Planning Without Policing: The Wild West Britain Forgot to Regulate
What’s the point of having rules if no one’s enforcing them?
That’s the uncomfortable paradox at the heart of England’s housing and planning crisis. It also forms the starting point of a recent submission I delivered to Rt Hon Damian Hinds MP, as a Medstead resident seeking systemic reform.
This article revisits and expands that message — not as a formal submission, but as a public-facing challenge to the idea that this crisis is accidental or unavoidable.
Britain once understood that when essential systems are vulnerable — especially in times of scarcity — the law must intervene. During wartime, hoarding and profiteering weren’t left to the “wisdom of the market”; they were met with criminal penalties, rationing controls, and public trials. Nobody needed a spreadsheet to know that manipulating the food supply during a national emergency was wrong.
And yet today, in a peacetime housing crisis, developers are free to do just that — hoard permissions, delay supply, inflate land values, and extract speculative profit from a basic need. There is no licensing regime. No delivery enforcement. No recognised offence for gaming the planning system — even when the behaviour is coordinated, repeated, and predictably harmful.
In finance, these tactics have names: market abuse, insider dealing, false accounting. In housing, they’re still called “commercial strategy.”
This submission asks why one of Britain’s most vital systems — land and housing — remains the only one where strategic manipulation is both legal and politically protected.
Engineering the Crisis: Market Manipulation, Not Market Forces
Today’s housing shortage is not just a failure of planning — it is the product of strategy.
Many of the largest developer groups operate not just as builders, but as land accumulators. They withhold delivery, pursue speculative permissions on new sites, and then point to the very backlog they helped create as justification for further approvals.
This isn’t accidental — it’s engineered scarcity: a slow, quiet form of market control that inflates land values, fragments infrastructure, and disables local planning.
While the public sees delayed housing and overstretched services, these actors see opportunity — permissions used as trading chips, not delivery contracts.
At the same time, they exploit viability loopholes — overstating risk, inflating costs, or claiming schemes are barely deliverable — to strip out affordable housing, delay infrastructure, and shield profit margins.
At the same time, they exploit viability loopholes — overstating risk, inflating costs, or claiming schemes are barely deliverable — to strip out affordable housing, delay infrastructure, and shield profit margins. These viability assessments are typically made at the permission stage and, critically, are almost never re-tested post-delivery — even when market conditions improve or sales values soar.
This means developers can downplay profitability when it matters most (during permission negotiations), then lock in those reduced obligations permanently, without any later clawback when actual profits vastly exceed forecasts.
The tactics are systemic: salami-slicing major schemes into piecemeal applications, laundering delivery risk through joint ventures, and operating through networks of land agents, consultants, and proxies that fragment accountability and neutralise local resistance. In any other critical sector, this would be recognised as coordinated regulatory evasion.
Planning complexity has become a tool of soft control — one that raises the entry cost for genuine local builders and communities, while preserving space for speculative actors to manoeuvre and manipulate from the shadows.
The Myth of a Broken System — and Who It Works For
The English planning system is often described as broken — too complex, too slow, too risky. But in reality, that complexity serves those who know how to use it. It shuts out small builders, community projects, and under-resourced councils, while giving an edge to those with legal teams, land agents, and political connections.
In short: the rules aren’t failing. They’re doing exactly what they were designed to do — for the people who helped shape them.
Large developers benefit from the confusion: it shuts out small builders and communities while giving an edge to those with legal teams, land agents, and political access.
They secure allocations in the Local Plan, then delay building in order to let land values rise — often holding onto sites for years without delivering a single home.
At the same time, knowing that councils must meet centrally imposed housing targets, they quietly gain control of land outside the Local Plan — and later apply for planning permission on those “windfall” sites.
These applications are carefully split into small, phased submissions to avoid triggering proper environmental assessments or infrastructure obligations. It’s a deliberate strategy of fragmentation.
Between 2011 and 2021, for example, the rural village of Medstead saw its population grow by almost 40%. Yet not one development in that period was ever assessed as having significant cumulative impact — because each was treated as minor in isolation.
Meanwhile, the allocated sites remained undeveloped.
This engineered underdelivery causes the local authority to fail national housing tests, triggering what’s known as the Tilted Balance — a policy that forces councils to approve almost any development, no matter how unsuitable, if they cannot demonstrate a five-year land supply.
That phrase — no matter how unsuitable — is not rhetoric. It reflects what actually happens on the ground.
In effect, developers manufacture planning failure in order to unlock more profitable, unplanned growth. And even when this strategy is clear and deliberate, there are no legal consequences — because the system does not recognise land hoarding, strategic delay, or fragmented applications as forms of abuse.
The problem isn’t that the system is broken. It’s that it works — just not for the public.
What’s missing from all of this is the effect on house prices — and the illusion that more permissions somehow improve affordability.
In reality, the government’s method uses a built-in “affordability uplift” multiplier: the higher the local house price-to-income ratio, the more homes a council is told to build.
The assumption is that oversupplying the market will bring prices down. But in areas like East Hampshire, this simply hasn’t happened. In 2011, the affordability ratio here was already above 10; by 2021, it had risen above 13 — despite continuous housing delivery.
delivery, where there’s no mechanism to enforce tenure mix, delivery pace, or community-led outcomes. And the cycle starts again.
Why? Because the homes being delivered are unaffordable to most local residents, and the pressure to meet rising targets keeps inflating land values, not fixing affordability.
The more expensive an area becomes, the more it is told to build — and yet the homes built don’t reflect local wages, infrastructure doesn’t catch up, and speculative investors benefit most.
This creates a self-reinforcing cycle: rising prices → higher targets → more permissions → higher land values → higher prices.
The very tool meant to address unaffordability ends up entrenching it — especially in places controlled by developer-led.
National Security Isn’t Just at the Border
An unregulated housing market isn’t just economically reckless — it’s strategically dangerous.
In an age of cyber threats, supply chain disruption, and democratic backsliding, it’s astonishing that land control — one of the UK’s most strategic assets — is still not treated as a national security issue.
Opaque ownership, offshore holding structures, and untraceable planning influence aren’t theoretical risks. Democracies from the US to Germany have seen authoritarian regimes like Russia attempt to shape outcomes through soft-power levers: media, property markets, and political donations.
If this behaviour were seen in energy, banking, or defence, the submission argues, it would be classed as a resilience threat. In housing, it’s just called the market.
A Submission That Calls the Bluff
This submission to Parliament — which I was invited to share and had the opportunity to deliver in person to Rt Hon Damian Hinds MP on 30 May 2025 — sets out six clear and actionable reforms — from developer licensing and a public land register to redefining housing as critical national infrastructure. It is accompanied by a supplementary proposal: Why and How to Deliver a Moratorium on Developer Donations — a practical outline for insulating planning decisions from political finance and restoring public trust in the integrity of the system. But it is more than a policy framework. It is a direct challenge to Parliament to stop treating housing as a private market concern and to begin recognising it as a failure of national governance.
For a period of five years, or until the national housing affordability ratio returns to pre-crisis levels, no political party or candidate should accept donations from companies, associations, or individuals with substantial financial interests in land development, housebuilding, or speculative planning promotion.
The logic is simple. As long as the housing system remains unstable and open to manipulation, those who profit from its dysfunction should not be allowed to finance the very decisions that govern it. Without a firewall between development capital and political decision-making, even the best-designed reforms risk being quietly dismantled before they take effect.
This proposed moratorium extends the ethical standards set out in the submission’s sixth intervention — which calls for formal developer licensing, enforceable conduct rules, and legal penalties for serious planning abuse. If developers are to be held to higher standards, then so too must the political institutions responsible for oversight.
Other democracies — including Canada, France, and Ireland — already ban or restrict corporate donations from regulated sectors. The UK, by contrast, continues to allow them, even in situations of clear conflict of interest.
Until this changes, the public cannot be confident that housing policy is being written for those who need homes — rather than for those who trade in them.
Why Damian Hinds? Why Now?
On this occasion, I have made both the risk and the path to mitigation clear.
I chose to communicate directly with Rt Hon Damian Hinds not only as my constituency MP — in line with proper protocol for raising matters of national concern — but because his ministerial background in security, education, and systemic resilience is directly relevant to the risks now emerging in planning and land governance.
This submission is now part of the public record. The ownership of action — or inaction — is therefore also on the record. The responsibility has been passed, openly and traceably, to those with the power to intervene.
The question now is whether Britain will finally bring land and housing under serious oversight — not in abstract principle, but through enforceable systems that safeguard the public interest.
I do not claim authority — only duty. And in fulfilling that duty, I have left my reasoning on the record.
“When in doubt how to behave — behave decently.” In systems as consequential as these, decency is not a private ideal. It is a public imperative.
