The Reader: Fat-cat builders have milked the planning system for decades

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Tricky: a brownfield site in East London
In Pictures via Getty Images
28 February 2019
WEST END FINAL

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City Editor Jim Armitage and the Government miss the point [“Fat-cat Persimmon boss snubs chance to eat humble pie”, February 26]. Milking the planning system by big builders is a racket that started decades ago.

Spotting future building land, seizing control through options and conditional contracts is easy if you have long credit lines with banks. Current use value of an acre of farmland in the Home Counties is £10,000 an acre. Value with consent is worth £1 million to £5 million per acre. Nearly as good as the Lottery. I know. I started my career years ago buying land for one of them.

The culprit is our broken planning system, aided by short-sighted local residents who fear change near them. Builders love it. Land-dealing profits are underwritten regardless of market oscillations, guaranteeing demand driven by an ageing population.

Tough, of course, as first-time buyers are forced out.
Ian Campbell

EDITOR'S REPLY

Dear Ian

I COMPLETELY agree with your points about the planning system. Short-term local politics and Nimbyism have become the prime feature of the country’s failure to build the homes we need in the South-East. The result is spiralling house prices, which keep families stuck in tiny rental flats, unable to get on the housing ladder.

The issue of landbanking is complex. You highlight the problem but come up with no solutions. Forcing builders to build on their land could lead to unintended consequences — state meddling in markets usually does. Investors might refuse to back builders if they were under orders to build whatever the economic weather. It’s far from clear, too, that we have enough tradesmen and materials to build on all the land with planning permission.

No doubt the builders would find tricksy ways around the rules anyway: sink some foundations in, then leave the project lying fallow like you would have done anyway.

Having said that, as an insider in the market, I’d like to hear more detail of how you’d fix the system. Please send me your ideas.

Jim Armitage, City Editor

Collins had right vision for Ireland

Further to your editorial [February 26], the life goal of Eamon de Valera was to remove the border in Ireland, and he failed. The life goal of Michael Collins was to make Ireland a modern, prosperous, forward-looking country, which it is.

Collins was indeed murdered, but the point you should have made is that de Valera, in a fit of petulance, denounced the Anglo-Irish Treaty, creating the Irish Free State.

Despite giving the treaty team, which included Collins, the authority to reach a deal, he believed the Irish people would rise up with him to fight against the border between North and South.

De Valera was so sure he was right that he released the poison of civil war. He lost, the Treaty was passed and the party of Michael Collins formed the first Irish government and remained in office for 10 years.

Because de Valera survived, he lived a long life knowing full well he could never match up to Collins.
Desmond FitzGerald

Show we’re better: take in IS children

We SHOULD show the world that we really are better than IS and take in the babies and children of their fighters. They didn’t choose their parents. It wasn’t their fault. As for the youthful parents, we deprogrammed Hitler Youth children 70 years ago. Why can’t we do it again?
Michael Brett

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