The accountancy of marketisation: Fictional markets in housing land supply

Abstract

This article investigates the performative role of accountancy in embedding market mechanisms in public services. Drawing on the work of Karl Polanyi, it argues that marketisation can be understood as a work of calculative modelling in which the fiction of a self-regulating market is propagated through the concealment of the social and political practices on which it depends. Exploring this thesis in the marketisation of housing land supply, the article provides a forensic study of an accountancy procedure called the Housing Delivery Test that modelled an ideal housing market in the English land-use planning system. The study points to the importance of Polanyi's analysis in theorising the performativity of calculative practices in the project of marketisation, not as creating the economy they describe but in fashioning a fictional market.

Artificial Scarcity in Housebuilding and the Impact on Affordability: The Return of Absolute Rent

“…Achieving an accurate count of the number of homes approved is hindered by the potential for developers and landowners to submit multiple planning applications. There are further problems with accurate data, since the English government does not collect official statistics on the number of homes given planning permission and maintains three separate statistical methods of calculating the number of completed homes, with the most reliable providing only incomplete and outdated information (Bradley 2022). The lack of dependable data hinders conclusive research into the land trading practices of English housebuilders, but the industry admits to what is called a "lapse rate" in residential permissions, with between 10% and 20% of homes given approval each year never getting built.…”

Land Marketization, Secondary Land Market, and Effects on Industrial Land Price

“…Polanyi (2001, p. 497) notes that land, along with labor and money, is essential to the operation of self-regulating market economies. The role of the state in land commodification has been central to land marketization (Bradley, 2021). This includes the privatization of public land (Christophers, 2018), the deregulation of mortgage markets (Aalbers & Haila, 2018), and the separation of land-use rights from state landownership (Huang et al, 2015;Liu, 2017).…”