The Joseph Rowntree Foundation published an international review of land supply and planning systems conducted by CCHPR, looking at what works and whether successful mechanisms from other countries could be transferred to the UK context. The review suggested that land supply was a key issue contributing to housing market volatility and the problems of housing affordability in the UK.
The three main messages from the research were as follows:
- There is no one single measure that will solve the problem – all countries struggle with balancing the need to constrain urban sprawl with the need to build sufficient homes to keep housing (more) affordable.
- But some countries, while having hot spots with high demand for housing and pressure on urban boundaries, do provide adequately outside these high pressure areas.
- Successful countries appear to be much more pro-active in the land market than the UK.
The review identified measures taken successfully in other countries to bring more land forward for housing. These included using urban growth limits to prevent urban sprawl, but pro-actively monitoring and adjusting boundaries over time. In many countries, local authorities play an active role in land assembly, often using compulsory purchase powers.
Several countries have mechanisms to ensure that infrastructure is in place prior to planned development and land readjustment processes also provide for infrastructure. Many countries offer compensation and incentive mechanisms, usually in the form of increased benefits to local authorities. Underpinning many of these mechanisms are forms of land value capture (in zoning systems) or planning gain in the English context. These include infrastructure charges, inclusionary zoning to provide affordable housing, and land value taxation.
However, the review showed that, in the UK, many of these mechanisms were already available or in place in some form, and identified that there was a need to modify the planning and land supply framework to create an overall coherent policy and make wider use of these mechanisms, rather than start from scratch. For example, urban growth limits in the form of greenbelts are often treated as fixed, but often exclude development of highly accessible sites which could be built on without losing the countryside, if growth management boundaries were treated more flexibly.
Other mechanisms, such as incentives, can be made more effective. One issue the review identified is that smaller planning units can be more responsive and effective at bringing land forward for housing. Neighbourhood planning in the UK may be a step in the right direction. In some countries, such as the Netherlands, local authorities purchase land, service it and divide it into smaller parcels, and sell these on to house builders at a price that covers the servicing costs. While local authorities in the UK are reluctant to tie up funds to purchase land, some have been successful in ensuring that new homes are being built, for example in Cambridge where a rolling fund originally enabled by the city’s designation as a growth area has been used to ‘lend’ developers the money to unlock infrastructure constraints on new housing schemes.
Without action to increase the supply of housing, affordability will worsen. This review identified measures which could be used more widely to bring more land forward for housing in the UK and help ensure people have access to affordable housing in the places they want to live.