How would one describe a market in which the value of the same commodity varied by more than 100 to one? “Hugely distorted” is the answer. Yet that is precisely the situation for land near England’s most prosperous urban centres. As I have recently argued, these anomalies are the product of the UK’s system of land planning, introduced by the postwar Labour government in 1947. Their effect is to make a mockery of the claim that the country has a competitive market economy. If it did, these discrepancies simply could not exist.
In an excellent book on housing, Housing: Where’s the Plan?, Kate Barker, a former member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, notes that in 2010, agricultural land around Cambridge was worth ￡18,500 a hectare, while neighbouring residential land cost maybe ￡2.9m a hectare. Land restricted to agricultural use and land open to development lie side by side but their value is hugely different.
In a recent paper, Christian Hilber of the London School of Economics and Wouter Vermeulen of the Netherlands bureau for economic policy analysis, note that real house prices have grown faster in the UK over the past 40 years than in any other member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Prices, particularly in London and the South East, are among the highest in the world. In the absence of controls, real prices would have risen by around 90 per cent between 1974 and 2008, instead of 190 per cent.