"Britain's nasty planning laws"

Adam Collyer has posted an excellent rant, well worth a read. I left the following comment:

I completely agree.

As an aside, this post reminds me of when I was helping a client negotiating the sale of a more-or- less-derelict site a few years ago. The developer let slip that he calculated the price he’d pay on the basis of permitted number of flats x £50,000 per flat.

This gave us a starting figure of £4 million (eighty flats). A month or two later, the council increased the permitted density to a hundred flats, so we went back to the builder and asked for £5 million (which he duly paid).

Now, tell me, who created that additional £1 million land value or the total £5 million value?

Not the factory owner (he had probably depressed local land values by having a derelict site); not the builder (the £50,000 per flat comes out of his profit); so was it perhaps the local community – the shops, the bus station, the train station, the cinema etc?

And given that this was in a suburb, the trains and buses were only important because you could use them to get in to "town" where most of the workplaces are, so in a sense the whole town collectively created it.

And seeing as that "town" is London, which makes money from being the capital city of the UK (in a political and financial sense), wasn’t it perhaps the whole of the UK who helped create and pay for that value?