Planning Without Policing: The Wild West Britain Forgot to Regulate

What’s the point of having rules if no one’s enforcing them?

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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.

Submission to Rt Hon Damian Hinds MP

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

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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.

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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,” the submission notes. “It raises the entry cost for everyone else while preserving space for speculative actors to manoeuvre.”

The Myth of a Broken System — and Who It Works For

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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.¹

Meanwhile, the public has no clear way to track who owns land, how long it’s been banked, or whether infrastructure promises tied to planning permissions have ever been fulfilled. And without that, there’s no way to hold anyone to account.

National Security Isn’t Just at the Border

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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

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This submission to Parliament sets out six clear and actionable reforms — from developer licensing and a public land register to redefining housing as critical national infrastructure. 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.

In line with this, a seventh recommendation is advanced: the introduction of a temporary moratorium on political donations from developers, land promoters, and their affiliates.

“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?

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And given Britain’s long history of regulatory leadership — from financial market safeguards to the origins of community policing — it’s time that same standard was applied to land and housing. Especially when it’s future generations who will pay the price for doing nothing.