Time limits on landbanking aren't going to work

Making some move against the idea of landbanking may or may not be good politics. A fairly damning criticism is that it’s not going to work. For a producer of something is going to want to have a stock of whatever it is to last however long it takes to gain new stock of that something.

If it takes 6 months to get steel to make cars from then a car manufacturer is going to want to have a 6 month stock of steel. Or, at the very least, a continual and reliable series of orders at least 6 months long. The more variability - risk - there is to an order not arriving then the closer to the 6 month’s stock, rather than just the order stream, they will decide upon. We’re seeing this calculation right now as car manufacturers do find out more about the time lags and variability of chip supplies. And yes, they are saying that they’ll probably have to hold higher stocks given the increased unreliability of supply.

How long does it take to gain planning permission to build a new development? Yes, sure, the time count from the final and completed application to pass through the system is measured in weeks. But the actual time from the decision to try to build here to gaining that permission to build here is on average some years - 5 years by several estimations.

Therefore builders seek to have a 5 year stock of planning permissions. Given the unreliability of the system in definitely delivering any specific application.

The way to reduce the number of approved but as yet unbuilt houses is to increase the certainty of the system delivering on any specific application and to reduce the total time taken to do so. Builders will then, entirely naturally, reduce the stock they desire to hold.

Another way of putting this is that builders are not trying to manipulate the market by landbanking, they are manipulated into landbanking by the planning bureaucracy. The solution thus lies in the bureaucracy, not the builders.