Gonna tediously respond to some of these bits as well
- Govt should establish new Development Corporations to buy land and then contract housebuilding to developers.
Can literally do this already. Don’t often because it involves the public sector assuming a lot of development risk.
This would mean housebuilders losing their ability to speculate on land prices and would instead win sites based on build quality.
Ehhhhh only if all the land used for housebuilding is done through this DC-controlled method. Which seems unlikely, but presumably ties into the next point:
- Public authorities shd be able to buy land at close to existing use value.
Incredibly legally (and ethically) fraught concept. Existing use value for farmland is very little - about £5k an acre - are we saying the state should be able to take the livelihood of whomever works that land for the equivalent of a few years wages?
Currently, landowners are entitled to sell at ‘hope value’, the amount that it might be worth if e.g. luxury housing were built on it.
This is sort-of correct, although I will repeat my point from a previous thread that while most housing is marketed as “luxury”, most housing is bog standard and aimed at normal people.
Plus, see my above point - the price of farmland for development represents existing use + lost future earnings + a premium. The level of premium to the landowner can be controlled - it’s what pays for things like affordable housing and schools in new estates - but lots of local authorities just simply don’t have their shit together on this stuff, so they miss out.
Also worth pointing out a lot of this sorta tried after the war, and didn’t work, and was repealed incredibly quickly.
- A new agency should be formed to help the public engage in planning decisions, giving social tenants more control over plans for new housing.
These are two separate points - presume the report doesn’t conflate them (??)
On the first one - councils expend huge amounts of effort trying to engage people in planning. It doesn’t work very well. People mostly engage when they want to oppose an individual application, but the nature of a plan-led system is that a lot is decided before the application comes forward. If they have ideas to get people to engage at the plan-making stage, I would love to hear it - cos the entire profession is working on that and not getting very far.
making more info on planning applications publicly available.
They’re already publicly available. Often indecipherable tho, but it’s a complex area.
