Publications
All Policy Exchange publications are free to download in .pdf format. You can also purchase hard copies of the majority of our reports – check each individual report page for details.
Housing & Planning Publications
Create Streets
Create Streets shows how demolishing high rise social housing blocks and replacing them with real streets made up of low rise flats and terraced housing would improve the lives of thousands of people who suffer from living in multi-storey housing.
Planning for Less: The impact of abolishing regional planning
Planning for Less shows that councils are planning to build 272,720 fewer new homes since the abolition of regional planning. The report argues that rather than fighting councils the government should now work with them to ensure that they actually deliver the homes their targets propose.
Why Aren’t We Building Enough Attractive Homes? Myths, misunderstandings and solutions
Why Aren’t We Building Enough Attractive Homes: Myths, misunderstandings and solutions shows how large developers are ‘playing’ an outdated planning system and fooling the government into potentially wasting taxpayers’ money propping up land prices. The report recommends wholesale changes to the planning system to end ‘land banking’, give local people planning control and get more good new homes built.
Ending Expensive Social Tenancies: Fairness, higher growth and more homes
Selling expensive social housing as it becomes vacant could create the largest social house building programme since the 1970s. The sales would raise £4.5 billion annually which could be used to build 80,000-170,000 new social homes a year and create 160,000-340,000 jobs a year in the construction industry.
Cities for Growth: Solutions to our planning problems
Cities for Growth sets out how reforming planning laws and the development of new ‘Garden Cities’ can both solve our housing crisis and boost economic growth.
More Homes: Fewer Empty Buildings
More Homes: Fewer Empty Buildings proposes that, as part of a strategy for growth, the government should reform the Use Classes Order to make it much easier to move buildings and land from Use Classes A (retail) and B (employment) to C3 (dwelling houses).
Planning Curses: How to deliver long term investment in infrastructure
Planning Curses shows how despite efforts to streamline planning, vital projects are not going ahead because of over-elaborate and unrealistic economic predictions.
Housing People; Financing Housing
Housing People; Financing Housing recommends that housing associations should be set free to raise money through methods like equity investment. This so-called “equitisation” could raise £30 billion and build an extra 100,000 new homes a year.
Making Housing Affordable: A new vision for housing policy
Making Housing Affordable calls for a radical overhaul of housing policy, saving taxpayers around £20 billion a year. It calls for a big increase in the number of new homes being built for sale or rent in areas of high demand, with social housing tenants given new ways to get onto the first rung of the housing ladder.
Building Blocks: An investigation into Building Schools for the Future
The report recommends that Labour’s flagship Building Schools for the Future programme should be radically simplified and the quango who currently delivers this project – Partnerships for Schools – should have its remit curtailed.