I looked for a source for this statement in the article:

> Granting permission takes the median hectare of land from £20,000 to £2.4 million - a 139x uplift.

I couldn't find one. However, I did run into some interesting viewpoints by a certain Paul Cheshire, Professor Emeritus of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics... "one of the world’s pre-eminent housing economists"

He has this to say about "Green Belts":

> Britain imposed its first Green Belt in 1955 and now, if re-zoned for building, farmland at the built edge of London has an 800-fold mark-up. There was no secular trend in housing land prices in Britain until the mid-1950s, but after Green Belts were imposed real prices increased some 15-fold. More than houses because you can substitute land out of house production. There is a similar pattern in Canada, New Zealand or the West and East coasts of the United States where policies restrict land supply.

https://www.newgeography.com/content/006358-lse-economist-pa...

> I couldn't find one.

A parliamentary publication from 2018 estimated the uplift factor to be 93x outside London and 287x inside [1]. Found via ChatGPT.

I would think that the north-south variation has flattened a little bit by now, but I can't immediately find any similar document from the last couple of years.

[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/..., page 12.

[2] https://www.progressive-policy.net/publications/gathering-th...

I have not researched this but someone I know at one of the big house-builders pegged the cost of building a 3 bed at around £35-40,000, so in the south east land with PP is 10X more valuable than what's sat on it.

"Farm" land, even in the SE is about 12K an acre, and you get 6-8 houses to the acre so you should be able build a three bed and sell it for £50K on the outskirts of London, Cambridge, Oxford or Brighton (just by example) still making a profit if we liberalised planning in those areas. That shows you how extreme this situation of fake constraint is.

It could therefore never be allowed to happen. The big house-builders wouldn't build and sell at that price, the locals wouldn't allow it as they've bought their houses for 500K, 10X as much and would literally all go personally bankrupt...