This year marks my twentieth anniversary working in think tanks. Two decades ago, I produced my first major publication for London’s Policy Exchange with the late Professor Alan W. Evans, an urban economist at the University of Reading.
Titled Unaffordable Housing: Fables and Myths, our research tackled Britain’s housing crisis by examining its root cause: the planning system.
What we highlighted was fascinating, not least from a historical point of view. Britain’s approach to regulating land use was not merely a technical framework but a powerful ideological apparatus shaped by socialist ideas of the 1930s and 1940s – roots that had been largely forgotten by the early 2000s.
Our report was remarkably well-received. It won ‘Publication of the Year’ at the British think tank awards (yes, there is such a thing!), and garnered flattering reviews in publications like the Financial Times (“superb” and “outstanding” according to the FT’s Martin Wolf), The Daily Telegraph (“brilliant”), and the Independent on Sunday (“a tough-minded set of answers”). With 109 citations, it remains one of my most-cited works.
Yet despite these accolades, the report failed in its main task: it had no impact on policy . The planning system we critiqued continues largely unchanged to this day – a testament to the remarkable resilience of the collectivist ideas embedded within it.
In the years since, my think tank career has taken me across continents, from Britain to Australia and eventually to New Zealand.
Throughout my journey, I have witnessed a curious phenomenon: the endurance of collectivist planning principles from mid-20th century Britain across time and space, outlasting even the most ambitious free-market reforms.
John Maynard Keynes famously observed that “practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”
In the realm of urban development, we might adapt this insight: practical planners and politicians who think they are making purely technical decisions about land use are in fact channelling the collectivist dreams of long-forgotten British socialist visionaries.
Our cities and housing markets remain captive to a planning orthodoxy established when Britain was embarking on its post-war reconstruction. These ideas have proven remarkably resilient, surviving the market liberalisation of the 1980s and spreading across the globe.
If a system persists long enough, no matter its intellectual and historical roots, it becomes part of the furniture. Things have always been that way, it seems, and people no longer question them. If they did, they might be surprised, even somewhat aghast, at the origins of systems they have always taken for granted.
Britain in the 1930s and 1940s provided fertile ground for collectivist thinking. The Great Depression had shaken faith in markets, while the seemingly successful wartime planning of the economy created confidence in state-directed solutions.
The intellectual climate was dominated by Keynesian economics, the blueprint for a welfare state outlined in the Beveridge Report, and a general belief that only collective action could address societal challenges.
In this atmosphere, architectural thinkers like Patrick Abercrombie, whose Greater London Plan of 1944 embodied the technocratic approach to rebuilding Britain, gained tremendous influence.
Their vision was not merely to rebuild bombed cities but to reshape society through spatial planning. Slums would be cleared, garden cities built, and urban sprawl contained by green belts.
All aspects of land use would be subordinated to the collective good as determined by expert planners.
Britain’s Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 institutionalised this collectivist vision. Its most radical provision – largely unremarked upon at the time – was the nationalisation of development rights.
Before 1947, British landowners generally had the right to develop their land; after the Act, this right belonged to the state. Any significant development would henceforth require planning permission, granted or withheld according to the state’s definition of proper land use.
Lewis Silkin, the Labour minister who steered the Act through Parliament, saw it as part of a broader socialist programme.
As he told the Commons: “The fundamental issue which is before the House today is whether we are likely to plan so as to secure the best use of our land, or to abandon any effective attempt at planning. Are we to go on accepting as inevitable the progressive congestion and deterioration of our towns and the spoiling of our beautiful villages in the countryside as we have done in the past, or are we to become masters of, and control the future of, our land?”
He concluded his speech with a vision of what this new planning system would achieve: “When this Bill becomes law, we shall have created an instrument of which we can be justly proud; we shall have begun a new era in the life of this country, an era in which human happiness, beauty, and culture will play a greater part in its social and economic life than they have ever done before.”
What is remarkable is not that such collectivist, nostalgic, socially romantic and preservationist thinking dominated the post-war era – that was the spirit of the time – but that it survived the great market liberalisation movement of the late 20th century.
The 1970s through 1990s saw sweeping economic reforms across the Western world. Ronald Reagan in America, Margaret Thatcher in Britain, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating in Australia, Brian Mulroney in Canada and David Lange with Roger Douglas and then Ruth Richardson in New Zealand all championed deregulation, privatisation, and market-oriented policies.
Yet in this era of economic liberalisation, town planning systems remained curiously untouched. While governments privatised industries, deregulated financial services, liberalised trade and curtailed union power, they left planning systems essentially intact.
In Britain, the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, passed under Thatcher’s successor John Major, actually strengthened the plan-led approach to development.
As Alan Evans and I noted in our report, it is a paradox that “a year after the Berlin Wall came down, whilst the Soviet economy and its satellites were collapsing, a Conservative government should have enforced a system of Soviet-style central planning for the provision of housing in Britain.” Even more ironically, the East-European communists arguably did a better job of keeping housing costs down, with their brutalist apartment blocks.
Why did planning prove so resistant to liberalisation? Political calculus certainly played a role. Homeowners benefitted from the artificial scarcity created by restrictive planning, which inflated their property values.
Meanwhile, the planning profession, deeply invested in the collectivist model, mounted intellectual defences of the status quo. By then, they had already added scores of environmental justifications to their cause.
Meanwhile, emotional attachments to preserving countryside provided powerful rhetoric against reform in many countries.
The result was a curious hybrid: increasingly liberal markets operating alongside fundamentally collectivist approaches to land use. This contradiction helps explain persistent housing crises in many developed nations – crises not of market failure but of planned scarcity.
Yet still more remarkable than the survival of collectivist planning is its global spread. British planning ideas were exported throughout the Commonwealth, taking root in Australia and New Zealand.
Like a virus mutating to survive in new hosts, the core principles adapted to local conditions while preserving their essential nature – centralised control, urban containment and subordination of property rights to collective plans.
Australia’s states enacted town and country planning laws heavily inspired by the British model in the late 1940s and 1950s. Many Australian planners were trained in Britain or by British curricula, importing “mainstream modernist British planning thought” directly.
Similarly, New Zealand’s planning regime evolved from the still relatively rudimentary Town Planning Act 1926 through to the much more ambitious Town and Country Planning Acts of 1953 and 1977 and finally the Resource Management Act of 1991 (RMA) – all rooted in British statutory templates.
The consequences are visible in housing markets on both sides of the planet. Australia and New Zealand now face housing affordability crises remarkably similar to Britain’s.
In all three countries, land values have soared as planning constraints have artificially limited supply. According to the 2024 Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey, housing in markets like Sydney (13.8 median multiple – meaning median house prices are 13.8 times median household incomes), Auckland (8.2), Melbourne (9.8), London (7.8), and Toronto (9.3) is now severely unaffordable.
These cities are separated by vast distances but united by their British-inspired planning systems and their shared housing affordability crisis.
The current New Zealand government under Prime Minister Christopher Luxon is now mounting what may be the most ambitious challenge yet to this collectivist planning legacy.
New Zealand’s recent resource management reforms aim to replace the RMA – which one might call “the Kiwi grandchild of Britain’s post-war planning legislation” – with a more liberal framework.
The proposed reforms would split the current system into a Natural Environment Act and a Planning Act, thereby separating environmental protection from development facilitation.
They would strengthen property rights, reduce barriers to development and better align local incentives with growth – all priorities long advocated by policy analysts who understand the system’s flaws.
Most importantly, the reforms would shift from the RMA’s cautious, precautionary approach to a more permissive, development-enabling regime.
By narrowing the scope of regulation and elevating the importance of development needs, they promise to reduce delays, costs, and red tape – crucial for boosting housing supply and economic growth.
Remarkably, New Zealand Housing Minister Chris Bishop and Prime Minister Luxon are now grappling with the last remnants of British utopian socialism from the 1940s – some eight decades later and on the other side of the world. They are attempting to dismantle planning structures whose ideological foundations were laid when their grandparents were young.
The government faces significant challenges, of course. Reforming a system built on decades of collectivist assumptions requires not just legislative changes but a cultural shift in how planners, courts, and communities approach development.
This being New Zealand, Treaty of Waitangi obligations also must be respected without reintroducing the RMA’s delays and ambiguities.
And the transition to a new system must be managed carefully to avoid creating a period of uncertainty that would chill investment.
Yet the very attempt represents a recognition that planning is not merely technical but ideological – and that addressing housing affordability requires confronting the collectivist ideas that have shaped our cities for generations.
The persistence of socialist planning ideas across decades and continents offers a powerful lesson about the endurance of ideology.
Long after central economic planning was discredited in other domains, it persists in the regulation of land use – invisible to most citizens but profoundly shaping where and how they live.
For those concerned with housing affordability, economic dynamism, and individual liberty, understanding this ideological dimension is essential.
Technical tweaks to planning systems will achieve little if they do not address the collectivist assumptions at their core.
Twenty years after I first began examining Britain’s planning system, I find a certain validation in New Zealand’s reform efforts.
They confirm what Alan Evans and I observed in 2005: that housing unaffordability is not an inevitable condition but the product of specific policy choices rooted in mid-20th century collectivism.
Still, it remains frustrating that planning in Britain – even twenty years after our publication – remains largely unchanged from what we described in 2005.
On 21 June this year, the twentieth anniversary of our report’s publication, I shall be on a business trip to Amsterdam. I plan to mark the occasion with a glass of wine, most likely on my own, and raise a toast to my late co-author, who all those years ago introduced me to the wonderful world of urban economics.
What makes this milestone a little more bearable is witnessing the exciting changes happening in New Zealand two decades later.
Whether New Zealand succeeds in breaking free from this legacy remains to be seen.
But the very attempt represents a hopeful recognition that our cities need not forever remain hostages to the socialist dreams of the 1940s.
Perhaps Luxon’s government will finally result in houses that markets – not socialism – built.
To read the full article on the Quadrant website, click here.