Planning Gain: Providing Infrastructure and Affordable Housing

This critical examination of the development and implementation of planning gain is timely given recent changes to the economic and policy environment.

The book looks both at the British context as well as experience in other developed economies and takes stock of how the policy has evolved. It examines the rationale for planning gain, how it has delivered substantial funds for infrastructure and affordable housing and, in the light of this, how it might continue to play a role in the funding of these.  It also draws on overseas experience, for example on impact fees and public sector land assembly.  It looks at lessons from the past for future policy, both for Britain and for countries overseas.

Planning Gain: providing infrastructure & affordable housing has a strong theoretical and policy analysis focus.  It addresses development values from a micro economics perspective; property development from the perspective of financial structures; betterment taxation and negotiated planning gain from principles of public finance and taxation and their links with the planning system; professional challenges in the use of planning gain; and the innovation, adoption and adaptation of planning gain at the local level from perspectives of discretionary policy and negotiating practice. It shows how negotiated planning gain has been a successful de facto betterment tax compared with earlier de jure attempts in Britain to tax development value through national taxation.

Mechanisms to tap development value are also a global phenomenon in developed market economies – whether through formal taxation or negotiated contributions.  As fiscal austerity becomes an increasingly challenging issue, planning gain has grown in importance as a potential source of funding for infrastructure and new affordable housing, with many countries keen to examine, learn from, and adapt the experience of others.