Planning Gain (eBook)

Professor Tony Crook is a chartered town planner, Emeritus Professor of Town & Regional Planning and former Pro Vice Chancellor of the University of Sheffield. His current research focuses on planning obligations and affordable housing and on the supply side of the private rented housing sector. His co-authored book with Professor Peter A Kemp, Transforming Private Landlords was published by Wiley Blackwell in 2011. He is also actively engaged in policy and practice. He is chair emeritus of the Shelter Trustee Board, Deputy Chair of the Orbit Housing Group, a non executive director of a regional house-builder, a Trustee of the Coalfields Regeneration Trust, a council member of the Academy of Social Sciences, and a member of the Royal Town Planning Institute Trustee Board. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and was appointed CBE in 2014 for his services to housing and the governance of charities. Professor John Henneberry is a charted town planner, a chartered surveyor and Professor of Property Development Studies in Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Sheffield. His research focuses on the structure and behaviour of the property market and its relation to the wider economy and state regulatory systems. He has particular interests in property development and investment and their contribution to urban and regional development. He has developed a distinctive 'old' institutional approach to property research that focuses on the impact of social, cultural and behavioural influences on market actors, structures, processes and outcomes. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. Professor Christine Whitehead is Emeritus Professor of Housing Economics at the London School of Economics and was for twenty years Director of the Cambridge Centre of Housing and Planning Research at the University of Cambridge. She is an internationally respected applied economist working mainly in the fields of housing economics, finance and policy. Major themes in her recent research have included analysis of the relationship between planning and housing; the role of private renting in European housing systems; financing social housing in the UK and Europe; and more broadly the application of economic concepts and techniques to questions of public resource allocation with respect to housing, education, policing and urban regeneration. Her latest book, with Kath Scanlon and Melissa Fernandez, Social Housing in Europe, was published by Wiley Blackwell in July 2014. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and was appointed OBE in 1991 for services to housing.

"Staff from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning have won this year's coveted Excellence in Planning Research Award for their text on Planning Gain. The award is made annually by the Royal Town Planning Institute, the global learned society and professional institute of chartered planners, following peer review of the best of the year's planning research by leading academics and practitioners. The award recognises the high quality and policy relevance of the work on planning obligations led by Emeritus Professor Tony Crook, Professor John Henneberry and Professor Christine Whitehead (at LSE) in collaboration with colleagues in the department, at the University of Cambridge and at the London School of Economics.

The work was commissioned by a wide range of organisations, including research councils and charities, government departments, and trade and professional bodies. Practitioners and policy makers helped design the research to secure its policy relevance. The work has led to many research reports, articles in research and professional journals, papers at professional and academic conferences, submissions to government consultations and parliamentary select committees' inquiries, and briefings for the policy and practice communities (local and central government and the legal, planning and property professions). The researchers regularly provided independent evidence on how planning obligations worked, critically commenting both on their effectiveness and on the policy changes regularly proposed.

All this work was brought together in Planning Gainauthored by the award winners and published in 2016. The book tells the 'story' of how planning obligations became an effective means of capturing development value and of securing affordable housing and infrastructure funding from developers, in a way that is accessible both to other researchers and to policy professionals."
--The University of Sheffield, press release (9/9/2016)
"This book makes a tremendous contribution to the subject by bringing together a rigorous theoretic approach, a clear narrative of developments since 1947, and a good deal of data on the revenue which has been gained for the public purse and on the new affordable homes secured from planning obligations. In particular, it is welcome to read a very clear account of why the taxation of land can be rather more distorting of land use than is sometimes supposed. This is a highly important book. The stress in the conclusion on moving towards public land banking is one I support. It also draws out the truth that government prefers to raise money from charges on development, rather than from property values (which, perhaps more rationally, could also be used to fund infrastructure) because this is not a tax and the effects are more hidden from the public."
--From the book's foreword by Dame Kate Barker CBE, DBE, Dame Kate Barker is a non-executive director of several finance and housing companies. She is also a former member of the UK's Monetary Policy Committee and of the board of the Homes & Communities Agency. She undertook independent reviews for the UK government of housing supply and of the planning system in England