The District Plan controls what people can build on a site, and so it’s natural to ask whether those rules have affected how much housing has been built. 

But on the other hand, these rules don’t compel anyone build on a particular site, and so we need to be careful about jumping to conclusions.  We need to look at how much spare capacity there is under the current rules, because if there is a lot of underutilised land there could be a variety of impediments preventing development

Wellington has a very large amount of underutilised land.  The planning rules have nothing to do with this. Planning rules are always a source of grumbling but when we look at this under-developed land we realise that there must be something else going on.