How to think about housing and planning
This chapter discusses how politicians have been deceived by faith-based, ideologically predetermined anti-planning arguments from free-market think tanks such as Policy Exchange. While ministers were fixating on the planning system as a barrier to house building, they neglected to do the obvious thing: build houses. In time, the ‘war on planning’, a steady stream of reports supported by seminars, newspaper articles, and private lunches and dinners, began to have an impact. Planning came to be widely blamed for the country's failure to build enough homes and, more generally, for holding back economic development. The chapter then looks at four related issues that help explain why a new approach is needed: the rise and fall of council housing; the economic model of the big developers; the rise and fall of the ‘property-owning democracy’; and land values.