Since the putative decline in the (party-)political significance of aristocratic land ownership, attention to who owns what land has faded. But it is now resurfacing, and the targets still include, but now extend far beyond, aristocratic estates and the grouse shooting season.
Recent headlines have noted that half of England is now owned by less than 1% of the population (that is, approx 25,000 landowners). This is the very stuff of my series on ‘greedy bastards’. Soberingly, if the land were distributed evenly across England’s population, each person would have just over half an acre.
Rob Evans in the Guardian (Wednesday 17 April) draws on Guy Shrubsole’s new book entitled Who Owns England? (which is as yet languishing on my study floor) to list some of the major landowners. The Duke of Buccleuch, the Queen, a number of large grouse moor estates and the entrepreneur James Dyson feature strongly.
Shrubsole’s research revealed that ‘the aristocracy and gentry still own around 30% of England’, though he admits this might be an underestimate since the owners of 17% of England and Wales remain undeclared at the Land Registry and it is aristocratic families who are most likely to fall into this category. Shrubsole further estimates that 18% of England is owned by corporations (of which more below). Heading the list of landowning corporations is United Utilities, a spokesperson for which claimed that much of this land surrounds its reservoirs. The public sector is most open about its landholding, and between them central and local government and universities own around 8% of England. The bulk of the population owns very little: Shrubsole estimates that those who own homes own only 5% of the country. Land under the ownership of the royal family amounts to about 1.4% of England. Conservation charities like the National Trust and the Woodland Trust collectively own 2% of England, while the church accounts for 0.5%.
Clandestine companies, according to Lee Martin in the Guardian (Friday 19 April, 2019), currently own around 2.6 million hectares of land (Shrubsole’s 18% of England.
Consider Peel Holdings. Never heard of them? Quite. They now own 15,000 hectares, 37,000 acres, of land and manage a property portfolio worth £2.3 billion. They own large swathes of central Manchester (including the Manchester Ship Canal) and Liverpool. Its ultimate owner is the billionaire John Whittaker, who lives on the Isle of Man. Never heard of him? Quite. He constructed Peel Holdings through the 1970s and ‘80s by buying up companies on a downward trajectory but that controlled valuable land. He purchased the Manchester Ship Canal Company in 1987, attracted not least by the land that flanked it. He was a dominant force in 2008 in successfully resisting Manchester’s planned congestion charge (to reduce toxic car fumes), fearing that it would discourage shoppers from using the Trafford Centre Shopping Mall he’d purchased.
Landowners like Peel Holdings are able to ‘keep their corporate structures obscure and their landholdings hidden’. A report by Liverpool-based thinktank ‘Ex Urbe’ found in excess of 300 separately registered UK companies owned or controlled by Peel Holdings.
Peel Holdings is not unique. And such companies typically subvert local planning systems and evade scrutiny, for example via shell companies or offshore entities.
Building on the research of Private Eye journalists Christian Eriksson and Richard Brooks and computer programmer Anna Powell-Smith, Martin put together a list of the top 50 landowning companies, which together owned more than 405,000 hectares of England and Wales. Data from the Land Registry showed that overseas and offshore-registered companies had bought land in England and Wales between 2005 and 2014 amounting to approx 113,119 hectares worth £170 billion. It was apparent too that purchasing land was/is for some a means for kleptocratic regimes or corrupt businessmen to launder money or to secure a return on their ‘ill-gotten gains’.
In 2017 the Land Registry released its corporate and commercial data-set. It revealed the 3.5 million land titles owned by UK-based corporate bodies – embracing both public sector and private firms – with limited companies owning the majority (2.1 million) of these. The data allowed for a number of conclusions. They showed, for example, that Wallace Estates (Heard of them? Quite), a firm with a £200 million property portfolio but all but invisible in the public sphere, is owned by an Italian count. It makes it money from the ‘controversial’ grounds rent market (whereby it owns thousands of freehold properties and sells on long leases with annual ground rents). Peel Holdings and its subsidiaries, it was revealed, owned 1,000+ parcels of land across England.
‘The data was full of odd quirks and details. Who would have guessed, for instance, that the arms manufacturer BAE owns a nightclub in Cardiff, a pub on Blackpool’s promenade and a service station in Pease Pottage, Sussex? It turns out that they are all investments made by BAE’s pension fund; if selling missiles to Saudi Arabia doesn’t prove profitable enough, it appears the company’s strategy is to make a few quid out of tired drivers stopping for a coffee break off the M23.’
Tesco, via multiple subsidiaries, owns more than 4,500 hectares of land, much of it as empty plots earmarked for future development. One estimate in 2014 suggested that the supermarket was hoarding enough land to accommodate 15,000 homes (hitting difficult times, it has sold off some since).
‘Pops’, or privately owned public spaces, have proliferated in and out of our cities, ‘colonising’ and ‘gentrifying’ in the process. As protesters occupying such spaces have discovered, security guards can emerge from the undergrowth to curtail any unwanted activities. Think of this when you next stroll through your local park.
Now consider the phenomenon of ‘land banking’ – the practice of hoarding land and holding it back from development until its price increases – in relation to the severe current housing crisis. It should be noted that it is common practice for UK pension funds and insurance companies to buy land as a long-term strategic investment. Legal and General, for example, owns 1,500 hectares of land that it openly terms ‘a strategic land portfolio … stretching from Luton to Cardiff’. Much of this is within green belt areas, where development is restricted. In other words, the company has accumulated land with the aim of lobbying councils to ‘rip up’ restrictions and re-designate sites for development in the future
Shelter has revealed that many of the major house-building companies own a lot of land. Furthermore, housing developers themselves speak of their ‘current land banks’ and publish figures in annual reports listing the number of homes they think they can build using land where they have planning permission. The top 10 housing developers have land banks with space for more than 400,000 homes, amounting to around six years’ supply at current building rates.
A government-sponsored enquiry by Letwin in 2017 exonerated house-builders from the charge of land banking (and pointed the finger of blame at the rate at which new homes could be absorbed into the marketplace). Well! Maybe Letwin should have set his sights higher. Gladman Land celebrates on its website a 90% success rate at getting sites developed. Hmm. Co-operation? No need to think ‘conspiracy’, more like C.W.Mills’ ‘tacit understanding’ (allied with his ‘higher immorality’). Consultants Molior have estimated that between 25% and 45% of sites with planning permission in London are owned by companies that have never built a home. Affordable housing is not a priority for profit-seekers.
Property groups like Tesco and Peel Holdings have eroded town centres and high streets by amassing land for out-of-town superstores, and have lobbied to maintain a culture of car-dependency.
Just ponder: companies now own almost a fifth of all ‘our’ land.