Mark Wadsworth maintains:

Barely ten per cent of England by surface area is developed, and the proportion of leafy Surrey that is developed is not much higher. And it’s not “forced construction”; there’s a demand for housing so developers try and meet supply. You might as well argue that by not placing a limit on the number of hairdressers who can operate in the UK, the government is “forcing people to have their hair cut”. And it’s funny how home-owners never consider the “vaste swathes of the greenbelt” that must have been destroyed in the past to enable their homes to be built.

Dearieme answered:

Your last point is weak – there was no such thing as a green belt when my house was built.

I commented:

I was going to say it and Dearieme did – that not all construction was in greenbelt areas and around some towns, the greenbelt is all that is left before the next town. Conurbations are not universally loved, Mark.

He replied:

Well, 85% of us live in suburbia, but 15% don’t. So let’s allow more construction in the countryside for those who want to live in the countryside, more construction near the seaside for those who want to live near the seaside and more construction around towns for those who’d like to live near a town.

Issues as I see them

While the current planning regulations in most parts of the UK are, IMHO, draconian and unnecessary, designed to fill the coffers and in line with the love of bureaucracy for more bureaucracy, rather than effect any love for the environment – while that might be so and one would like to see much greater freeing up of where people can or cannot build, there is this niggling question of “beauty”, of untrammeled countryside.

Mark answers this:

Don’t forget that only ten per cent of England is developed, if we built five million new homes, it would still only use up one per cent of undeveloped land.

I don’t think it’s a question of total percentages.  Look at the pic above and imagine someone building in that field, then another one further over and that you have indiscriminate building all over the place.

So whilst, in total percentages, not a lot has been built on, there are these factors:

1.  The lowest common denominator of builders who build the cheapest and most minimal, especially if it is going to be mass accommodation, the designs are going to be something as fitting as an airport or caravan park and the dire drabness of one part of Britain will extend out over the whole country.

2.  There is infrastructure.  Mark Wadsworth’s contention is that the further out you go, the less infrastructure one can expect and hence the lower the prices, therefore more incentive to move out until a balance is met where people live “some distance out” and thus Land Value Tax is applied accordingly.

It seems to me that people in outlying areas will want all sorts of infrastructure plus living far from the madding crowd.  Now we get back to the old classic liberal question of how far a government can force people to go where they don’t want or have what they don’t want.

How would this be any different from Brown’s socialism?

On the other hand, indiscriminate building of all sorts of support services, just because someone wanted to plonk a house on a hill would lead to the spaghetti planning which besets Britain today, especially England.

My question

Where is the happy medium?

Update

The Economic Voice offers this solution:

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