Land underpins everything. On the geopolitical stage, you see it most crassly in Putin’s landgrabs in Ukraine, or Trump’s greedy desire to annex Greenland. But the importance of land goes far deeper than the territorial ambitions of states. It is the foundation of every nation’s economy: the fields that produce our food, the places where we build our homes. And underlying all this is land’s irreplaceable role in providing ecosystem services, from purifying water and preventing flooding to soaking up carbon in forests and peat bogs.

Britain, as an island nation, understands more keenly than other countries that land is ultimately finite. “Land differs from all other forms of property,” wrote one of Westminster’s rising political stars in 1909, arguing that it is “a necessity of human existence”, “the original source of all wealth”, and “strictly limited in extent”. The name of this thrusting young radical? Winston Churchill.

Part of a reforming Liberal government at the time, Churchill recognized that land’s finite nature made ownership of it a zero-sum game — to quote the future Prime Minister “by far the greatest of monopolies”. Certainly, this truth lies at the heart of the housing crisis of our own time. If little land is coming onto the market, one cannot simply make more of it to increase the supply. Land prices occasionally fluctuate, but they always go up in the long run: the total value of land in the UK increased from around £1 trillion in 1995 to over £5 trillion in 2016. You could rip up the entirety of the Green Belt tomorrow, only to see land values in those areas skyrocket, replacing the supposed block of the planning system with the block of landowners keen to make a tidy profit.

Suggested reading

We're running out of eggs

By James Rebanks

England’s market in land, after all, is highly illiquid: huge swathes of the country have been owned and inherited by the same aristocratic families for centuries. After the Norman Conquest, William the Bastard declared all land in England ultimately belonged to the Crown, before parcelling it out to his 200 barons as patronage. That concentration of landed power in the hands of a few set the pattern in England for a thousand years. In Belgravia, owned by Hugh Grosvenor, the Duke of Westminster, a statue of one of his ancestors bears the proud inscription: “The Grosvenor family came to England with William the Conqueror and have held land in Cheshire since that time.”

At the same time, land has taken on fresh relevance in the 21st century with the acceleration of the climate and ecological crises — because who owns land also enjoys huge sway over how it’s used. Land ownership comprises a “bundle of rights”, including not just the right to enjoy its fruits and charge rent, but also to exclude others (hence laws of trespass) and even the right to destroy or abuse land, the so-called jus abutendi. As the 18th-century legal scholar William Blackstone remarked: “if a man be the absolute tenant in fee simple [ie. a freehold owner]… he may commit whatever waste his own indiscretion may prompt him to, without being impeachable or accountable for it to anyone.”

Many of England’s biggest landowners have hidden their environmentally dubious records behind the oft-repeated lie that they are the trusted “custodians of the countryside”, who can be left to their own devices to look after rural England. Translation: no need for pesky environmental regulations, state oversight or public accountability. Though there are clearly some brilliant nature-friendly farmers and landowners, trying their best to restore nature to these de-wilded isles, the broader picture remains grim. The reality is that a tiny number of landowners have had an outsize role in ecological destruction, from the draining of the Fens and the destruction of England’s upland peat bogs, to the dire state of even our most protected nature reserves.

Those in possession of land have woven a powerful forcefield around questioning the status quo. A shroud of intense secrecy still surrounds even knowing who owns land in this country. The official Land Registry, despite being founded in 1863, still hasn’t completed its task of registering every landowner, and the vast dataset it possesses lies locked behind prohibitively expensive search fees. Influential lobbyists continue to press the case for landed privilege: the Country Land and Business Association (CLA), set up in 1907 to oppose land taxes, still protests the Government’s attempts to close the tax loophole of Agricultural Property Relief. We might sympathize with elderly farmers struggling with inheritance planning — less so with the likes of Jeremy Clarkson, who bought his Cotswolds farm with the express intent of avoiding tax.

Challenging any of this — the inequality of land ownership, and the way landed power mistreats this vital common good — is often referred to as “land reform”. In the modern world, this means both changing who owns land, but also changing the terms on which land is owned. Why should landowners’ bundle of rights include the right to destroy nature, for example, or the right to exclude others from even accessing the countryside? The cause of land reform once united politicians of all stripes, from Churchill to David Lloyd George and Clement Attlee. Serious land reform in England has been off the political agenda for decades. Yet now, finally, it is stirring once more.

The first straws in the wind came in the dying days of the Tory government. “There is… unquestionable public interest in who really owns land and property,” asserted Michael Gove, then Levelling Up Secretary, in the foreword to a government consultation on increasing transparency about land ownership. This strand of thinking has been taken up with gusto by Labour, with Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook recently announcing that the Government intends to open up the Land Registry, “prioritize free access to data”, and “enabling others to map” who owns land. If enacted, these changes could finally spell an end to the secrecy that has cloaked and protected landed power in England since the Domesday Book.

But Labour also appears willing to go much further. In its new Planning Bill, the Government has taken aim at the hoarding of land by landowners, addressing the sky-high land prices that thwart the building of affordable homes. Ministers propose to give local authorities powers to acquire land — compulsorily, if necessary — at close to existing use value: that is, shorn of the “hope value” that can inflate the price of a field from, say, £22,500 per hectare to £6.2 million per hectare. During a recent parliamentary debate on the Bill, Labour MP Chris Curtis mocked Tory opponents of this provision by approvingly quoting Churchill’s writings on land reform.

Starmer’s government also seems to be taking some inspiration from the successful land reforms that Labour-led administrations have enacted in Scotland. In 2003, First Minister Jack McConnell championed a Land Reform Act that created a Community Right to Buy: giving communities powers to register an interest in land; a right of first refusal when it comes up for sale; and a pause in the ordinary sales process to give them time to secure funds. Half a million acres of Scotland now belong to communities, from small-scale communal woodlands to a vast 10,000-acre former grouse moor, acquired in recent years by the townsfolk of Langholm. Now, Angela Rayner says she will create a Community Right to Buy in England, via the forthcoming English Devolution Bill.

Suggested reading

The war for the National Trust

By Wessie du Toit

Community ownership does not, however, simply mean transferring legal title over land from one person to another. It also opens up profound questions about landowner accountability, asserting that the public have a legitimate interest in how land is used for the common good. The Government now argues this too. In particular, it has recently issued a challenge to England’s biggest landowners to do more to restore nature. In March this year, Environment Secretary Steve Reed convened the first meeting of a new “National Estate for Nature” group, comprising huge landowners like the Crown Estate, the Duchy of Cornwall and the water company United Utilities. “Landowners must go further and faster to restore our natural world,” Reed told them, arguing that since they collectively own 10% of England, they “have a responsibility to future generations to leave the environment in a better state.” If major landowners want to claim to be stewards of the earth, they can. But now, the public needs to see proof of delivery.

The idea that land should serve the national interest, not just that of private property owners, also animates Labour’s proposed Land Use Framework, which seeks to more rationally plan how we use the finite resource of land. It equally lies behind the Government’s planned ban on moorland burning: an ecologically destructive practice carried out by the wealthy owners of grouse moors to prop up their archaic Victorian bloodsport. Setting fire to heather helps maximize the numbers of grouse for shooting. But, more importantly, it also damages England’s most important natural carbon store — our upland peat bogs — and forces the residents of Sheffield and Manchester to breathe in acrid smoke and suffer worse flooding. The dukes and oligarchs who possess England’s 150 grouse moors view them, in the words of The Spectator, as the “ultimate trophy asset”. But the Government is now signaling that this land should instead be treated as a national asset: and looked after accordingly.

There is still much to be done, of course, to push forward more ambitious land reform in England. When in opposition, Labour initially committed to introducing a Scottish-style right to roam in England, but later U-turned following intense lobbying by the CLA and National Farmers’ Union. It should look at the polling, and think again. Almost 70% of the public want a right of responsible access to the English countryside — a sentiment shared by people living in rural areas and cities alike. There are also worrying signs that the Government is watering down some of its commitments around Community Right to Buy, a move which would deny communities the chance to dream big and own not just pubs and village halls but also rivers, woods and peat bogs.

If, however, this is not the end, it is at least the end of the beginning. As the Labour government looks towards its second year in office, it should seize the land reform agenda with both hands, and lay claim to a tradition that united both Churchill and Orwell, and a great swathe of public opinion in between.

***

Guy Shrubsole is the author of The Lie of the Land, published by William Collins in paperback on 8th May.

A fascinating example is the relationship between the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 16th Century England and the Industrial Revolution a couple of centuries later. This is the subject of a rather brilliant piece of research by Leander Heldring, James Robinson and Sebastian Vollmer, which they write about for VoxEU.org.

They begin with the historical context:

“…[when] Henry VIII decided to break with the Catholic Church… he expropriated all monasteries in England, which collectively held about one third of all land in the country…

“When the management of these vast properties turned out to outstrip the bureaucratic capacity of his government, Henry sold all monastic assets in England.”

This was a lot of land, but why was its change of ownership so significant?

“Where lands were before held in long leases whose rates were set by medieval custom, lands now changed hands frequently and at market rates. In a few years between 1535 and 1542, the majority of monastic land was sold…

“The historical consensus on the immediate impact of the Dissolution was to break up archaic forms of land tenure and create a land market…”

Markets are all about the efficient allocation of scarce resources; and land (which they’re not making anymore) is an indispensable input to just about every economic activity. Henry was a brutal despot, but in selling off so many stolen acres, he accidentally created the basis for a modern enterprise economy – one capable of nurturing the seeds of an industrial revolution.

That’s the theory, but where’s the proof? Luckily for the researchers, English land records go back a long way. It also helps that monastic land holdings were not evenly distributed – thereby allowing those villages that were impacted by Henry’s ‘reforms’ to be compared against those that weren’t (because they didn’t contain much, or any, monastic land for Henry to confiscate):

“We choose comparison villages that lie close to impacted villages so as to make them comparable. When we statistically estimate the effect of having more monastic assets in a village in 1535 on industrialisation, we find a large positive effect – villages that had more monastic assets (by value) were more likely to have at least one textile mill by 1836 and employed more people in the textile industry.”

As well as a more industrialised workforce, the researchers also found that the former monastic villages had “higher productivity in agriculture” and were associated with a greater number of agricultural patents.

The Industrial Revolution was the most important economic event in human history – and its birthplace was Britain. No one is arguing it was the sole result of the Dissolution, but the contribution of a functioning land market to the growth of entrepreneurial culture not only makes sense, it also appears to be supported by the evidence.

Fascinating stuff, but of what relevance is it to us today? Well, despite the digital age, land (in the right place) is still a vital economic input. And though most medieval customs may be long gone, we have many modern restrictive practices that stop land markets from working as they should.

For instance, governments are shockingly bad at making the most productive use of their own extensive land holdings – including those in high-value global cities like London. Property developers use land banking and land option techniques to sew up and carefully ration the supply of land for new housing. Investment companies hold on to high-value sites in commercially attractive locations, not bothering to regenerate them because the rising value of the asset is all they need in showing off their balance sheets to shareholders. And most stupidly of all, tax systems treat property speculation, land hoarding and rent extraction as if they were a socially useful, economically productive activities and not the parasite on growth they actually are.

While not copying his methods, any government presiding over a sluggish economy needs to follow the example of Henry VIII – breaking up land monopolies and freeing the productive potential of local economies.