You go Angela, you go girl!

Apparently Angela Rayner is going to do something sensible about Britain’s housing woes:

Labour bid to ‘bulldoze’ the Home Counties

How excellent. That Green Belt around London - there are other versions around other cities and areas too - means that it is impossible to build houses in the most valuable area to build houses in the country. This is an obvious nonsense. The very definition of wealth creation is moving an asset from a lower valued - say, golf course, parking lot or green field - to a higher valued one - say, underneath a house. So, given that we like being richer, wealthier, we should do that.

We have a law against doing that, the Town and Country Planning Act 1947. Specifically and deliberately enacted to stop people doing exactly that wealth creation. The underlying reasoning was that if those rolling acres got built upon then the proles might have decent housing that proles would like to live in, where proles would like to live. Of course that cannot be allowed now - only the haute bourgeois should be allowed such a freedom.

So, good.

Then the not so good:

Labour has been accused of seeking to bulldoze through the Home Counties as Angela Rayner prepares to unveil the biggest overhaul of planning rules in a generation.

The Housing Secretary will on Thursday unveil a new National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) intended to pave the way for thousands of estates across the South East.

Ms Rayner’s proposals – which will include building on the green belt around major cities such as London – are expected to go even further than a draft version of the framework, which had proposed building 69,000 houses a year in the South East.

Because maintaining the national planning will retain exactly the basic problem here, the national control of planning. The answer is simply to not have planning control at that national level. Blow up the TCPA and successors. Proper blow up - kablooie.

People should be allowed to build houses where they think people would like to live. Further, the houses built should be of whatever type the builders think people would like to live in. At whatever density that is and so on. At which point market forces will very quickly zero in on the production of housing of the type, location, size and greenery of what people do wish to live in.

The only complaint we’ve got about Ms. Rayner threatening to concrete over the Home Counties is that she’s not, in fact, threatening to allow people to do that. She should.

Tim Worstall