Right-to-Move-Out, not Right-to-Move

Like your blog, by the way. I've added it to the blogroll.

It was a bit more than liberalising planning laws. The following are from the Executive Summary of the Cities Unlimited report:

There is no realistic prospect that our regeneration towns and cities can converge with London and the South East. There is, however, a very real prospect of encouraging significant numbers of people to move from those towns to London and the South East.

We should go further [than liberalisation of land use in London and the South East]. No one likes urban sprawl per se, but suburbs offer a high quality of life to those who live in them and create the economic “bulk” that makes cities both prosperous and vibrant. Increasing the size of London so that it takes an extra minute’s journey to reach the edge of town would make room for another million people, increasing their opportunities. 

We also know that cities based on highly skilled workers are the most dynamic. Oxford and Cambridge are unambiguously Britain’s leading research universities outside London and both are well located economically. We should consider expanding both dramatically, just as Liverpool and Manchester expanded in the 19th century 

We propose that the Government should roll up current regeneration funding streams and allocate the money to local authorities according to a simple formula based on the inverse of their average income levels. Central funding would be available for a handful of exceptional circumstances, such as decontaminating highly polluted land. 

We propose that, wherever possible, we should stop demolishing properties. Instead, the Government should buy up the cheapest houses on the open market and give them to the next door neighbour in exchange for an equity stake in the expanded property. 

There's quite a lot of planning, or incentivising to an outcome rather than according to equitable principles, in that. In fact, that latter approach seems to be Tim's modus operandi. He works out what he thinks ought to happen, and then works out what market mechanisms could make it happen. This, of course, assumes that he is a better calculator of efficient outcomes than markets with rationally internalized externalities.

He should have called for a planning system that took better account of local externalities and provided more balanced incentives reflecting both the benefit as well as the social costs of development, and then left it at that. At the moment, because only the negative aspects are reflected in councillors' incentives, it is a no-brainer usually to say no. If there were a mechanism for balancing a benefit to the community against the subjective social costs, planning decisions would be more measured. My suggestion is that the rateable value (or council-tax band, for as long as we have to live with that duff system) should be negotiated as part of the planning process.