Land Reform from the Ground Up – Report and Resources

Land Reform from the Ground Up – Report

The Policy Working Group of the Land Justice Network held a successful day dedicated to exploring what we need from land reform in order to achieve our goals of a fairer and more equitable society in which everyone is able to benefit from land, the basis of all wealth.

Why land matters

The day began with speakers from Granville Community Centre, Community Food Growers Network, Radical Housing Network and the Save Earl’s Ct campaign, London Co-operative Housing and St Ann’s Redevelopment Trust. They explained why the issue of land is fundamental to their campaigns- being able to have access and control of land for housing, community centres and community food-growing.

The People’s Land Policy (PLP)

A speaker from the Policy Working Group briefly presented its work on a PLP which would be the basis of making policy and legislative demands to meet the needs of a variety of campaigns.

Private Ownership and the Commons

Two speakers gave presentations showing contrasting approaches to land ownership: the history of private ownership and the Commons. The general feeling was that the Commons model shows the way forward for creating a society where we can all benefit from land and have a say in how it is manged.

The Experience of Scotland

The afternoon started with a speaker on what progress Scotland has done on land reform, including the 2003 and 2016 Land Reform Acts. The main point is that though progress is not radical in the sense of truly challenging the massive inequalities of ownership, a positive start has been made and land reform is firmly on the public agenda.

Resources:

Next steps?

The remainder of the afternoon was spent in groups discussing what policies we think would make good first steps in the rest of the UK. Groups were given a list of policies and asked to choose 5 that they think would make a good start. Groups responded to this in different ways as the feed-back report shows.

Resources:

Feedback on next steps

There was no clear consensus about the way forward both in terms of some of the polices themselves, eg disagreement about land value tax, or what exactly we should focus on for a Land Reform Bill. However, there seemed to be a strong feeling that we need to move forward towards land reform.

Below is a summary of what the three groups’ discussions. From this I attempt to draw some conclusions about what we might do next.

Group One

We need to start with something that grabs people’s attention – gets people thinking about the topic of land reform.

We selected two main policy areas:

1. Free, easy and compulsory land registry so that interest in land, housing, companies is easily accessible. Having this information will make it easier to push for other policies and is also necessary for campaigns for land access.

2. Grabbing reform: we need to democratise land decision-making and make it more collective. It needs to be easy for communities to anticipate what might happen and to come up with solutions. In other words we need to get communities more engaged in making decisions about how land is used.

Further down the line we would see the importance of establishing a Land Commission.

Group 2

Nearly all points were supported by someone on the table. Nearly all the points are important- a lot of interconnections. .

• Land Commission was supported. But then where does democracy come in- do you need local land Commissions- who is in control?
• Ownership and community control of land were central. This included concern that public land is being sold off as well as how public land could be used by communities. There was criticism of the concept or ‘right to buy’ even if it communities. This implies property and ownership and exclusion. This also applied to agricultural tenants’ right to buy. Should we be taking land from one landowner and give to another even if that landowner may be a small farmer or a community? Maybe we should talk instead of community stewardship.
• Banning foreign ownership was thought to be problematic- associated with nationalism, anti-migrant etc. So maybe we should focus on people or companies based in tax havens owning land.
• Interest in LVT but need to know more about it.
• Taxation policies: eg on underused property and maybe LVT but need to know more about it.
• Squatting- not everyone agreed that squatting should be legalised. Where it takes place needs to be defined.
• Democratising decision-making about land use is a key issue. Many of the policies need to have participation. Issues such as how we define community, how do we get more people involved in decision-making, who represents the community etc. This is a problem of the Land Commission- it needs to reflect a diverse range of people and not be top down. Community groups currently do not have the same power as landowners and developers. It is difficult for community groups to keep up with everything. We need to level the playing field.
• Get away from the banks role in financing purchases of things like housing. Peer-to-peer finance.

Group 3

This group discussed the LVT as the main way of addressing the issues of land such as capturing increased in land value so that the benefits went to society and also the size of land holdings as the more land you have the more you have to pay.  It has been tried in places such as Hong Kong and it has been very successful.

However, others stressed that maybe we need to go for smaller, ‘easy-win’ policies such as right to roam and squatters’ rights. These could help change the way people see the world around them.

Others had some reservations: LVT implies that land is a commodity. It accepts the market as a regulator- the tax tries to control and manage the market to achieve desired outcomes.  There should be more taking over of land by the public and community trusts. The more you deprivatise land the less you have to worry about tax solutions.

Tax is a word that might cause people to recoil in horror. Maybe use a different term such as community land charge.

Other issues raised in plenary

LVT

• How broad should the grass roots movement be? Just Space, affiliated to LJN, does not support squatting or the LVT so it would be difficult to reach a consensus on this.
• We could use different terms- such as a betterment tax or have a more targeted approach rather than support for an all-encompassing LVT.
• We need to learn more about LVT and hear the pros and cons.

Other

• What support is there for land reform? Who are our allies?

What next for the Policy Working Group

There was general agreement that we would all benefit from more workshops, focusing on some of the issues raised in the last session. These might include:

1. Public ownership: what is happening to public land, how can have more direct and democratic community control over how public land is used and managed, what role for community buy-outs

2. Land Value Tax: to what extent can this be used to achieve our goals?

3. Transparency on ownership: what is the situation at the moment, what information do we need and how could we achieve this

Get in touch

For more information on the Policy Working Group of the Land Justice Network contact Bonnie by emailing landjusticeuk@gmail.com