Local costs, national benefits

Welcome to Little Built, a newsletter about vetocracy, technology, and the planning system

The objects of town and country planning are becoming increasingly understood and accepted. Primarily, they are to secure a proper balance between the competing demands for land, so that all the land of the country is used in the best interests of the whole people.

– Lewis Silkin MP. (Town And Country Planning Bill, Second Reading, January 1947)

Building more houses, power plants, commercial centres, train stations, is A Very Good Thing. This I take as axiomatic. Progress comes from growth, and growth is fuelled by construction, consumption, production.

But building more things also creates externalities. Increased development means an more people on the streets, more cars on the roads. It incurs opportunity costs: what could have been a shop is now a block of houses, what could have been a nature reserve is now a car park. It affects communities along cultural and aesthetic dimensions as well as geographical and socioeconomic ones.

This is, of course, a very old story, and it’s the principle rationale for basically all planning law. Planning law is there to ‘secure a proper balance between the competing demands for land’.

The trouble is, balance is often precarious. Tip too far from the fulcrum and you’ll fall.

Since the Town and Country Planning Act was passed in 1947, this is exactly what has happened:

Since the 1980s, the rate of house construction has consistently lagged behind any other period in the preceding century, barring the years of World Wars I and II.

We now have a planning system that has tipped.

The system’s guiding principle, often referred to as ‘development control’, is less a holistic evaluation of a proposed project’s benefits and more an exercise in identifying potential harms. This produces an inherently defensive orientation: it places an emphasis on mitigating local costs rather than exploring potential regional or national benefits.

And I get it. The psychology makes sense.

The local costs imposed by development are vivid, legible, memetic. They are pastures paved over. They are stressed teachers and the GP’s dreary holding music. They are trees felled, habitats destroyed, roads jammed with traffic. The promise of your town looking and sounding and smelling different, the likelihood of your net worth decreasing.

It’s colourful. Contrast that with the very real but also very abstract impoverishment that our failure to promote development has caused. A spike in petrol prices doesn’t cause you to thrust your arms into the air and launch into barbed invective against the local planning authority, no matter how intimately they are actually connected. There is little connection between local planning decisions and our national predicament.

The connection isn’t vivid, and – here is my main point – no political incentive exists to make it so. The ‘interests of local people’ are narrowly defined, and then optimised for. The people who most directly benefit from more development in an area are not the people who live there already. Even if you are renting and wish to buy closeby, the process of public consultation, and the broader system of democratic criticism and consent it sits within, is biased against those renters.

It is biased against you when public consultations are held at 2pm on a Wednesday. It is biased against you when planning applications are held up in appeal for years, inflating rental prices and distorting local economies. It is biased against you when property prices exceed 12 times the median salary, as in London. It is biased when the only lever the government seems able or willing to pull further juices the demand side, subsidising mortgage deposits and forcing prices higher.

Planning is broken, we are collectively poorer because it is broken, and the system that is supposed to watch over and allow us to course-correct can’t fix it. Won’t fix it.

Our Members of Parliament are selected by constituency parties that predominantly consist of older, property-owning members. They are elected by a local constituency populated by local people who are also older: 94% of 65+ year olds are registered to vote; by comparison, 67% of 18-24 year olds are. 91% of people who own their house outright are registered to vote. 58% of private renters are. Unsurprisingly, likelihood of voting increases monotonically with tenure at your address. All of these numbers look worse when you look at local elections. The demographics of the UK electorate simply don’t support the kind of radical pro-development consensus that we need.

Perhaps you don’t believe that politicians respond rationally to incentives? There are explanations that fit within a signalling model too. It is cheap and easy for a local MP to oppose any given development. Councillors and MPs can grandstand about supporting the natural environment, or advocating for council-funded or affordable housing provision, or protecting already-stretched public services, or preventing congestion on local roads. Of course we need more houses, but those houses shouldn’t come at the cost of our local ecology. We need affordable homes, not luxury flats for executives. It is close to free to gain the admiration of the louder NIMBYs. Friends, neighbours, colleagues. Supporting large-scale development involves aggravating and frustrating these people. Just saying no is much easier.

Hence, we inevitably fall into an inadequate equilibrium of NIMBYism. There are few compelling reasons for a local representative to support development, at the current margin, but many reasons to oppose it.

Herein lies the central tension of the UK planning system: it functions as a risk-minimiser, an umpire calling fouls and enacting penalties rather than a strategic player envisioning and directing the trajectory of urban growth.

We ossify this impulse by embedding control over our planning system into an electoral structure that optimises for reducing local costs, not maximising national benefits. (Democracy is the worst of all systems, apart from the others.)

Some recent announcements, especially those from the inchoate Labour GE campaign, give us reason to be cheerful. But the incentives run deep, and it’s yet to be seen how much Labour will suffer electorally because of their pro-development noises. If their lead gets kicked into a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, it seems unlikely that significant planning reform will survive the negotiations.

Reorienting the UK planning system along pro-development lines would require a shift both in policy, and political culture. There needs to be a recalibration from the defensive to the constructive, a movement from an itemised list of constraints to a positive vision for a society, and the political courage to see it through.

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The key focus of this newsletter is to understand why all this has happened, and how we can get out of it. It is a place for me to analyse, lament, plan, vent, exhale.

I will be writing about planning, vetocracy, and a cluster of related topics, such as:

• the Town and Country Planning Act 1947, its subsequent amendments, and the world they have created;

• the effect of public consultation;

• aesthetic considerations and the way that they’re woven into our planning codes;

• the empirical data behind the Housing Theory of Everything [The housing theory of everything - Works in Progress](https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything) and the hidden costs of the planning system;

• ‘luxury’ versus ‘affordable’ building, the violence of political one-liners;

• left-NIMBYism, and our special British flavour of it;

• how other countries do it better;

• how we could do it worse.

I’m also going to be writing about Tract, my startup, and the role that I think technology has to play in pulling us out of this quagmire. I have framed this as a policy and political problem. But the solution is, in part, I believe, a technological one.

Thanks for reading, and welcome to Little Built.