We refuse to see this as a threat or a problem

Front page headline in The Times:

Rural areas face threat of 400,000 new homes

We refuse to see this as a threat or even a problem.

Start from the very beginning. With any economic resource we desire to put it to the use that produces the most value. Moving something from a lower to a high valued use is the very definition of wealth creation.

We also think it a useful attribute of a planning system that it enables people to do what they want where they want to do it. Yes, there are limits on this, those third party effects. But those effects must be significant - more than harming the view out the window - for them to overcome that general presumption in favour of people being able to maximise their utility.

So:

The revised planning formula requires that more homes are built in areas where house prices are higher, because property costs are seen as a proxy for where people want to live.

That strikes us as a very useful proxy. If £5,000 worth of agricultural land can be turned into £1.5 million of building plots then that is value addition. We also agree that willingness to pay is a useful definition of the value being added. We can’t do that with an acre of Snitter, up by Morpeth, we can with parts of Surrey. Building in Surrey thus adds more value.

A stark illustration of the effect of the new plans can be seen by comparing the demands put on Boris Johnson’s London constituency and Rishi Sunak’s North Yorkshire seat. The analysis suggests that the prime minister’s seat of Uxbridge & South Ruislip would need to accommodate 1,220 homes a year, ten times as many as the chancellor’s constituency of Richmond.

We’re not sure we entirely share these tastes but then the point of an economy, a civilisation, is that each gets to maximise their own utility according to their own determination of it. If ten times as many desire to live in Uxbridge than the Yorkshire Richmond then that should be the distribution of the housing.

The claim in that headline is that housing people would like to live in being built where people would like to live is a threat. We think it’s the point.