When builders don't build enough houses why is it always the planners who get the blame? According to Planning Magazine, legislation designed to speed up planning decisions is to be introduced in the next few weeks and the green belt might be vanishing too, as it apparently 'restricts growth'.
However as LRR subscribers would have seen in their 2012 Red Book, the planning pipeline looks like this. Notice the red blocks, that's the number of units at permission, currently around 180,000.
A recent article in The Guardian summed up the state of the housing market well, when it said this...
The quandary is this: housing costs too much, but for millions of people, security depends on the value of their bricks and mortar. A generation are being priced out of homes so that their parents keep the value of their principal asset.
Read the full article here, which goes on to say how recent noises about planning and green belt changes are little more than populist window dressing that will make no real difference to the fundamental problem that house prices still too inflated.
The BBC housing correspondent Henry Pryor also summed it up pretty well in less than 140 characters on twitter... "Building more homes devalues those already built & spoils back yards for voters who won't vote to build more homes for those who need 'em".
And as the table above again shows in relation specifically to London I might add, it's not planning's fault, it's viability and the fact prices are still way too over priced. The flats and houses have permission, they're just not getting built.
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