Who Runs Planning in England?

In our June 2025 e-newsletter we listed the 7 major house builders, Barratt Redrow, Bellway, Berkeley Group, Bloor Homes, Persimmon, Taylor Wimpey and Vistry who now effectively form a cartel and run planning in this country.

This “Corporate Capture” has been long in the making…

Companies with big enough budgets can ride roughshod over the planning system and have for a long time benefited from having their landholdings kept secret giving them an element of surprise when it comes to lobbying councils over planning decisions.  Representations, and calls for scrutiny and debate by concerned organisations like CPRE, on companies involved in land banking for the housing sector was given scant attention by previous governments.

The 2017 Independent Review for the government by Sir Oliver Letwin on Build Out, published in 2018, was drawn too narrowly to be able to make the charge of land banking.  But a housing market analyst, Neal Hudson, commented how the review remit ignored the most important and unknown bit of the market: sites and land ownership pre-planning. We are now acutely aware of the lucrative and growing industry of land promoters who, since that time, have made it possible for financial investors of a certain kind to make a business out of holding land as a purely speculative activity. Through planning promotion the volume house builders can persuade councils to change their site allocations in their local plans.

In Wiltshire we have wide spread experience of this, particularly with the promoter Gleeson.

Land will never lose its value, quite the opposite.

A visit to Land Registry data reveals the thousands of acres owned by these companies, but the more opaque ‘options agreements’ with landowners do not show up and are hard to investigate.

This was then, and is now, a serious issue for the planning system. But the government in 2017, ducked any deeper analysis of the Letwin report and enabled the housebuilding companies to continue to accumulate, strengthen and consolidate.

Backed up by the Land, Planning and Development Federation (LPDF) and the House Builders Federation the volume house builder cartel is now almost all powerful.

In February 2024 the Competition and Markets Authority launched a formal investigation into the seven major housebuilding companies, (Barratt Redrow, Bellway, Berkeley Group, Bloor Homes, Persimmon, Taylor Wimpey and Vistry), having established that there were reasonable grounds for suspecting that the “Parties” had infringed a section of the CMA rules by exchanging competitively sensitive information which effected house prices. In some cases the investigation involved the direct exchange of information between the Parties and certain other house builders, and in others the indirect sharing with other Parties through agents or consultants acting on behalf of those involved.

In October 2024 they issued their report and the preliminary view was that the Suspected Conduct may have had the object or effect of preventing, restricting or distorting competition with respect to the supply of new build properties and/or the purchase of land within various local areas across Great Britain.

Forward to July 2025.

The seven house builders have now agreed to pay £100m to affordable housing schemes throughout the country, without however admitting any culpability.

The Affordable Homes Payment

“The Parties propose to commit to make a payment of £100 million to His Majesty’s Government within three months from the Effective Date, which His Majesty’s Government shall disburse to the affordable homes programmes in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.”

Although the planning system is fundamentally democratic, it is also vulnerable and open to being gamed by these large corporate developers who can pay land assembly agents, planning consultants and expert lawyers. Cash strapped councils are outgunned by corporate wealth and land acquisition pre-planning,  and faced with the demanded delivery of huge government housing targets are quite unable to resist the market manipulation of land and housing delivery which has been exposed.

Find out more here!