The political economy of housing in England

Miguel Coelho, Sebastian Dellepiane-Avellaneda and Vigyan Ratnoo

New Political Economy, 2017, vol. 22, issue 1, 31-60

Abstract: Problems of housing affordability have been afflicting parts of the UK, especially the South East of England, for a number of years. The problem is closely related to shortages in housing supply, which are, in turn, largely associated with constraints imposed by the English land planning system. A leading theory for explaining these constraints posits that they reflect political economy forces that convey the interests of current homeowners to planning decisions in disproportionate and excessively influential ways. We test this theory by examining survey data on public attitudes to house building in local communities; and by investigating whether these attitudes are related to local planning decisions. We find that there is a tendency for owner-occupiers to express greater opposition to local house building and that, in the decade to 2011, the housing stock grew significantly less in local authorities with higher proportions of owner-occupiers among local households. The results suggest the risk that planning decisions might have been distorted in favour of current homeowners is real and economically significant. We discuss a range of historical, socio-economic and policy trends that help explain why successive governments of various stripes have been reluctant to address head-on problems in housing supply and put a curb on house prices.

Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13563467.2016.1195346 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cnpexx:v:22:y:2017:i:1:p:31-60

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/cnpe20

DOI: 10.1080/13563467.2016.1195346

Access Statistics for this article

New Political Economy is currently edited by Professor Colin Hay

More articles in New Political Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().