To fix housing, you need to blow up housing planning

So, a political party promises to build an enormous number of new affordable houses in their first term --- "affordable homes, social housing and new towns, with planning reforms to stop nimbys blocking building."

Not, this is not Labour's Kiwibuild -- this is the UK. But no matter. The points made there by the Adam Smith Institute help explain the failure here. First:

We, of course, would be delighted if there were 1.5 million more homes. We’d probably mutter that if there were that many new ones then they don’t, in fact, need to be affordable nor social. For if supply is increased that much then all homes will become more affordable. Rather the point of the exercise we’d hope.

Building new homes makes all existing homes more affordable, all else being equal. Building many new homes, if you can, would make them all that much more affordable.

But there's another point. Perhaps even a problem:

Given the current planning laws there is no possibility whatsoever of gaining that amount of new housing [even] in one 5-year parliamentary term. For it takes about 5 years from gleam in the eye of a builder eyeing up a green field to the removal vans arriving with the new furniture. Which means that substantial reforms to the planning process are required to be able to do this.

Fair point. And there's an even better corollary:

But if there are substantial reforms to the planning process to enable this to happen then the problem is already solved - we’ve reformed the planning system so that large volumes of new housing can be built. Huzzah!

That's what didn't happen here. And maybe still won't. 

Over there (Britain) the Adam Smith Institute reckons the planning "reform" most urgently needed is to blow the system up! 

I reckon the same is needed here.

Blow up our planning and buildings laws so that spec builders can make a profit again -- as they were when they were building the houses that still shelter us all -- and in no time they'll be able to build enough houses to make them all more affordable again.

But that would require politicians without constituents wedded to rising house prices. That is to say, it would take a government with real courage.

Do we have one?