No, really, markets do sort themselves out

You'll recall the terrified bleating from the usual suspects over the way that the supermarkets were sitting on all that land that could be used? As we recall said bleating the first set of allegations were that they had the land banks to make sure that other supermarket chains couldn't build stores in an area. Our reaction to that was, well, issue more planning chittys then. More recently the story moved on to how the supermarkets were sitting on all that land that should be used for housing instead. To which our reaction was, well, issue more planning chittys then. We're really not short of land to build on in this country, we're only short of land someone is allowed to build upon.

And what is happening now?

Britain’s supermarkets are building on just 6pc of the land they control across the UK, underlining the problem they face with undeveloped sites as the industry battles tumbling sales.

New figures show that the pipeline of new grocery stores in the UK is 46.61m sq ft, the equivalent of more than 1,000 acres. However, just 2.8m sq ft of these new stores are actually under construction.

Building work on stores has fallen by 20pc compared to a year ago as the “big four” supermarket chains – Tesco, Asda, J Sainsbury and Wm Morrison – suffer from tumbling sales and profits.

This means that 43.81m sq ft of land across the country is sitting unutilised by grocery retailers according to property agent CBRE. This land is either subject to a proposal for a new food store, or planning permission has already been granted.

The supermarkets simply do not want to build more stores on that land that they own. That land will, therefore, in the fullness of time (given the time and effort it will take to change said planning chittys, this system is not known for its efficiency) be developed to some other purpose, most likely that housing that was being called for.

And all being done without a politician or a bureaucrat making a plan, without considering social usefulness and entirely cocking a snook at the desires of our betters in the Great and the Good.

We the peasantry have decided that we're not all that interested in more supermarkets. So, therefore, there won't be that many more supermarkets. Markets really do just sort themselves out, we get supplied with what we actually want for that's what we spend our money on, what we want.

Well, markets do sort themselves out if they're allowed to. Who's willing to bet on the campaigns against those now won't be supermarket sites being turned into the housing that people insist we need?

Right question, wrong solution here

Given that it is Christmas Day an opportunity for us to play The Grinch. There's a certain amount of truth in the analysis here, although not a great deal. It's just the solution proposed that is wrong:

Some people in private rental accommodation are having to cut back on food and heating to cope with rising rents, according to research by the National Housing Federation (NHF).

The organisation, which represents housing associations across England, said soaring rents and high deposits were making life increasingly difficult for those locked out of homeownership.

In a survey of 1,183 private tenants it found that 41% of those with children had struggled to pay their rent at least once. Across all tenant households, 31% had been in difficulties.

More than a quarter of the families surveyed said they had cut back on buying food to meet their housing costs, and just under a quarter had cut back on heating.

Well, yes, we're sure this happens. As it also happens that some in social housing cut back on heating and or food to afford their rents, as those in owner occupied housing cut back on both or either at times in order to pay mortgages or maintenance bills. This is simply a fact of life for anyone at all facing income constraints. As all of us do of course. Our desires are unlimited and our incomes, as with the more general point about economic resources, are limited.

It is, of course, possible to insist that the general cost of housing (of any and all types) is "too high" and thus propose solutions to this perceived problem.

The group called on the government to provide more affordable homes for families on low and middle incomes. Its chief executive, David Orr, said: “We have too many renters just keeping their heads above water, who are being kept awake at night and suffering from stress over the worry of paying the next rent bill.

“The government needs to come up with a bolder, long-term plan for housebuilding so that families across the country can find the homes they need, at a price they can afford.”

And a bold new plan would also be a nice idea. But that call on the government "to provide" is the wrong way to go about this. For it is the government, as we've said innumerable times before, with the Town and Country Planning Acts, that is the problem. Those acts artificially restrict the pieces of land upon which housing may be built. Thus housing, as a result of those restrictions, is more expensive than it would be without the restrictions. This is true of any form or sort of housing: owner occupied, rental, social, "affordable" or otherwise.

And the solution is obvious: loosen those restrictions on what may be built where.

As, of course, happened in the 1930s when the scale of housebuilding was what actually dragged the country up out of recession.

That would be a nice seasonal present, would it not? The government solving the housing problem by the government stopping doing what the government has done to create the housing problem?

When Sam Bowman and George Monbiot agree then we know the End Times are near

Rains of blood will obviously follow, cats will lie down with dogs:

Sam Bowman, deputy director of the Adam Smith Institute, said: ‘The housing shortage does not exist because the private sector doesn’t want to build new homes. The problem is that developable land is so scarce because the planning system makes it so.’

This is clearly and obviously so, as we have demonstrated in these pages many a time. But Sam's not the only person to have got the right end of the stick here. Much to everyone's surprise, George Monbiot has managed it too:

The Scottish government might address the speculative chaos that mangles the countryside while failing to build the houses people need. It might challenge a system in which terrible homes are built at great expense, partly because the price of land has risen from 2% of the cost of a house in the 1930s to 70% today.

Except that it's not quite the price of land which has risen. That's some £10,000 a hectare for reasonable agricultural land these days and that's suitable for 14 dwellings (according to the density rules that the planning system insists upon). That just ain't 70% of the cost of a house. It's land that has the planning permission attached to it that allows you to build 14 houses on it that costs the vast amount: it's the cost of the chitty, not the cost of the land.

But with that slight correction, yes, we are all on the same page here. Housing is expensive and it's the planning system than makes it so. Thus, if we desire cheaper housing then we need to reform ("reform" here being a synonym for "blow up with extreme vehemence") the planning system.

And given that the End Times must indeed be approaching given this convergence of views perhaps we can also hope for a murrain that strikes NIMBYS*, BANANAS** and politicians***?

* Not in my back yard people

** Build absolutely noting anywhere near anywhere people

*** A third and virulent plague upon our society.

Geoffrey Lean's still not getting it about housing

It's becoming somewhat tedious to have to continually correct the misunderstandings that people have about the English housing market (and yes, it's really an English problem, not a British one). Today's example of just not getting it is Geoffrey Lean in the Telegraph:

You hear it all the time, in the mouths of developers, ministers and commentators. The reason for building over unspoilt countryside is that the nation is short of land for housing, thanks to an unduly restrictive planning system.

This mantra drives government planning policy, and – under its pressure – councils have set aside sites for up to 700,000 new homes on greenfield land. It is also the rationale for allowing, nay encouraging, speculative building that is threatening to swamp village after village across the country: its “physical harm” – even one of Downing Street's favourite MPs, Nadhim Zadawi of Stratford-upon-Avon, who sits on the No 10 policy board, has warned – threatens to become “the defining legacy of this Government”.

But it's wrong, plain wrong. For a start, developers are sitting on enough land for 400,000 houses which have already been given planning permission. That's enough for nearly four years at the present much too low rate of building – or two years of what would be needed to meet a realistic demand.

Yes, that land bank. So, how long does it take to get planning permission (by which we mean, from a standing start to actually being allowed to break earth on the project)? Two years? Four? It's most certainly not 6 months, is it?

Great, so, we would expect any responsible business to have enough, in stock, of its basic raw material to cover the lead time necessary to create more of that basic raw material. If it takes one week to get more steel then we'd expect a car plant to have, somewhere around and about the place, a week's worth of steel. So, given that we have a constipated planning system we expect builders to have a stock of their basic raw material, land with planning permission.

That these land banks exist is proof, not that the builders are hoarding, but that the planning system suffers from that constipation. Everyone would be a great deal happier if they didn't have to have vast amounts of capital tied up in such land.

Then there's brownfield land. This week a report by the Campaign to Protect Rural England concluded that there is enough of it in England alone for at least a million homes, enough to meet five years of demand, or to build that terrace from London to Cairo. What is more, it is constantly increasing as factories, hospitals and other institutions are merged or close down.

Ah, yes, brownfield land.

Developers far prefer building on greenfield sites because they make bigger profits, as they do not have to clear – and at times decontaminate – the land.

Er, yes, that means that brownfield land is more expensive to develop. To the point that, for some sites at least, the clean up costs are so high that even at current house prices a development proposal is entirely uneconomic.

More than that, what is actually being complained about is not the volume of housing available (although obviously these two are intimately linked) but the price of what is available. Meaning that yes, we want to build a great deal more housing. But we're not going to bring prices down, the aim and point of the plan, if we insist that only the most expensive to develop land can be used.

Finally – the property company Savills has just reported – central and local governments and the NHS are between them sitting on enough for two million homes, a full decade of supply and enough for a terrace from London to Caracas. Some 600,000 of them are held by the very central Government that has been so loudly trumpeting the scarcity of land.

That might well be true. But think through the implications of what is being hinted at here. Government is so inefficient, so cack-handed, that it's sitting on £200 billion's worth of development land (£100k a plot seems reasonable, at least for the SE) and yet the suggestion is that such fools should be tasked with planning the allocation of housing land.

It's doesn't work as a logical assumption, does it?

Should governments compensate taxis for allowing Uber?

An interesting thought. Governments have, over the years, privileged taxi providers in a number of ways. They've also imposed costs upon them: in the US things like taxi medallions (which can become very valuable in some cities) and in London by insisting on a couple of years as an apprentice doing things like The Knowledge and so on. Now governments are allowing companies like Uber (and Lyft, Sidecar and so on) to enter these markets without imposing the same costs upon those companies. This is akin to government taking the property of a citizen, similar to a compulsory purchase order to build a railway through the land. So, should governments be compensating those cab drivers? I think Mike Munger has the discussion and the conclusion correct here.

Yes, that cab license is property, akin to land. But compensation for the removal of a legal privilege it's doubtful should have been granted in the first place is not the same as compensation for the removal of a righteously owned piece of property.

The analogy I would use is that of free trade. It's often said that OK, perhaps a move to free trade is justified. But there's all sorts of people who gain from the current, not free, trade. So, those who will gain from the move should compensate those who lose. Which is an attractive idea: except, except. That except being, well, those who currently gain from not-free trade aren't currently sending cheques to those who suffer from not-free trade. So, why should the reciprocal be enforced?

We consumers are those who would have to compensate the cab drivers, through our taxes. The cab drivers aren't compensating us presently for the benefits to themselves of the restrictive legal privileges. So, the removal shouldn't lead to us having to compensate them.

Well, yes Sir Simon, but how do we calculate this?

Simon Jenkins is reviving the notion that clever people like himself, those Great and the Good, can tell all of the rest of us how to live our lives. His particular example is supermarkets but it could be anything at all really, given the proclivities of some to tell other people what to do. We went from that High Street thing, to supermarkets, to out of town supermarkets and perhaps now to online sales:

Land is Britain’s most precious resource. The point of planning is to economise its usefulness.

We'd argue a bit there, Britain's most precious resource is Britons. Their, our, accumulated knowledge, labour and the accumulated labour (also known as capital) handed down from our forefathers. But that aside, yes, of course, we wish to create the maximum economic benefit from whatever resources we have (and that does not mean just money, of course not, we're talking utility here).

At which point we've got to ponder, well, how do we do that maximisation? And the truth is no one knows. That's why we cannot plan. Should someone, in the 1980s, when considering a planning application for a supermarket have predicted the rise of the internet, Amazon and Ocado? Could they have done so? In the 1990s?

Yes? No?

If not, then it couldn't have been planned for, could it?

At present, smart planning ought to be thinking ahead of the boom in online shopping. What mistakes might there be in pandering to its gargantuan appetites? What are the implications of every street jammed with home delivery lorries? What of every suburb blighted with distribution centres, supplied by giant hangars littering every motorway?

The correct answer here is "we dunno". Nor do you and nor does anyone else. We're all just going to have to suck it and see. Or, as we might put that a little more formally, allow the market to sort it all out. We consumers will work out which of the various options we ourselves prefer, those who cater to our desires will prosper and we'll end up with a system that might not exult entirely everyone but which does the best to provide aggregate human utility that can be managed at this stage of technological progress.

And yes, that does mean that Sir Simon and his ilk don't get to plan it all for us. Exactly what annoys them all so much of course.

In praise of Project Gregory

This is a really rather inventive idea that's just been funded on Kickstarter. We've lots of homeless people (perhaps rather fewer in England than many think but still). And we'd all obviously like to find a way to house the homeless. We might say it's for ethical reasons, civilised ones or just that they clutter up the urban landscape so badly: but housing the homeless is quite obviously a good thing to be doing. So, why not build little self-contained units, by the roadside, that are then slathered with advertising? The billboard pays for the upkeep (even if not the capital cost) of that housing? On much the same basis that various advertising firms are willing to build bus shelters as long as they get the advertising rights upon them.

An excellent concept except for just one thing:

Cities are engulfed with billboard advertisements which are expensive to construct, maintain and their subsequent renting is a costly venture. The proposal increases the functionality of the structures in a way that the insides could be turned into living spaces. Such an object would produce minimal maintenancecosts, which could be paid through the rental space of its facade. In addition, the architects believe, ‘if we take the electricity cost needed for the billboard to keep it lit during night and we try to optimize it by x%, we find that this saved energy could fully cover all those interior usage needs.”

That might not quite roll off the tongue but that's pretty good English for some Slovak architectural students.

At which point we come to that just one thing.

Planning permission.

To do this would obviously require the granting of planning permission to build such dwellings. But if we had a planning system that allowed the building of cheap and cheerful urban homes then we wouldn't (absent addiction and mental health issues) have a problem with homelessness in the first place.

It's a fascinating solution. But the reason it won't work as a solution is because it won't pass through that planning system that causes the problem it's trying to solve.

Ain't bureaucracy wondrous?

On the merits of competition in government services

Perhaps we should be having more competition with government services? A businessman who built his own £325,000 toll road to bypass roadworks is to close the shortcut after the local council invested £660,000 to finish repairs five weeks early.

Mike Watts, 63, claims he will now not make a penny and will lose out on a profit of several thousand pounds after Bath and North East Somerset completed the work ahead of schedule.

He became the first private individual to build a British toll road in more than a century when a crucial road in Kelston, Somerset, was closed by a landslip, leaving locals with a 14-mile diversion.

The roadworks were scheduled to last until Christmas, which would have given Mr Watts and his wife Wendy, 52, a healthy profit on their £325,000 investment.

But instead the A431 Kelston Road between Bristol and Bath will re-open tomorrow, meaning he couple will just break even after spending £150,000 to build the road and £150,000 on upkeep.

That he won't make a profit is no doubt distressing to him but it's of no importance at all over public policy. And there's more than a suspicion (look, your humble writer is a Bathonian and he's absolutely convinced that there's no suspicion at all, this is simple fact) that the speed up was done out of spite. Can't have the council being made to look bad or incompetent, can we, people will wonder what they're paying their taxes for! But again that's of no real import here.

What is important is that the landslip has been corrected, the public road opened 5 weeks earlier than it would have been without the competition. And yes, even if is simply spite that drove that decision the consumers are all better off as a result. So, more competition in public services please: for we are supposed to be running this whole economy and government thing in order to benefit the consumers.

Tired of London?

Samuel Johnson famously pronounced: “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life”. This isn’t the end of his statement though, he added: “for there is in London all that life can afford.” But what if you can’t afford life in London? Surely then it is time to up sticks and move to a cheaper city.

According to a poll from the Supper Club, the network for entrepreneurs turning over £1m or more, 40pc of London-based business owners have considered moving their operations.

More than a third claimed that the cost and inefficiency of London’s public transport system is holding back businesses, while 40pc said that the cost of housing is driving away the best talent. With house prices in London reaching an all-time peak, business owners have warned of a “brain drain”.

The Supper Club, which represents 330 entrepreneurs from a range of sectors, found that 79pc of respondents fear a skills crisis within five years.

Of course, for as long as London remains a leading world city – at the cutting edge of finance, business and culture – it will remain a pricey place to live. After all, there is a flipside of the economies of amalgamation – some stuff, like housing becomes more expensive. And yet, there can be no doubting that house prices are hitting crisis point. For Generation Y, many can’t foresee how they will ever be able to own property in the capital. London’s big divide is between the owners and the renters and successive governments’ failure in allowing more houses to be built is squarely to blame.

To give you a sense of the crisis, Shelter’s model predicts that fewer than 1 in 5 of London families will be able to become owners by the age of 65 if prices inflate as they have done in the past.

As the LSE’s Paul Cheshire points out, politicians haven’t stepped up to the plate. The coalitions’ Help to Buy policies are doing little (except pushing up prices), while Labour’s suggestion for partial controls on rents, increased security of tenure, and elimination of agent’s fees for finding housing for renters, will probably just decrease rental supply as fewer people want to become landlords.

Cheshire believes “nothing short of radical reform will improve housing affordability. But radical reform, like intelligently loosening restrictions on Greenbelt building, is frightening.” Affordable, more stable house prices should be the policy goals of all political parties. This requires a more liberalised system, whereby the demand for housing would impact its supply.

This generation of successful entrepreneurs may be able to live in London but their employees increasingly can’t. And crucially, for the wealth of this nation, the next generation of entrepreneurs may have already moved to a city where the cost of living isn’t prohibitively expensive – and my first pick wouldn’t be the UK.

It really is the planning system that's harming us

It really is the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act that is causing our housing problems:

Britons live in the smallest homes in Western Europe because of draconian planning laws restricting house building, a report found yesterday.

Residential floor space in Britain is on average just 66 square metres (710 square feet) per household, compared to a spacious 118 square metres (1,270 sq ft) in Ireland, 115 square metres (1,238 sq ft) in Denmark or 110 square metres (1,184 sq ft) in Italy, according to data compiled by the Institute of Economic Affairs.

‘All the evidence suggests that years of tight planning controls restricting house building has led to us having the smallest space per household in Western Europe.’ The figures were compiled as part of a report which confronted some of the most widely-held views about the cost of living crisis.

We have some of the most expensive housing in Europe and some of the smallest. Those two logically go together of course: people tend to consume less of something the more expensive it becomes. But is it actually desirable?

If we were facing a shortage of land upon which to build then perhaps so. If something does have to be rationed then rationing by price is the way to do it. But there isn't any shortage of land. Housing takes up some 3% of England all urban areas no more than 10%. Famously, more of Surrey has golf courses than housing on it. What we do have though is a shortage of the pieces of paper that allow building a house on a piece of land.

Many say that this is a problem that government should solve. Build more council houses for example, force the private sector to do so. And the aim is correct, the government should solve this problem. But not by actually doing anything of course. That shortage of planning permissions is an active action by government: and the solution is therefore for them not to try to do something but to stop doing something.

Simply liberalise that planning system. After all, the last time the private sector built houses in the sort of volumes we need today was the 1930s. And it built all those houses where people wanted to live, in sizes they desired: those semi-urban semis are exactly what people find desirable today as well, judging by their prices. And all of this was done without much restriction on what could be built where.

We know this solution works because the last time we had a reasonably functional housing market was when we had an absence of that planning.