Land for the Many and a New Politics of Land

Land reform has not been a major political issue for close to a hundred years in England.¹ Until very recently it has seemed as if small incremental changes were the only feasible goal, indeed I made this argument myself just a few years ago (Kenny, 2015). However, last year the largest political party in Western Europe commissioned me and six co-authors to propose a comprehensive agenda for land reform. We published the final report, Land for the Many, in June 2019 (Monbiot et al., 2019).² Regardless of whether our recommendations are adopted, I believe this report reflects the emergence of land reform as a serious and growing political issue.

This paper introduces our analysis of why land should lie at the heart of politics and how planning is integral to much of it. It also explains some of the reasons why land reform rose up the agenda in England, and considers what a new ‘politics of land’ might mean both in England and globally.

Why Land Must be a Key Political Issue and the Main Battleground

Our report started from the premise that land underlies many of the issues people care about, but this role is ignored or deliberately obfuscated:

Dig deep enough into many of the problems this country faces, and you will soon hit land. Soaring inequality and exclusion; the massive cost of renting or buying a decent home; repeated financial crises, sparked by housing asset bubbles; the collapse of wildlife and ecosystems; the lack of public amenities – the way land is owned and controlled underlies them all. Yet it scarcely features in political discussions. (Monbiot et al., 2019).

In framing the report we conceived of land as both a core factor in all these issues, and a central pillar in future positive social change. Just as abuse of land underlies many of our most pressing problems, the land can also play a central role in healing the damage that has been done to society.

For the rest of this article I focus on the parts of Land for the Many which are most relevant to planning. However, the report is extremely wide ranging and advocates pulling on many policy levers. The land reform agenda communicated in our report mainly focuses on the following core areas.

• Transparency – making all information on land ownership, use and control open and easily accessible.

• Reducing speculation in the land market – reorienting incentives and stabilising land prices through strengthening tenants’ rights and introducing a range of regulatory, fiscal, and macroprudential reforms.

• Ownership – exploring new models of land ownership which could help deliver social outcomes.

• Development – ensuring development is controlled by democratic bodies and communities, and responds to social need rather than profit alone.

• Access to land – policies to expand and protect the rights of the public to access and use land to meet their needs.

• The Environment – ensuring it is possible to plan for how farming, forestry and other major rural land uses can work for people and the planet.

The Role of Planning in a Land Reform Agenda

We argued that many of the problems with development in the UK can be traced to a reliance on private developers operating on a speculative model. The duty of these companies is to their shareholders, and they shape the built environment in ways that maximise shareholder value. In many cases, the result is buildings, tenures and amenities that bear little resemblance to those that communities need. Taking back control means creating a new model, in which development is led by democratically-accountable bodies with a duty to serve the public interest, working in partnership with local people, landowners and others.

Our report did not present reform of the town and country land use planning system as a silver bullet solution, however, we did recommend specific changes to its operation in England. The main planning-related changes we proposed were securing transparency, increased public participation, pro-active publicly-led development, and extending planning to cover farming and forestry (activities traditionally excluded from planning regulation).

It is likely that many of the areas we considered, would be central to land reform agendas in other countries. Indeed, many of our proposals were strongly influenced by systems elsewhere. Most prominently, recent land reform legislation in Scotland included several policies repeated in this report, for example the establishment of a Land Commission to oversee reform and the Right to Roam across all uncultivated land. Further afield, our focus on development corporations was partly influenced by greater state involvement in land assembly in countries like the Netherlands. We can learn from examples in New Zealand and Montana when it comes to providing transparent information on land ownership, control and management. Our proposed Community Participation Agency was partly inspired by the French Commission Nationale du Débat Public, in relation to the goal of securing the participation of citizens in major infrastructure planning.

Chapter 2 of the report focused on the role of information on land in enabling greater democratic engagement in land use and making it easier for small builders and communities to play a larger role in development. We argued that land use planning would be made more effective and accessible by complete, transparent and accessible data. To this end we proposed “that planning applications and development plan policy data should be published in a simple, consistent way, with geospatial boundaries under open licensing … ” and that we also need “better data on ownership, options and developers’ records.” At the moment information on land ownership is incomplete and expensive to access, whilst control of land is rendered even more opaque by developers securing ‘options’ to purchase it in the future, with this legal control over the land being wholly invisible to the public.

Opening up data and making it accessible is often presented as a way to make planning more efficient, and it certainly could help with this. However, more importantly, it is also fundamental to democratic, effective, and equitable planning. Land markets often display asymmetric information, with private landowners and businesses using their control over information on land to protect and extend their advantage. The reforms we proposed would give more information and therefore power to small builders and communities.

Indeed, in Chapter 5, we argued that genuine and early public participation in land use planning is essential to a land reform agenda. Our analysis of the current situation highlighted a relative lack of influence from communities in relation to central government, landowners and the development industry, and very little consideration as to the needs of children and future generations. We called for “a shift from a system dominated by developers to a more dynamic system, characterised by constructive tension between democratically-elected bodies and direct community engagement.” To achieve this we proposed a new independent body with a federated structure and a mandate to influence for all parts of the community in land use planning. We also called for public deliberative processes to lie at the core of plan making. Finally, we called for ‘Future Generations Champions’ to represent the needs of children and those not yet born in decision-making, inspired by recent legislation from Wales (Welsh Government, 2015).

Just as government has played a key role in proactive development in Britain in the past, and governments in other countries play a central role in development today, we need local government to assume a powerful role in development. From the end of World War II to the early 1960s the state was able to buy land at close to its existing use value (normally agricultural), however, the Land Compensation Act 1961 and a series of court cases meant that the state has had to pay far more to secure land for development (Bentley, 2018). This, alongside other reasons has led the British state to retreat from pro-active development, leaving the market to dominate development and the primary motivator to become shareholder returns. We need to celebrate public planning and increase our ambition for what it can achieve. We proposed a major role for local authorities and public development corporations in assembling sites for development. This would be made easier by changing land compensation law to allow the public sector to purchase land at closer to the existing use value, and to share more of the uplift in land values with the public.

Finally, we proposed that the Government explores extending the planning system to include major farming and forestry decisions. When the modern UK planning system was created, agriculture was seen as having a largely benign impact on nature, whilst urban development was seen as the risk to the countryside. However, this is clearly not the case now. Research, including the State of Nature Report 2016, indicates that the main threat to nature in Britain today comes from industrialised agriculture (Hayhow et al., 2016). Farmland birds have plummeted by 56% since 1970 (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs [DEFRA], 2018). In the UK, agriculture is responsible for around 46 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions annually – some 10% of the UK’s total (Committee on Climate Change [CCC], 2018). The Committee on Climate Change has recently outlined necessary steps for achieving net zero emissions including less livestock production, restoring peat bogs, and greatly increasing woodland cover to draw down and sequester more carbon from the atmosphere (CCC, 2018).

We need to develop a regime capable of delivering the land use we require to avoid catastrophe. This could develop from the planning system, it could be a new regime or it could be based on developing and enforcing far tougher environmental regulations. However, this will almost certainly require the skills of planners.

A New Politics of Land?

To implement solutions like those proposed in Land for the Many we will need a new politics of land which captures the imagination of the public. Given the entrenched interests opposing reform, major public support will be needed to provide momentum. Land ownership in England is very unequal, with around half of the land owned by less than 1% of the population (Shrubsole, 2019). Moreover, landowners have major influence in politics and the media (Monbiot, 2019). Until the House of Lords reform in 1999, the upper house of the UK parliament was largely made up of hereditary peers who were almost all major landowners.

The problems that land reform seeks to address are not limited to the UK. I believe a global politics of land could help tackle both domestic issues in each country and global issues which require global solutions. Developing this politics of land will require finding ways to communicate analyses and solutions which people can relate to as well as making the most of political opportunities to force land on to the agenda.

For Land for the Many, we started from the premise that a politics of land must be based on normal people understanding the role land plays in the issues they care about. In England, land as a political issue has been stimulated by greater awareness of various crises and how they are related to land use. In particular this includes unaffordable and insecure housing, financial instability, inequality, biodiversity and soil decline, public health and welfare, and of course climate change. Alongside awareness of these issues there has been concerted intellectual work and information campaigns which have highlighted the central role land use plays in all of them.³

Different messages break through at different times in different places. The most important driver in England in the last five years has probably been the growing scale of the housing crisis, which has led more and more people to understand how important land is to their ability to afford suitable housing. This was helped along by work such as the book Rethinking The Economics of Land and Housing, which joined the dots between the housing crisis and the way we own and trade land (Ryan-Collins, Lloyd, & Macfarlane, 2017).

Now, as warnings of impending climate disaster are thrust on to the agenda by scientists and activists, people are increasingly discussing the crucial role of land in climate change. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent report, Climate Change and Land (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC], 2019), highlighted the central role land plays in human livelihoods; the supply of food, water, and ecosystem services. It also made it clear that human use of land is crucial to the climate system. These messages are breaking through both in the UK and internationally. This is perhaps seen most obviously in land use change being a ubiquitous demand of the growing climate movement

Political developments in the UK also played an important role in pushing land up the agenda. The Scottish Government passed two Land Reform Acts in 2003 and 2016 after decades of campaigning from figures such as Lesley Riddoch and Andy Wightman (now a Member of the Scottish Parliament). The reform of the upper chamber of the UK Parliament, the House of Lords, means that traditional large landowners now have less direct political power. Finally, the UK Labour Party elected a new leader in 2015 who was open to considering structural changes to the UK’s established power structures.

The UK is certainly not the only country experiencing political turbulence and this comes with both dangers and opportunities. The uncertainty is concerning, and may make it difficult to take strong international action in some cases. However, it also provides space for new ideas to emerge.

A Positive Vision for Reforming Land and Society

A politics of land is rising, powered by the crises that necessitate it. However, this politics is not just about responding to a scary vision of the future. Instead it should be tied up with a positive vision of the kind of society we want to live in. A powerful message from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s report on Climate Change and Land was that in addition to tackling the climate crisis, most of the solutions relating to land use would also “contribute positively to sustainable development and other societal goals” (IPCC, 2019).

We can reform the way we use land in to make us healthier, more resilient and more equal. But to get there we will need a politics of land which seizes imaginations. I look forward to seeing it develop.

We are very interested in the role of land in reform agendas in other countries, and in the role land use planning systems play in them. If you have any thoughts to share on this issue please email us at [email protected].

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tom Kenny

Tom Kenny is a social researcher with a particular interest in housing and land use policy. He has worked at the National Centre for Social Research, the land use think tank Shared Assets, and the Royal Town Planning Institute. He is also a co-investigator in the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence. All the authors of Land for the Many contributed to the report in a personal capacity rather than representing organisations or employers.

Notes

1. Due to Devolution in recent decades policy around land has diverged to a significant enough degree that it makes little sense to talk about the UK as a whole. Scotland in particular has an established land reform agenda which has been enacted in policy. The emerging English land reform movement is deeply influenced by the progress achieved in Scotland.

2. The report was written by George Monbiot (editor), Robin Grey, Tom Kenny, Laurie Macfarlane, Anna Powell-Smith, Guy Shrubsole, and Beth Stratford. Names of co-authors are in alphabetical order and the seven authors played an equal role in the production of the report. The report was commissioned by the UK Labour Party, which will consider the proposals as part of its policy development process in advance of the next UK general election. The full report and a summary of recommendations in English and Spanish are available at www.landforthemany.uk.

3. For example, The Committee on Climate Change’s, Land use: Reducing emissions and preparing for climate change (CCC, 2018), Who owns England?, a blog and book exploring land ownership and its influence (Shrubsole, 2019), and Land for What, a set of events designed to bring together land-based campaigns in the UK.