Monday 21 November 2016

Stephen Hill MA. MRICS.
Churchill Fellow and Director C2O futureplanners,
Biography Updated December 2018

Stephen is a chartered planning and development surveyor, working as an independent public interest practitioner, with forty years of public and private sector experience of housing, planning and delivering mixed-use development, urban extensions, new settlements, and community-led neighbourhood regeneration.

In an individual capacity, he played a part in the conceptual development of spatial planning and the development of the wellbeing powers, in the Cabinet Office’s Policy Action Team ‘Joining it up locally’ in 1998, the LGA’s work on “The future of local planning” from 1999-2000, and the Ministerial Sounding Board on Local Government Reform from 2001-05.

He has represented the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors on the government’s Housing Construction Roundtable (2009-10) and Housing Sounding Board (2010-16), and has recently retired from being their representative on the Housing Design Awards judging panel, and official observer on board of the Housing Forum, for which he  coordinated of a joint RICS-Housing Forum initiative to integrate institutional investment into housing and infrastructure.

He has written extensively on the causes of failure in UK property markets, most notably in 2013, for the TCPA Journal. His paper "It's the Land Economy, Stupid!" [1] looked at the period from the deregulation of financial markets in the mid-1980s to the housing market and credit crisis that unfolded over the first decade of the 21st Century, and analysed the persistent causes of failure in UK land markets and housing policy, and their damaging structural effects on society and the economy, and the entrenchment of inequalities in wealth and life opportunities. He proposed a package of five integrated reforms of taxation and the fiscal treatment of land, local government finance, the practice of spatial planning, and the structure of infrastructure investment markets and of the house building ‘industry’.

He was involved in the early development of policies to support the introduction of self/custom build as a significant part of housing policy, from Housing Minister John Healey onwards. In 2010-11, he was Chair of the Land, Procurement and Strategic Planning sub-group of the Government Industry Self-Build Working Group which launched the government’s Custom Build initiative, and led to the revision of the NPPF to include the needs of ‘people wanting to build their own homes’. More recently, in his professional work, he has been facilitator for a cohousing project supported by Cambridge City and South Cambridgeshire Councils, and as an adviser to South Cambridgeshire’s Right to Build Vanguard programme.

During 2018, he served as the External Expert on the RIBA's Ethics and Sustainable Development Commissions. Between 2010 and 2014, he was course tutor on professional ethics, and city planning for social and economic justice, for Cambridge University’s Interdisciplinary Design of the Built Environment Master’s, and currently tutors the Future of London Leaders Courses on professional ethics in planning and development.

He visited the USA and Canada in 2014 as a Churchill Fellow, and his report Property, Justice and Reason[2] was published the following year focussing on the relationship between the ‘state’ and citizens, through community organising for housing.  He advises the UK’s first urban Community Land Trust, (East) London CLT, and is a board member of the National CLT Network, and currently chairs the UK Cohousing Network 

Email: smdhill@gmail.com  Telephone: 07795 813 080