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Despite the growing belief in the efficacy of market forces, the ownership and use of land in Britain are now '...subject to a greater array of statutory controls than at any time since the introduction of the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act'.

'Market failure' arguments are used in support of land use planning. However, in this radical attack on the present regime, Mark Pennington shows that such arguments are misguided. Planners, even if altruistic, could not gather and interpret the information which would be necessary to run an efficient land use planning system. In practice, planners have their own interests and are subject to pressure from special interest groups which benefit from the present regime.

Fundamental change is required, according to Pennington. The system is over-centralised, there is too little experimentation, information is lacking and incentive structures are inappropriate. The costs of enforcing property rights could be reduced by entrepreneurial action in a market. Private covenants, deed restrictions and the establishment of proprietary communities are the way forward.

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Mark Pennington

Dr. Mark Pennington is a senior lecturer in political economy in the Department of Politics, Queen Mary, University of London. He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics. His main research interests center on Hayekian and public choice analyses of the regulatory state, with a particular focus on environmental policy. He has published two books on the political economy of the British system of environmental regulation; Planning and the Political Market: Public Choice and the Politics of Government Failure(Athlone/Continuum: 2000), and Liberating the Land (Institute of Economic Affairs, 2002). At present Dr. Pennington is developing Hayekian arguments against communitarian theories of "citizenship" and their implications for the appropriate boundaries of the regulatory state.