The financialisation of housing land supply in England

Quintin Bradley

doi:10.1177/0042098020907278

Abstract

The aim of this article is to identify the calculative practices that turn urban development planning into the supply-side of land financialisation. My focus is on the statutory planning of housing supply and the accounting procedures, or market devices, that normalise the practices of land speculation in the earliest stage of the urban development process. I provide an analysis of the accountancy regime used by planning authorities in England to evidence a 5-year supply of housing land. Drawing on the work of Michel Callon on market framing, I assess the activities of economic agents in performing or ‘formatting’ this supply, its boundaries, externalities and rules of operation. I evidence the effect of this formatting in normalising the treatment of land as a financial asset and in orienting the statutory regulation of land supply to the provision of opportunities for the capture of increased ground rent at a cost to the delivery of new homes.

Highlights

The liberalisation of town planning systems has been a necessary accompaniment to the increasing financialisation of land and Corresponding author: Quintin Bradley, School of the Built Environment, Engineering and Computing, Leeds Beckett University, Northern Terrace, Leeds LS1 3HE, UK
Rather than serving to moderate ‘the increasing tendency to treat the land as a pure financial asset’ (Harvey, 2006 [1982]: 387), town planning is seen as instrumental to property market growth
The focus of study is on the ‘invisible power of an inscription’ (Latour, 1987: 14) – in this case an annual monitoring account of housing land supply – to shape choices and influence decisions and transform the world it describes and obstruct the policy goals it is intended to help implement (Miller, 2001)

Summary

Introduction

Housing markets (Rydin, 2013; Savini and Aalbers, 2016). Rather than serving to moderate ‘the increasing tendency to treat the land as a pure financial asset’ (Harvey, 2006 [1982]: 387), town planning is seen as instrumental to property market growth. This paper makes a significant addition to existing work on the role of the statutory planning system in facilitating the financialisation of landed property (Waldron, 2019; Ward and Swyngedouw, 2018) It identifies these processes at the earliest stage in the urban development process and in the market in land separable from, and at the expense of, the supply of housing. It demonstrates the performative impact of statutory planning practices in formatting the market for the speculation in land and in establishing the supply-side conditions required for landowners to treat their property as a financial asset (Crosby and Henneberry, 2016). I explore the performative effect of housing land accountancy in embedding the use of land as a financial asset in the urban development process and I conclude by assessing the impact of financialisation on the rate and scale of housing development

Town planning and the financialisation of land

The rise of site promoters and the market in permissions

Findings

The normalisation of planning for land speculation