📌 What’s the Problem?
Right now, developers and landowners can:
- Mislead councils with carefully crafted but false or incomplete data
- Suppress land to manipulate housing supply figures
- Fragment sites to avoid environmental checks
- Deliver consultations that say little — and hide even more
And they do this knowing one thing:
There is no real legal risk.
Unless there’s proven criminal intent — and even then — the police and CPS typically won’t act. Councils don’t have the power or budget. Meanwhile, the public loses trust, infrastructure falls behind, and housing policy is warped.
⚖️ But What If This Was Finance?
If a company inflated its stock price by releasing false information, or coordinated with others to suppress market supply, that would be market manipulation — a crime. The UK criminalised this years ago because unchecked distortion causes systemic harm.
In finance:
- Making false or misleading statements = crime
- Withholding key information = crime
- Creating false impressions = crime
In planning:
- The same conduct = “business as usual”
🧠 Why This Analogy Matters
🔁 Let’s connect the dots:
| In Finance | In Planning |
|---|---|
| Stock price | House price & land value |
| Investor | Council & public |
| Market distortion | Planning distortion |
| Insider coordination | Developer coordination |
| FCA enforcement | No equivalent |
The system is being knowingly gamed — and just like in finance, it needs a legal firewall.
📜 How Stock Manipulation Became a Crime
🔹 Step 1: Patterns of Abuse
- Market crashes
- Widespread investor harm
- Collusion and price distortion
Governments didn’t wait for one scandal — they recognised a pattern of abuse, hidden behind technical processes and legal grey areas.
🔹 Step 2: Legal Reform
- FSMA 2000 created civil offences for market abuse
- Market Abuse Regulation (MAR) (now UK law) criminalised:
- False/misleading info
- Fake trading activity
- Concealed positions used to distort market outcomes
These changes weren’t radical. They were the baseline for system integrity.
🧱 The Same Needs to Happen in Planning
Planning allocates:
- Land
- Infrastructure
- Community trust
But it has no equivalent protections. That’s why we propose:
🧾 The Solution: A Simple Legislative Mechanism
We are calling on Parliament to adopt:
- A statutory duty of candour in planning submissions
- A new criminal offence:
“Planning Fraud by Misrepresentation or Omission” - A mandatory referral mechanism for Local Planning Authorities to report suspicious or coordinated submissions
- Whistleblower protections for professionals who see what’s happening and speak up
✅ Bottom Line
If you lie to distort financial markets, you risk prosecution.
If you lie to distort planning decisions, you still get planning permission.
That needs to change.
This proposal isn’t about punishing developers — it’s about rebuilding public confidence, enforcing truth in policy-making, and ensuring planning decisions are based on reality, not manipulation.