local opinion take no notice of the incentives to allow more housing in their areas?
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