Professor Rob Kitchin:

We are all agreed that active land management is necessary, is a useful thing for local planning and for large-scale strategic spatial planning and is key to the national planning framework and being able to deliver on that. The real issue is how it will do this. We are pretty poor at infrastructure. We tend to build the housing and then try to do the infrastructure afterwards. We do not have a strong track record, with a few exceptions such as Adamstown and so on, of thinking about the infrastructure going in before or at the same time as the housing goes in. There potentially will be a move towards doing that in the Land Development Agency with proper master planning towards co-ordinating and putting in infrastructure at the right points and making sure of that. It is very evident in places such as the unfinished housing estates where there were houses but no roads, water, sewerage or street lighting because of the point at which they failed. In other countries it was the other way around. Photographs on Google Earth in 2009 showed that in the US, there were the roads and infrastructure but the houses were missing because the infrastructure had to go in before everything else so that when people move in they have what is needed.

Co-ordination of that would make a lot of sense. If that does not happen and pressure is put on the transport or health systems, because only the housing estate is dealt with and nothing else around that is co-ordinated, then that becomes a problem. It needs to move towards larger-scale local development plans where there is joined-up co-ordinated planning around that, as opposed to just developing specific sites. If we get into the business of creating specific sites, we will create a series of other related issues around schools and health centre capacity, water or sewerage or whatever else. In other European countries, development companies like the certainty of planning. Construction companies like knowing what will be developed over the next 30 or 40 years. They know their phasing, they know there is certainty in the market and that this is almost certainly going to happen. They like the certainty and profit. They are often not looking for mad profits but for a good 5% or 6% return. They are not looking to make a huge buck and get out. It would be positive if we can move towards that. Whether our developer or construction industry would like that is a different matter but perhaps we can move the planning mindset onto having much more co-ordinated long-term planning. The Land Development Agency is a good vehicle to do that and we should be landbanking. We know the population will go up by 500,000 over the next 20 or 30 years and that we are going to have to build infrastructure and so on and we should be doing it in a co-ordinated way.