Housing and Land Use Policy

The Office of Fair Trading today announced that it was to conduct a review of the UK's house-building sector. One of the aspects of the market it will be looking at is:

how land that is suitable for development is brought through the
planning process...and...how land with planning approval is
converted into new homes.  read more »

In one of those odd coincidences, Land Value Taxer colleague Tony Vickers was last week having a few problems adding an article to the 1909 website and eventually he forwarded a quote he had just discovered to me by email to put it into an article.

I hadn't thought that the opportunity would come around so soon to do so, but it transpires that Ming Campbell is today giving a speech at a Joseph Rowntree Foundation conference in which he will announce housing proposals, including:  read more »

Let's face it, the 2012 Olympic Games, as far as the main site in east London is concerned anyway, are less about a now once a century chance to host the paramount global sporting event - no longer the amateur affair it was when London last hosted them of course - than they are about regeneration of an area of inner city that should never have been allowed to remain run down and uncared for for as long as it has.

And, because such regenerative development rests on the willingness of deep-pocketed capital to see the opportunity, dig deep and purchase land to develop, they need encouragement, often publicly funded encouragement that their investment will be a worthwhile one. And so the greatest asset in the Olympic village will not be a stadium or a veoldrome but Stratford City Station, part of the multi-billion pound development of the Channel Tunnel high speed rail link.  read more »

Following on from the Barker reviews into housing supply and planning, a new quango (actually they call it a think-tank I believe but it's government funded so I'll call it what it is, another quango), the National Housing and Planning Advice Unit, arrives on the scene today with a manifesto for failure, or so it would seem. Its report, highlighted in the Guardian article - Britain faces 20-year house boom that will split nation - and similarly in the Telegraph, omits any mention of land values. And if it doesn't get to grips with the land question, it is bound to fail.

Jock outlines a new form of investment structure that could take the worry out of financing income producing public asset improvements, replacing privatisation, stock transfer and PFI deals with true "Open Capital Partnerships".

Lib Dem blogger Tom Papworth of Liberal Polemic, inspired by the poverty of a debate on housing policy on Newsnight, advocates Land Value Tax.

http://tinyurl.com/2zm8np