Sam Bowman on UK housing policy

Inside Housing – ICLE Director of Competition Policy Sam Bowman was cited by Inside Housing in an article about the planning reforms in the United Kingdom. You can read the full piece (behind a subscriber firewall) here.

In another example of ‘helpful Twitter’, Sam Bowman (@s8mb), director of competition policy at the International Center for Law & Economics, posted a lengthy but informative thread about where and how the government’s policy has gone wrong on reforming English planning.

1/ The govt's planning reforms are doomed.

They're already crap, and they're probably going to get worse. And they've been done so naively that what the govt is doing now is probably going to set back the cause of housing reform by another ten years.

Thread:

— Sam Bowman (@s8mb) May 13, 2021

He analysed the political naivety of attempting to allow more building on the green belt and increasing housing targets (“Even MPs who are normally pro-development & pro-reform opposed these proposals. They were DOA,” he noted), leaving only zoning on the table.