Britain's system of land-use planning is fundamentally misguided', says Dr Mark Pennington of Queen Mary College, University of London in a new iea paper.* It needs radical reform so that market forces play a much bigger role.
According to Dr Pennington, the British system is '...one of the most comprehensive systems of government land-use regulation anywhere in the industrialised world.' (p24). Moreover, regulation has become tighter, partly because of the environmental agenda, so that '...the ownership and use of land in the United Kingdom is subject to a greater array of statutory controls than at any time since the introduction of the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act.' (p22).
This regulatory regime suffers from over-centralisation, absence of experimentation, lack of information and inappropriate incentives - in ot