Keir Starmer's Labour Party pledges to build 1.5 million new homes over the next parliamentary session.Ian Forsyth/Getty Images

John Rapley is an author and academic who divides his time among London, Johannesburg and Ottawa. His books include Why Empires Fall (Yale University Press, 2023) and Twilight of the Money Gods (Simon and Schuster, 2017).

Although Canada’s housing crisis is more acute than most, many Western countries are wrestling with the same problem. So the ambitious plan by Britain’s new government to tackle that country’s crisis should interest Canadians.

By and large, the housing crises have the same root cause – lack of new supply because of bottlenecks and underinvestment. Britain’s new government has announced a bold plan to tackle the first problem. It will take planning approval out of the hands of municipalities and centralize it, set mandatory house-building targets for local councils, open up some greenbelt lands to development and commit to building the supporting infrastructure new housing will need.

Centralizing the planning process should eliminate the powerful obstacle to new construction of NIMBYism, whereby property owners lobby local councils to block new building in their neighbourhoods. The ill-fated Boris Johnson government unveiled a proposal for centralized planning but was........

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