HC 1526 Communities and Local Government CommitteeWritten evidence from Policy Exchange

Policy Exchange was founded in 2002 by Michael Gove, Nicholas Boles, and Francis Maude. It has taken a major interest in housing and planning since 2005 and published a series of key reports on housing and planning such as Unaffordable Housing; Fables and Myths in 2005–07. These reports tried to cut through many of the misconceptions around housing and planning policy (eg only 10% of England is developed, why confusion around concepts like brown field meant highly valuable urban greenery being destroyed).

These earlier reports sought to consider how a different system might look with a more localist and compensation based system, trying to see how and why other countries’ planning systems worked better than the UK’s. We deeply believe more homes and more attractive development for people to live in should be a core goal of policy for all parties.

Policy Exchange returned to the subject with Making Housing Affordable in 2010. This won Prospect Magazine’s Think Tank Publication of the Year and attempted to show why social housing should give greater weight to employment in allocations. It also set out the full cost of our housing crisis to society and government, whether that was the rising wealth inequality or £20 billion housing benefit.

It also showed why most of our housing problems link back to a single problem – our dysfunctional planning system. The planning system in the UK very substantially undersupplies land for housing. By doing so, it is the main cause of our high housing and, internationally speaking, commercial space costs.

Planning is not the only reason housing is expensive; there was clearly a credit bubble from at least the mid-90s, whilst we have a particularly dysfunctional house building sector. Policy Exchange will be expanding on this in our forthcoming report, Cities for Growth. This will set out in more detail why our planning system fails as well as how it has created the current problems with our house building sector.

The NPPF is a key part of the DCLG’s plans to reform the planning system. Policy Exchange’s views continue to be that Government intervention in planning should be limited to where there is real market failure, that compensation should flow to localities where development takes place, and that people should have a real say over development.

October 2011