In this Institute of Economic Affairs podcast, IEA Managing Editor Daniel Freeman speaks with Dr Kristian Niemietz, IEA Editorial Director, about his chapter in the forthcoming book The Great Stagnation. The conversation covers why Britain has struggled to build almost anything for decades, from housing to lab space to supermarkets, and how this shortage of building land helps explain the country’s weak economic growth.
Kristian explains how the rationing of building land dates back to the nationalisation of development rights in the late 1940s, and how this has left Britain with smaller and fewer homes per person than most of Western Europe, a shortfall he puts at around 5 million houses. He argues this isn’t a problem of physical space, since only around a tenth of land in Britain is developed, but a political failure to release land in the places where growth is happening. The discussion also covers how the same constraints hit commercial and retail space, choking off growth in productive areas like Cambridge, and considers pushback points including why growth held up through the 1980s and 90s despite the same planning laws, and whether recent political enthusiasm for building more will actually be followed through. Kristian ends by rating land use regulation as roughly an eight out of ten barrier to UK economic growth.
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