There is a serious case against Britain’s housing model. Dale Vince does not make it.
I am a brownfield-first SME developer in London, and this is the hardest business environment I have known. I know developers across the country: strategic-land businesses, shop-and-upper specialists, regional housebuilders and auction traders. Almost nobody in the built environment is having a good time.
None of us accepts children in temporary accommodation, overcrowded families or young people unable to leave home, start families or move for work. Housing is a wicked problem. Only simpletons think the answer is simple. Only simpletons think transferring taxpayers’ money to state-run organisations will automatically produce a building boom.
Dale Vince and I agree on one point: a builders’ boom would be among the most beneficial things Britain could do for productivity. Construction creates local employment, apprenticeships, supply-chain activity and useful assets. It binds capital, labour and expertise around productive work.
But Britain also has a confidence problem. We increasingly treat profit as moral failure, capitalism as exploitation and businesspeople as predators. That matters. Builders organise capital, people and materials around productive endeavour. The surpluses generated by successful enterprise ultimately fund public services, pensions and social provision. A country that vilifies productive risk-taking should not be surprised when less of it occurs.
There is also a credible piece of analysis beneath Vince’s campaign. The CEBR work commissioned by Babelfish appears to be a serious attempt to quantify brownfield housing capacity and model the economic effects of developing it. It distinguishes direct construction activity from wider supply-chain effects and acknowledges planning delay, skills shortages, rising costs and the collapse of SME building capacity.
However, Vince has perverted that analysis. He converts conditional capacity into 1.4 million homes supposedly “waiting” to be built, modelled economic activity into money apparently returned to government, and a complex account of institutional failure into an accusation that private builders are deliberately suppressing supply.
The argument Vince could have made
There is a respectable argument he could have made. Britain’s dominant housebuilding model is speculative private sale. Developers build to effective demand, not abstract housing need. A family may need a home but still lack the income, deposit or mortgage capacity to buy one. Builders therefore manage output around local absorption: the number of homes that can be sold without destabilising prices or trapping capital in unsold stock.
This can produce a privately rational build rate below the socially desirable rate. Planning scarcity also raises barriers to entry and favours large incumbents capable of carrying years of delay. Brownfield sites often involve fragmented ownership, contamination, missing infrastructure and viability gaps that the state may be better placed to address. Social housing and other tenures can also broaden demand and accelerate large sites.
That is the steelman case: private housebuilding is necessary but insufficient; planning scarcity can produce excess returns; the state should unlock difficult sites, support non-market housing and penalise genuinely implementable permissions that remain unjustifiably dormant.
That is not Vince’s case.
He says the large builders resemble an “OPEC-style cartel”, are “hoarding” land, “build slowly to keep prices high” and enjoy a “free ride”. The evidence does not support those claims.
His 869,000-plot figure combines short-term and strategic land. More than half is strategic: often unallocated, unconsented and controlled through options rather than owned as ready-to-build plots. Even short-term land may still require reserved matters, legal agreements, condition discharge, roads, utilities, drainage or remediation.
A pipeline is not evidence of hoarding. A builder completing thousands of homes annually must control several years of prospective land because planning is slow, uncertain and failure-prone. The Competition and Markets Authority examined thousands of sites and concluded that large land pipelines were largely a rational response to the planning system. It warned that forcing them down without fixing the causes could reduce completions.
Nor does cumulative profit prove predation. Vince cites billions of pounds over a decade without reference to revenue, capital employed, cyclicality or risk. The five largest builders have averaged roughly 9–10% statutory net margins over the past five years. That is not unusually high within the FTSE 100 and is modest relative to many capital-light, branded or information businesses.
Historic returns may sometimes have exceeded the cost of capital. That deserves scrutiny. But it is an argument about planning scarcity, barriers to entry and market structure—not proof that builders are cartelising output.
Vince’s “OPEC-style cartel” language is especially weak. Parallel behaviour is not the same as collusion. Builders face similar planning constraints, financing costs and local absorption limits, so they often behave similarly. That is predictable economics, not evidence of an agreement to suppress national supply. The CMA’s recent investigation concerned suspected exchanges of commercially sensitive information, not a conspiracy to restrict overall housebuilding.
The brownfield claim is similarly distorted. Brownfield registers identify potential capacity, not serviced, viable homes ready to start. Sites may be occupied, contaminated, fragmented, flood-prone or disconnected from infrastructure and demand. The CEBR analysis models what could happen if these sites were consented, assembled, financed, remediated and built. Vince presents the modelling assumption as an existing inventory.
He also treats a planning classification as an environmental trump card. Brownfield development should be prioritised, but “brownfield” does not automatically mean ecologically worthless, commercially viable or well connected. Some previously developed land has high biodiversity value or requires carbon-intensive remediation. Some low-value greenfield land beside existing transport may support better, lower-carbon settlement patterns.
Brownfield-first is sensible. Brownfield-only is a development veto disguised as environmental virtue.
One of the most egregious errors concerns value. Babelfish derives a figure of roughly £275 billion by multiplying potential plots by average selling prices. That is not the value of the landbank. It is closer to hypothetical gross development value after completed homes have been built and sold.
Before any residual land value exists, someone must pay for construction, planning, remediation, roads, utilities, drainage, professional fees, finance, affordable housing, sales, warranties, tax and years of development risk. Presenting gross completed value as the value of land being “hoarded” is economically illiterate.
Britain’s actual housing crisis has several causes.
The planning system is discretionary, slow and politically vulnerable. Local plans are weak or outdated. Permissions remain unimplementable because utilities, highways, drainage and infrastructure are unresolved. Mortgage affordability constrains private sales. The tenure mix is too narrow. SMEs cannot absorb years of planning and financing costs. Public agencies, regulators and utilities control critical dependencies without being accountable for housing delivery.
National politicians promise housing numbers. Local authorities and existing residents bear the visible disruption. Utilities and statutory consultees control delivery-critical decisions. Developers receive the blame because they are the actor visible at the end of the chain.
Housebuilders respond to those constraints. That does not make every outcome desirable. It means attacking the response while preserving the system will not work.
The solutions are structural.
Planning should become more rules-based: local plans should settle location, density, design and infrastructure requirements, after which compliant schemes should be approved administratively. Planning departments should be properly funded, but deadlines for councils, utilities and statutory consultees should become real.
The planning and regulatory framework should also be simplified. Requirements should be proportionate to site size and risk. Standardised conditions, clearer information requirements, simpler obligations and more predictable viability rules would reduce fixed costs that currently favour large firms over SMEs.
The state should focus on functions where it has a comparative advantage: assembling fragmented land, using compulsory purchase, remediating contaminated sites, delivering trunk infrastructure, funding social housing and enforcing quality and consumer protection.
Public bodies should create serviced development platforms, then divide them into parcels for volume builders, SMEs, housing associations, rental investors and custom builders. That crowds in private capital rather than replacing it.
Large sites should contain multiple tenures so they are not wholly dependent on one pool of mortgage-funded buyers. Genuine stalling can be penalised, but only after a permission is detailed, legally complete, serviced and implementable.
Most delivery must remain private. Building hundreds of thousands of homes requires risk capital, procurement, labour, local knowledge, cost control and distributed decision-making. A national public builder would still rely on private contractors, consultants, manufacturers and trades. Without expanding capacity, state procurement merely competes for the same land, labour and materials and crowds out viable private schemes.
State intervention should therefore be judged by additionality. Did it create a permission that would not otherwise exist? Assemble land that private parties could not coordinate? Install infrastructure that unlocked several sites? Fund a tenure the market could not provide? Maintain capacity during a downturn? Attract private capital rather than replace it?
The state should permit, coordinate, unlock and commission. The private sector should finance, build, own and operate.
Vince’s rhetoric is not merely wrong. It is socially self-defeating. It offers false hope that hundreds of thousands of homes are already waiting, absolves the institutions that created scarcity, and encourages punitive policies that raise risk, deter investment and entrench the largest firms at the expense of SMEs.
Britain will not solve its housing crisis by turning building into a vice. It will solve it by making permission abundant, infrastructure certain, regulation simpler, entry easier, tenure more diverse and development profitable.
Edward Freeman is Managing Director of SME developer Rare Origins.
