In 2018, Sir Oliver Letwin led a government-commissioned review into slow rates of housebuilding by UK property developers on land with planning permission, a large proportion of which in recent years has been acquired from public-sector bodies. Finally, it seemed, the Government was set to address a longstanding problem: land banking. Indeed, even the Conservative government’s own housing minister, Sajid Javid, as if pre-empting Letwin’s findings, conceded in January 2018 that there “is definitely some hoarding of land by developers”.
But when Letwin delivered his final report in the autumn, it was a major disappointment to critics of the property sector. There was seemingly no evidence of hoarding after all. “How can anybody come up with the idea that build-out rates are not slow, and that they are not tied to the monetary return to developers?”, one exasperated observer, a Labour councillor in Leeds, demanded to know.
If critical observers were deflated, they should not have been surprised. Vigorously lobbied and generously funded by the property sector, the Conservative Party has long shied away from meaningful confrontation with this constituency; if it has occasionally talked the talk, it has invariably declined to walk the walk.
Nowhere is this symbiotic, money-mediated relationship between the Conservatives and the property sector clearer than in regard to the ex-public land that today fills out UK developers’ land banks. Since Margaret Thatcher’s accession to power in 1979, the Tories and the property sector have been the core pillars of what the academic Philip Kivell 30 years ago described as a “coalition of interests” ranged against public landownership that also included private landowners, financial institutions, private industrialists and the growing population of homeowners.
This coalition has in recent decades presided over a profoundly significant and undemocratic phenomenon that has been largely hidden from the public eye. On the one hand, the property sector has channelled money the Conservatives’ way, while repeatedly calling for the government to “release” more public land to the private sector. On the other hand, successive Conservative administrations have succeeded in pressuring public-sector bodies across local and central government alike to give vast amounts of their land to those developers – usually in return for monetary compensation, but sometimes literally as a gift. Public land was sold when New Labour were in power, too, but in nothing like the same volumes.
This is land that was owned by the public, but which the public at large has never consented to relinquish; indeed, it has never been asked.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe