Alex Morton

Head of Housing, Planning & Urban Policy
alex.morton@policyexchange.org.uk
0207 340 2650

Biography

Alex joined Policy Exchange in October 2010 as a Senior Research Fellow in the Economics unit, with a particular focus on housing and planning issues. Alex rose to become Head of the Housing & Planning unit on its creation in September 2012.

Prior to joining Policy Exchange Alex was Secretary to the Conservative Party’s Globalisation and Global Poverty Group Policy Group under the Rt Hon Peter Lilley MP. Following this he worked in the Civil Service Graduate Fast Stream at the Department of Health, before leaving to publish Making Housing Affordable, which set out the cost of current housing policies and went on to win Prospect’s Magazine’s 2010 Think Tank Publication of the Year. He is the co-author of More Homes; Fewer Empty Buildings which argued for easier conversion to homes for vacant office and retail properties and Cities for Growth, which argued for a radical overhaul of urban planning policies and new Garden Cities close to existing urban areas.

In 2012 he authored Ending Expensive Social Tenancies which called for a huge social housing programme funded by sale of the most valuable social properties when they became vacant. This was followed by Why Aren’t We Building Enough Attractive Homes? which discussed again the failing planning and housing delivery mechanisms holding back the quality and quantity of homes in the UK. He finished with Planning for Less which discussed how the Coalition’s reliance on local plans was leading to falling housing targets. In January 2013 he co-authored Create Streets which argued that we could build hundreds of thousands of new attractive homes by redeveloping crumbling modernist multi-storey estates to high density terraced housing and low rise flats.