07What would improve under zoning?

After all the changes above, it is worth concluding by considering exactly how housebuilding and development would be expected to change under a flexible zoning system.

Housebuilding would increase, as the supply of development land would increase with all urban land becoming available for redevelopment. Infill development in urban areas – which is now exceptionally difficult – would become much more feasible at scale, creating more opportunities on small sites and for smaller developers, and supporting public transport with the greatest densities.

Higher housebuilding would in turn lead to cheaper housing, larger disposable incomes, and stronger economic growth. Poor quality stock would be demolished and replaced by more and better housing.

The rapid success of these measures in New Zealand and other countries suggests that a shift to zoning from discretion in England would not “freeze” land values and development as some commentators and policymakers suggest, but that builders would immediately start building if only they had certainty and would start to deliver these benefits within this Parliament.

Urban expansion would occur when a planning authority decides to zone previously agricultural land for urban uses. As there would be much greater certainty as to the land value uplift that would arise from zoning, land value capture would become much easier, and occur through simpler approaches for capturing land value uplift rather than through s106 agreements.⁶¹

This has two separate implications for the development process for urban extensions.

First, this means that much more supporting infrastructure which is currently delivered through planning conditions by the developer would be delivered directly or tendered for by the local authority.

Second, sites can be delivered in a variety of ways. Developers can either continue with their current model; or they can sell individual plots to new buyers and build to spec or let them do self-build, or the local authority can take a central role in master-planning the entire development.

The efficiency of urban economies would improve too. More intense zoning in city centres, urban cores, and near railway stations would make for more efficient use of infrastructure and increase the effective size of cities’ labour markets. Existing structures beyond the end of their life would be demolished and replaced by the private sector, increasing the quality of the built environment and its energy efficiency. More flexible zoning would also be expected to make it easier to provide mixed-use developments and neighbourhoods.

The national economy would improve under flexible zoning too. By removing the Barlow Report’s restrictions from our planning system, our high-demand, highly-productive urban economies would finally be able to grow to their full potential. In this way, planning reform would deliver not just a ‘sugar rush’ for economic growth from a housebuilding boom, but also permanently increase long-run productivity, which is the foundation of national prosperity.

None of this is to say that Nimbyism would disappear under flexible zoning. In the politics of planning, there will always be arguments at the national level about what the rules are. And there will always be arguments at the local level about how and where those rules are applied. But crucially, there should not be any arguments as to whether the rules should even matter.