- Fairplay to Countryfile for publishing this.. Archived Message
Posted by Gerard
on January 15, 2020, 6:26 pm, in reply to "Re: The trespass trap: this new law could make us strangers in our own land"
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"Who owns England? But it’s not just the Home Counties where land lies in the hands of a few. Just over 400 hectares (1,000 acres) of central London’s super-prime real estate belongs to the Crown, the Church, and four wealthy aristocratic estates. Over 200,000 hectares (500,000 acres) of the English uplands are tied up in huge grouse-moor estates owned by around 150 people. The Duke of Northumberland, whose family lineage stretches back to Domesday, owns 40,468 hectares (100,000 acres) – a tenth of his home county. A handy chart showing the division of land ownership in England. Farmers are represented in most sectors – either as direct landowners (gentry) or tenants of the aristocracy, new money, conservation charities and others. Indeed, many of the largest landowners in the country today owe their standing to decisions made by the Norman king William almost 1,000 years ago. After conquering England, William declared all land belonged ultimately to him, before parcelling it out to his cronies: his barons and his allies in the Church. While the Church would have some of its land later seized by Henry VIII, and frittered more of it away through poor accounting, the aristocracy kept hold of their slice of the cake. When the Victorians ordered a rare census of landowners, they found that just 4,000 lords and gents owned half the country. By my reckoning, the aristocracy and gentry still own roughly 30% of England today. As the Duke of Westminster once said, when asked for advice for young entrepreneurs: “Make sure they have an ancestor who was a very close friend of William the Conqueror”. Since the industrial revolution, aristocratic families have been joined by successive waves of newly moneyed landowners. In the Edwardian period, industrialists who had made it often acquired land and titles in order to join the ranks of the upper crust; the beer-making Guinness family became the Earls of Iveagh and Lords of the 8,093-hectare (20,000-acre) Elveden Estate. Recent decades have seen Saudi princes and Russian oligarchs buy into London real estate and English country houses off the back of oil wealth and the sell-off of Soviet state enterprises. Corporations, too, have become major landowners in modern times – Land Registry data shows they now own around 18% of England and Wales. Some of the largest corporate landowners are household names, such as Tesco and BT. Others are more mysterious, such as Peel Estates, a property and retail conglomerate that owns swathes of Manchester, or the Badgworthy Land Company, which possesses a large chunk of Exmoor for shooting pheasants. Still others cloak their ultimate owners through complex corporate structures, registered in offshore tax havens. The State became a significant landowner in the 20th century in the wake of the First World War. A timber crisis caused by demand for wooden pit props and trench boards led to the creation of the Forestry Commission, sending serried ranks of Sitka spruce marching over many a hill. The need for army training grounds led the British military to acquire much land, sometimes through requisitioning, and often in secret. You’ve heard of the MOD’s firing ranges on Salisbury Plain, but did you know it also owns a military island off the coast of Essex, where the atomic weapons programme began? Warfare drove much of the government’s acquisition of land to begin with, but later, so did public welfare. After the Second World War, the creation of the modern planning system modified landowners’ rights to build on their land, while councils were empowered to buy land cheaply, sparking a boom in council- house building. But recent decades have seen a great sell-off of public land, from council homes being sold under Right to Buy, to the privatisation of water companies and the railways. County Farms, set up by councils to help young farmers get into agriculture, have halved in extent since the late 1970s. Who owns what? The Crown Estate owns London’s Regent Street, including the freehold for Apple’s flagship UK store, from which the Crown collects more rent than from all its agricultural land. The Duke of Westminster’s trusts own Abbeystead Estate in Lancashire, a huge grouse moor that covers much of the Forest of Bowland. The National Trust owns around a fifth of the Lake District National Park in Cumbria. The Duchy of Cornwall owns London’s Oval Cricket Ground, Maiden Castle in Dorset (above) and Ham Hill in Somerset. Paternoster Square in the City of London, home of the London Stock Exchange, is owned by the Church Commissioners. The monarch was excluded from entering the House of Commons after the Civil War, but the Crown still owns the freehold; it’s the site of the old Palace of Westminster after all. Politicians have sometimes claimed that we live in a property-owning democracy. But though there’s been a big increase in the number of people owning homes in the past century, homeowners own just 5% of England, and home ownership has been in decline since 2003. My investigations have led me to conclude that – by contrast – an elite of less than 1% of the population owns half of England. A few thousand dukes, baronets and City bankers own far more land than all of Middle England put together*. It’s time we had a serious debate about land reform in England. Scotland has been having one for the past 20 years, since devolution, in which time it has given communities the right to buy back land from absentee landowners, and established a full Right to Roam across all uncultivated land. Many housing experts are starting to recommend that councils should be allowed to buy land cheaply again, like they could for a while after the Second World War, as a way to resolve the present housing crisis. Most fundamentally, surely the time has come to draw back the cloak of secrecy that has shrouded land ownership in England. It’s high time the Government opened up the Land Registry, forced it to complete its founding mission, and told us who owns England*. Guy Shrubsole is a campaigner and investigator at Friends of the Earth. His book Who Owns England? published by William Collins, is out now." Go to: https://www.countryfile.com/news/who-owns-england-history-of-englands-landownership-and-how-much-is-privately-owned-today/ for full article and diagrams. *Italics mine. |