We disagree entirely with Berkeley Group's Tony Pidgely over land hoarding and planning uplift

This is entirely the wrong solution:

One of Britain’s top housebuilders has backed radical reform of property laws to reverse the decline of home ownership by ending the hoarding of land and triggering a new wave of development.

Tony Pidgley, the founder of Berkeley Group, said landowners and developers should be forced to share “planning uplift” with local authorities.

The move would upend the residential construction industry but Mr Pidgley said the system is “in dire need of reform” to meet demand for hundreds of thousands of new homes.

“We need a central body that buys land, awards planning permission, then passes on the returns to the local community,” he said. “The whole of society should capture that value – it’s about decency.”

This makes no sense to us at all. The aim should be that there’s no planning uplift, not that the gain is shared communally.

Start back at the beginning. We have an artificial restriction upon who may build what, where. That restriction leads to there being value in having the permission to build something, somewhere. The value comes purely and solely from that restriction.

The result of this is that people have to pay very much more to live somewhere than they would without that set of artificial and entirely human, bureaucratically, created restrictions. We wish it to be cheaper for people to live somewhere. Thus we should be killing off the price rise caused by the restriction by killing off the restriction.

Shuffling around who gains that value created by the artificiality of the system doesn’t change that people have to pay more to live somewhere. That is, communal planning gain doesn’t solve our actual problem. Reorganising the system so that we issue more planning permissions, their value thus declining, would solve our problem.

Thus the answer is to issue more planning permissions until there is no planning gain at all. Or, as we’ve noted a certain number of times before, blow up the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 and successors.

Arguing about who should get a slice of the pie when there shouldn’t be a pie to be shared at all isn’t dealing with the root problem here. Why don’t we actually try to solve the thing instead of shuffling it?