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The Sunday Express:
'Use green belt to fix housing land shortage'

6 July 2014

The Government's Help to Buy scheme was also helping first time buyers move into the market, she added but Prof. Cheshire rejected the measures as ''putting fingers in dykes''. ''The help to buy scheme is simply a recipe for increasing house prices. It has no other effect because supply is so inelastic,'' he said. ''The crisis in our housing market is absolutely and undeniably about lack of supply. The most important single factor to this is the planning system and the restriction on development for 60 years. There is no alternative but to reconsider greenbelt land. We have to increase supply of housing land and that cannot be done on brownfield sites alone because there is surprisingly few of them and they are not in the right places were the demand for housing is.''

This article was published in The Sunday Express on July 6, 2014
Link to article here

Related publications
Turning houses into gold: the failure of British planning, Paul Cheshire. Article in CentrePiece Volume 19, Issue 1, Spring 2014.
Turning houses into gold: the failure of British planning, Paul Cheshire. LSE British Politics and Policy blog, posted May 7, 2014.

Related links
Paul Cheshire webpage
Spatial Economics Research Centre (SERC) website

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