The financialisation of housing land supply in England

Abstract

The aim of this article is to identify the calculative practices that turn urban development planning into the supply-side of land financialisation. My focus is on the statutory planning of housing supply and the accounting procedures, or market devices, that normalise the practices of land speculation in the earliest stage of the urban development process. I provide an analysis of the accountancy regime used by planning authorities in England to evidence a 5-year supply of housing land. Drawing on the work of Michel Callon on market framing, I assess the activities of economic agents in performing or ‘formatting’ this supply, its boundaries, externalities and rules of operation. I evidence the effect of this formatting in normalising the treatment of land as a financial asset and in orienting the statutory regulation of land supply to the provision of opportunities for the capture of increased ground rent at a cost to the delivery of new homes.

Land and the housing affordability crisis: landowner and developer strategies in Luxembourg’s facilitative planning context

“…More recently, Raco & Savini (2019) have identified the rise of a 'new urban technocracy' in which delivery-focused planning becomes reliant on an expanding set of private sector experts in the context of prolonged austerity. The influence of this new urban technocracy operates indirectly, through the infusion of market devices in planning practices, as Bradley (2021) shows in the case of the calculative practices English planning authorities must rely on to justify that they have made available enough building land.…”

The accountancy of marketisation: Fictional markets in housing land supply

“…While local planning authorities increased the supply of land in response to sanctions, developers and landowners sold the permitted land, used it as collateral or repurposed it in new development applications leaving on average 40% of annually permitted homes unbuilt. The time taken to build a home after full planning permission doubled, rising from two to four years, reducing the rate of housing supply still further (Bradley, 2021;Chamberlain Walker, 2017). The Housing Delivery Test made the supply of a fictional commodity, land, dependent on demand for a real commodity, housing.…”

“…Agricultural land in Oxfordshire, typically worth £25,000 a hectare, might be valued at £5.6 million a hectare with residential planning permissionan increase of 224 times (Murphy, 2018). Site promoters monetised the planning permission process by creating a profitable market in auctioning residential permissions on behalf of landowners, fuelling a speculative market in land at the expense of housing completions (Bradley, 2021). Research by the development consultancy Lichfields (2017) identified what the industry called a 'lapse rate' in residential permissions with, in some areas, 50% of homes given planning permission never being built.…”

“…I argue from this evidence that marketisation can be understood as the performative accountancy of a fictional market within the shelter of public regulation. The article seeks to contribute a new perspective on the marketisation of public services to the literature on calculative practices, and it adds to a growing body of work that seeks to expose the practices through which land-use planning systems are repurposed to facilitate the extraction of value (Bradley, 2021;Ferm and Raco, 2020;Murphy, 2020;Waldron, 2019).…”

Financialised Privatisation, Affordable Housing and Institutional Investment: The Case of England

“…Indeed, developers and their advisors often gain access to policymakers outside the formal policymaking sphere and push through their prescriptions for system changes to enhance the profitability of development (Slater 2016). Although it is argued that the relaxation of planning regulations could help to address constraints on land supply (Cheshire 2018), such measures have also opened opportunities for development-friendly policy transformations (Bradley 2020). Such transformations could include, for example, measures to fast-track planning decisions connected with large housing developments, changes in regulatory or building regulations (e.g.…”