William Blake’s poem, Jerusalem, the anthem of conservative sentiment, gives a surprisingly true vision not just of England but of the whole of the United Kingdom. The majority of the UK’s 60 million acres are lightly populated and comprise vast swathes of empty countryside. Urban plot makes up just 6% of the land and is where 90% of the population of England, Wales, Scotland and the north of Ireland live and work. The rest is 42 million acres of ‘agricultural land’ and 12 million acres of ‘natural waste’ – mountains, bogs, moors, estuaries and so on. Only 5% of England remains ‘common land’.
The feudal legacy
A 2009 parliamentary written answer to the question, ‘Who owns the land?’ states that: ‘The Crown is the ultimate owner of all land in England and Wales: all other “owners” hold an estate in land’.
This feudal heritage originates in land robbery, but is underpinned by a dense system of law upholding the rights of property. The aristocratic legacy of land ownership is evident in the Crown Estate (358,000 acres) and the estate of the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry (240,000 acres). But among the wealthiest estates are those of more recent date, like the estates of the Grosvenor family, which combined land buy-up with property development about 250 years ago. Mayfair and Belgravia were purchased to build housing for the ruling class which lived just outside the City of London (which had its own, medieval property laws).
Multinational investment
Those who own property in land make continuous acquisitions of further acres under compulsion to find additional investment outlets for capital. The Grosvenor Estate has expanded into the Americas, Australia, Asia and continental Europe since the 1950s. At times this has been for property development, at others for land purchase with future development potential. The estimated value of the Grosvenors’ Westminster land is £93,300,000 per hectare (about two and a half acres) which signifies a very large income from property – but this wealth must be continually expanded to keep up the return of rental income.
Indeed, all multinational investment funds, hedge funds and developers need a place to store and measure their wealth. Land in the UK has come to function as a ‘land bank’ for huge corporations. The 2,800-plus pension funds are the fourth largest landowners in the UK, with over 550,000 acres between them. Land ownership is turned into collateral for other trades and businesses. (See FRFI 253 for a detailed exposé of this trend in Scotland.)
The conservation lobby
When land is released for development its value increases by 20%. However, the rate of release of land onto the market is determined not by supply and demand but by power over land. In the UK’s distinctive land ownership pattern, non-governmental organisations hold vast tracts of land. The Forestry Commission is the largest single landowner with 2,571,270 acres, followed by the National Trust with 630,000 acres; the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds is one of the UK’s richest charities, owning 321,237 acres. Together with English Heritage and Natural England, this countryside power bloc is hostile to housebuilding and development on every level. They characterise themselves as guardians of the landscape when in fact they are ‘guardians’ of private land ownership. They form a network of shared interest with land bank owners in an empty countryside. Conservationists are hostile to working hill farmers but indifferent to the areas that have been transformed by multinational interests into agri-businesses by intensive crop and animal production.
Farming subsidies: an unearned benefit
The government of the UK gives subsidies of £5bn a year to all ‘farmers’, whether they produce anything or not, on land over 220 acres. The richest landowners receive the most with Sandringham, the Queen’s estate, getting £650,000 a year and the RSPB £700,000. In addition British farmers receive a subsidy of between £2.4bn and £3bn annually from the European Union under the Common Agricultural Policy; the government has said that it will replace this after Brexit. The family of pro-Brexit MP Iain Duncan Smith, who run Swanbourne Home Farms, was given £1,517,535 funding from the EU over a ten-year period. For any other sector of society these payments would be called unearned ‘benefits’. Further, neither landowners nor the ‘conservation lobby’ pay any form of council tax or business rates.
Ruling class power and banking capital is the major block to the housing provision of the future in the UK. Corbyn promises to build another million homes. The building is not the problem since the biggest cost is the price of the land: in London this can represent as much as 80% of the price of a building. The real question is whether the Labour Party will challenge power over land and construct homes on the underpopulated, privately-held lands of the UK.
Susan Davidson
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 254 December 2016/January 2017
