giving permission for land to be built on immediately makes it soar in value (this is known as 'betterment')

the Beveridge Report of that year, which underpinned the future of the welfare state by taking aim at the five social evils of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness

The free market answer to the malfunctioning planning system is simply to remove it, loosening regulations as much as is politically possible to make it easier for developers to build more, smaller homes and therefore bring prices down. This is ridiculously simplistic. It's derided even by right-wing thinkers: a report from the Conservative think tank the Bow Group rejects the conventional wisdom of the property lobby that planning deregulation and government subsidies for lenders and buyers will solve the affordability crisis. Report writer Daniel Valentine writes: 'The solution is not extra supply. Extra supply feeds house price inflation, by reassuring investors that house price inflation will continue. The property lobby says that price is a function of supply and that increasing supply will eventually prices. The opposite is actually the case.' Conversely, he points out that when supply fell following the financial crisis, prices fell as well. Investment markets operate differently from user markets, with investors attracted to the rising prices which exclude users. [...]

Ed Miliband identified similar issues and criticized developers for 'land banking', the process whereby housebuilders buy up land and fail to build on it as they wait for it to rise in value.