Tom Tugendhat: evaluation

Transcript context

…Even though we’re much wealthier and better educated, it seems that we — and I don’t just mean the UK here — we can’t build anything like, say, Bath or York. Why is that? Where have we gone wrong? We can, actually. The king has built Poundbury. I’ve seen some fantastic designs for communities near Faversham. I’ve seen some really nice designs for communities in other parts of Kent, and there are people who are willing to do it. But the challenge you’ve got is, you’ve got to have long-term interest. Actually, the great irony is that what we’ve swapped is, we’ve swapped the ability to plan for the long term with the ability to plan only for the short. Once you do that, then you put huge financial constraints on. Once you restrict the ability of people to access land, and so you put all of the costs on the land rather than on the building, you end up massively distorting the amount that people are willing to spend on the architecture and on the quality because, of course, people aren’t doing this for charity. They need to make a profit out of it. Profit is a perfectly noble motivation, and we need to make sure that people are able to do that. If we constrain their ability to spend on beautiful architecture by restricting the supply of land so they have to pay an inflated price for that, then you end up with worse-quality design and worse0quality housing. If I think back to the 1970s, and I suppose even the ’60s in Britain, my impression is a lot of very good buildings were knocked down, probably by mistake. Is that why YIMBY has a bad name in a lot of Britain today?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.