Statecraft, Centralised Localism and the Political Geographies of the Housing Delivery in London

How do states channel market forces into meeting public policy goals? What evolving forms of calculative practices are involved in doing so? What modes of statecraft and (re)constitution of the state does this entail? In this paper, we consider this navigation of state-market relations in the planning system in which market-based mechanisms for boosting housing supply has become a primary focus for a range of governments concerned with ameliorating worsening affordability. Lacking clear means of directly boosting supply, policymakers in such contexts have focused on planning reform to facilitate market delivery, alongside the introduction of target-based metrics imposed on local state actors to support delivery. We will focus on the failure of England’s flagship policy to boost supply, the Housing Delivery Test (HDT), illustrated through the case of Greater London as the UK’s most high-pressure housing market. While changes in the UK planning system have been argued to have been characterised by processes of austerity and financialisation since the 2008 financial crisis, recent literature has focused on the situational specificities of ‘statecraft’ in driving such changes. Building on recent work on hegemony and central-local relations in the planning system, we argue that England’s mode of planning statecraft has been characterised by ‘centralised localism’ in which marketisation is facilitated by selective disintermediation between central and local government. In focusing on planning targets as a means of navigating state-market boundaries, we highlight an important aspect of statecraft as the wielding of practical tools to achieve governance as such. This connects recent debates on housing governance and planning reform to broader debates on quantification and accountability in the iterative negotiation of statehood across contexts.