Does Britain Need a Second London? | The 33rd IEA Hayek Lecture

In this Institute of Economic Affairs podcast, chair Callum Price hosts the 33rd Hayek Lecture, introduced by Lord Frost, IEA Director General. Harvard Professor of Economics Edward Glaeser delivers the lecture entitled “Does Britain Need a Second London?”, examining the relationship between urban density, housing supply and economic growth. Kristian Niemietz, IEA Editorial Director, joins the panel discussion alongside Lord Frost to respond to the lecture and discuss its implications for Britain.

Glaeser sets out the economic case for cities, arguing that density drives productivity, innovation and upward mobility. He examines Britain’s chronic failure to build housing and infrastructure, tracing it to planning restrictions that have constrained London’s growth and throttled the capacity of other cities to develop. Drawing on data from across the United States, he argues that high house prices are a supply problem, not a demand problem, and that the places which build the most are consistently the most affordable. He also challenges the case for rent control, new state-built cities and large-scale rail investment, arguing instead for deregulation, brownfield densification and mass production in housebuilding.

The panel discussion ranges across Britain’s 18 years of near-stagnant per capita growth, the counterintuitive finding that planning restrictions worsened under Thatcher, the limits of government competence in directing economic development, and Lord Frost’s observation that government policy effectively killed Birmingham as a productive city in the post-war decades. The conversation closes with the argument that Britain is not physically full — it simply believes it is, and that changing that psychology is essential to changing the country’s economic prospects.

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