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But it isn’t merely the colour scheme of villages that landowners have sway over. They also control access to large swathes of the countryside. A ‘Right to Roam’ was established by the Countryside and Rights of Way Act in the year 2000, but open-access land still only makes up around 10 per cent of England and Wales – a far cry from the situation in Scotland, where the right to roam is now established as the default – and much of that is mountain and moorland. Down south, the countryside is far less open to ramblers. ‘Less than 1.5 percent (#litres_trial_promo) of West Berkshire, for example, is covered, and many of its glorious woodlands remain inaccessible to the large population of London and the Thames valley,’ notes Marion Shoard, whose tireless campaigning helped bring about Right to Roam. These tiny scraps of accessible woods include Snelsmore Common and Pen Wood – both of which were cut through by the Newbury bypass – and parts of Greenham Common, which had been closed off to the public for decades because of the airbase. So even these fragments of open-access land have been shut off or defiled by some of the county’s major landowners.
The efforts of large landowners to keep people off their estates have, however, proved their undoing when it comes to uncovering what they own.
I was inspired to try to map who owned my home county by the work of John McEwen (#litres_trial_promo), who pioneered studies of Scottish land ownership in the 1970s. McEwen set out to find who owned his native Perthshire, but it ended up taking him four years to map just the one county. Fortunately, I discovered a shortcut, and it was all thanks to the territorial behaviour of the landowners themselves.
Under an obscure clause, Section 31(6) (#litres_trial_promo), of the otherwise extremely boring Highways Act 1980, landowners can prevent new public rights of way from being established across their land by lodging a statement with the local authority. The deposited statements usually last for twenty years, meaning that any public use of the land during this period will not then count towards determining new rights of way. But to protect their interests in this fashion, landowners also have to submit a map delineating the boundaries of their estates. This is then usually published by the council online, or is accessible under the Freedom of Information Act. Possessive landowners are thus hoist by their own petard.
It was this documentation that I was able to draw upon to discover who owns my home county. West Berkshire Council, it turned out, had a remarkably complete set of landowner deposits. I requested they send me their maps in a digital format, to make analysis easier. Combining these with information from a number of other sources, the jigsaw began to fit together. The results astonished me: it was now that I discovered that almost half the county was owned by just thirty landowners.
Their identities offer a telling insight into the landowning elite of modern England. Baronial estates owned by the same aristocratic families for centuries sit next to stately piles snapped up by newly moneyed businessmen (and it is nearly always men), organic farms, and horse-racing studs registered in the Cayman Islands. The aforementioned newspaper magnate Baron Iliffe and property mogul Sir Richard Sutton jostle for landowning supremacy with H&M chairman Stefan Persson, Formula One racing legend Frank Williams, and three scions of the wealthy Astor family.
But the single biggest landowner in West Berkshire is Richard Benyon MP. Benyon is the inheritor of the 12,000-acre Englefield Estate (#litres_trial_promo); the palatial, turreted Englefield House (#litres_trial_promo) has belonged to his family since the eighteenth century.
Today, Benyon is the richest MP in Parliament, with an estimated fortune of £110 million. One tranche of this comes from the East India Company; another stems from property, through the development of De Beauvoir Town in the London Borough of Hackney in the nineteenth century. Richard Benyon still owns De Beauvoir today, via the Englefield Estate Trust Corporation (#litres_trial_promo), with the Berkshire connection commemorated in the name of Englefield Road. In 2014, his company courted controversy when it took a minority stake in a consortium that bought the New Era housing estate in Hoxton. The consortium threatened (#litres_trial_promo) to hike rents on the estate, leading Hackney Council to warn of ‘enforced homelessness’ for nearly half of the ninety-three households living there. When the community rallied in protest, and were joined by comedian-turned-activist Russell Brand, Benyon’s firm was forced to back down and sell its stake.
A third income stream flows from farming. In 2017, Benyon’s Berkshire estate (#litres_trial_promo)pocketed £278,180 in farm subsidies, courtesy of the taxpayer. It was through enclosure that the Englefield Estate grew to be so large, and so wealthy. To this day, a large expanse of woodland at Englefield is called Benyon’s Inclosure, denoting a former common enclosed by the MP’s ancestor.
His deer park (#litres_trial_promo) was created two hundred years ago by literally moving a village to make way for it. The long flint wall that surrounds Englefield today signals a dark history: people’s homes had been demolished to make way for this private pleasure-ground. As the poet Oliver Goldsmith wrote in 1770, in protest at widespread enclosure:
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.
But more important than Benyon’s sheer wealth is the example he provides of the continuing political influence of landowners. Elected to Parliament in 2005, his political pedigree is impeccable: his father was Conservative MP for Buckingham and Milton Keynes, and his great-great-grandfather was the Conservative Prime Minister Robert Cecil, the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury. The estate’s paint scheme, perhaps by coincidence, is of deepest blue. In 2012, shortly after Benyon became a junior environment minister in David Cameron’s government, the gravel-quarrying company operating on his estate applied to extend its operations into Benyon’s Inclosure. Under the plans (#litres_trial_promo), the quarry would expand to cover 217 acres, extracting 200,000 tonnes of sand and gravel annually.
The existing quarry had already wrecked a patch of land called Burnt Common. I visited it one summer: the common looked like the surface of the moon, pockmarked with pits that had filled with water. Despite Burnt Common being marked as open-access land on Ordnance Survey maps, a barbed-wire fence had been erected around it, with signs reading DANGER – DEEP WATER – KEEP OUT.
The local Wildlife Trust protested that the new gravel-extraction plans would lead to the felling of trees, the destruction of ancient woodland and the permanent loss of heathland. As the minister (#litres_trial_promo) then responsible for wildlife and biodiversity, you might have thought Benyon would have abandoned such plans out of sheer embarrassment. But he pressed on.
This wasn’t the only time Benyon’s landed interests appeared to clash with his ministerial jurisdiction. The MP also owns an 8,000-acre grouse moor in Scotland, and runs a pheasant shoot at Englefield. Coincidentally or not, as wildlife minister he refused to make it a criminal offence to possess the poison carbofuran, which is used by some gamekeepers to kill birds of prey when they are suspected of predating on game birds.
A second incident during Benyon’s ministerial tenure compounded the suspicions of his detractors. Walshaw Moor, a large grouse-shooting estate near Hebden Bridge owned by wealthy businessman Richard Bannister, was in the process of being prosecuted by the regulator Natural England for damaging protected blanket bog habitat, after its grouse moor management regime had intensified. Then, suddenly and mysteriously, the case was dropped. No explanation (#litres_trial_promo) was ever offered by Natural England or DEFRA as to why they had abandoned legal proceedings, and Benyon refused to give a straight answer when questioned. Was this another instance of the landed classes coming to a gentleman’s agreement behind closed doors?
Even if Benyon had recused himself from such ministerial decisions, what does it say about prospects for meritocracy and democracy in England today when constituencies can still end up being represented by the local lords of the manor? Benyon may stand out for the sheer scale of his estates, but he isn’t the only sitting MP to be drawn from the ranks of the landed gentry.
Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (#litres_trial_promo) MP, for example, owns the East Beckham Estate in Norfolk, for which his estate company received £102,566 in farm subsidies in 2017. Sir Henry Bellingham (#litres_trial_promo) MP owns land in his seat near the Queen’s estate at Sandringham. And the MP for South Dorset (#litres_trial_promo) is Richard Drax – or Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, to give him his full quadruple-barrelled surname – owner of 7,000 acres of his constituency, bounded by the longest wall in England. Many MPs nowadays, too, are landlords with rental property portfolios, as the parliamentary register of interests attests.
Nor is the level of land ownership concentration in my home county an anomaly. England as a whole belongs to a tiny number of people and organisations. Just 36,000 landowners – a mere 0.06 per cent of the population – own half of the rural land of England and Wales, according to the Country Land & Business Association, who represent the land lobby in Westminster. That’s an extraordinary concentration of land in the hands of so few.
That concentration of ownership is visible in the landscape itself. Once you start looking for them, it becomes possible to discern patterns of land ownership, like invisible ley lines stretching out over the countryside. A hedgerow is no longer simply a tangle of hawthorn to keep out livestock, but a territorial boundary. A set of gateposts, previously remarkable only for the carved eagles perching atop them, takes on a new significance as a display of might: get off my land.
To see the world through the lens of land ownership is to survey a landscape of power. Many of England’s largest landowners have acquired their land through inheritance; an inheritance that has often been built on the back of conquest and enclosure. And landowners possess great power over how their land is used, for good or ill.
Ill fares the land, indeed. While our last wild habitats face collapse, many landowners continue to turn their land into chemical deserts or flog it off for development, traditional concepts of stewardship seemingly crushed by the lure of pound signs. In our cities, urban space is treated by landowners as an investment opportunity, with homes transformed into assets rather than being places to live in. Urban land is too often wasted, with properties left empty and vacant sites kept as land banks, as owners wait for their value to climb still higher before cashing them in. Shadowy offshore firms swallow taxpayers’ money to run horse-racing studs, and lords of the manor are elected to Parliament. Worst of all, the vast majority of people living in England today remain as landless as they have always been. I belong to England; I love its countryside and history. But does any of it really belong to me?
Ramblers and environmental activists, when they gather together around campfires, often sing the songs of the American folk musician Woody Guthrie. They console themselves with the heartwarming lyrics of his most famous piece, a paean to nationhood, land and belonging.
This land is my land, this land is your land …
But it isn’t true. This land does not belong to you or me.
2 (#ulink_9f30ac52-da3d-541e-9af7-df2623427b74)
ENGLAND’S DARKEST SECRET (#ulink_9f30ac52-da3d-541e-9af7-df2623427b74)
There’s a huge reluctance to discuss who owns land in England. It’s seen as impolite, an expression of the politics of envy. Some of this is a hangover from an earlier era of deference, when the right of the local lord of the manor to his thousands of acres was as unquestioned as his hereditary seat in Parliament.
But there are also deeper ideologies at work. There’s a peculiarly English reluctance to debate land ownership, some of which has its roots in the work of the seventeenth-century moral philosopher John Locke. Locke argued that there was a natural right to the exclusive ownership of land, which permitted people to own land as private property just like any other possession. He admitted that ‘the earth … be common (#litres_trial_promo) to all men’, but argued that any person who cultivated land ‘hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property’. Owning land, in Locke’s view, was just like a carpenter owning a chair he had made by hand.
Locke’s arguments lent a moral respectability to the actions of large landowners through the centuries, shutting down the space for debate. There was just one proviso: taking private ownership of land was only morally justified ‘where there is enough (#litres_trial_promo), and as good, left in common for others’. That seemed to be true in Locke’s day, when the world appeared vast and its population small. But it also provided a convenient excuse for the English gentry to carry on enclosing commoners’ land in the name of agricultural improvement, and for the early English colonists in the New World to seize ‘wasteland’ from Native American peoples. Locke ignored common forms of land ownership, the inherent scarcity of land on a finite planet, and how taking private possession of it becomes a zero-sum game.
Over the past century and a half, Locke’s detractors have grown in number, reopening conversations about land. ‘Land differs (#litres_trial_promo) from all other forms of property,’ argued Winston Churchill in 1909, at the height of the Liberal Party’s push for land reform. ‘Land, which is a necessity of human existence, which is the original source of all wealth, which is strictly limited in extent, which is fixed in geographical position – land, I say, differs from all other forms of property in these primary and fundamental conditions.’ Churchill was clearly right about this, and it’s a view that is once more gaining traction. But it’s taken a long time for such ideas to obtain a hearing, and for land ownership to become a permissible topic of debate.
Who owns England has also been literally hidden from plain sight. Large landowners have built high walls around their estates, to keep out prying eyes. The English countryside still bristles with a profusion of KEEP OUT, PRIVATE PROPERTY signs. Rich businesspeople and celebrities live in gated communities protected by private security. For many decades during the Cold War, some Ministry of Defence sites were literally erased from maps.
No one doubts the right to privacy in one’s own home, nor the need for security around military bases. But England’s laws to protect private landed property go far beyond simply defending the old notion that ‘an Englishman’s home is his castle’. For many Englishmen whose homes are actually castles, their rights also extend far beyond their moats into hundreds of acres of parkland, woods and fields.
The civil offence of trespass means that anyone setting foot on land where no public right of way exists without the consent of the landowner is a trespasser, and can be prosecuted. While access to the countryside has been opened up considerably in recent years, the extension of Right to Roam remains unfinished business, and is a continual reminder that the English remain unwelcome in most of their countryside. And if you can’t see it, you’re less likely to ask questions about who owns it.
Parallel developments in the 1990s also showed lawmakers to be overwhelmingly on the side of the landowners when it came to dealing with people protesting about land issues. The 1994 Criminal Justice Act created a new, criminal offence – invented by the Major government to squash roads protesters and hunt saboteurs – of ‘aggravated trespass’, for cases where trespassers were deemed to be impeding the landowner from undertaking lawful activities. This, coupled with the more recent criminalisation of squatting, has closed down the space for taking direct action against unjust and unsustainable uses of land.
Land has also been airbrushed from modern economic theory. All the classical economists – Adam Smith, Karl Marx, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill – recognised land as a key factor of production, sitting alongside capital and labour as inputs to the economy. Land was different (#litres_trial_promo) from capital and labour, however, in being of fixed supply, and in having no production costs: nature provided it for free. But neoclassical economists removed land as a separate factor of production, conflating it with capital. Land, despite being finite and thus a constraint upon economic activities, was no longer treated as such.
But most tellingly of all, public discussion of land ownership has been hampered and stymied for centuries by the near-impossibility of obtaining proper information on it. Accurate facts, figures and maps detailing the ownership of land in England are very hard to come by.
Charges of conspiracy are flung about wearyingly often in modern politics. But the long-term concealment of who owns England appears to me to be one of the clearest cases of a cover-up in English history. To understand its depths, we have to go back a thousand years, to Domesday.
The Domesday Book was the first comprehensive survey by any European monarchy of the owners and occupiers of land in their domain. It was, to put it bluntly, a swag list assembled by an acquisitive king. William the Conqueror commissioned Domesday in 1085, nineteen years after his conquest of England, in order to better understand who owned what, so he could tax them more in future. The anonymous scribe behind the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recounts that King William ‘sent he his men (#litres_trial_promo) over all England into each shire; commissioning them to find out … what, or how much, each man had, who was an occupier of land in England, either in land or in stock, and how much money it were worth’.
The significance of the Domesday survey is twofold. First, it was the first official state record of who owned England; and second, nothing like it was carried out again for another eight hundred years.
For eight centuries, Crown, Church and aristocracy hid their landholdings away, fenced off and out of public view. The Domesday Book was preserved and referred to, but mostly as a means for the Crown to extract taxes and settle disputes over legal title to land. There was little sense of it being a public record that might aid demands for wealth redistribution. Occasionally, it was used to try to turn the tables. In 1377, a ‘Great Rumour’ began spreading among peasants that Domesday Book granted them ancient rights to land that exempted them from feudal duties. The resulting protests (#litres_trial_promo), though short-lived, were a precursor to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. A similar moment of revolutionary possibility appeared in the aftermath of the English Civil War. Parliament, freshly victorious, carried out a survey of Crown lands belonging to the recently executed Charles I in order to auction them off. But more radical demands to redistribute land and give every man the vote were brutally quashed by Cromwell.
Yet in the past two hundred years, as England has become an industrial democracy, its governments have chosen to survey land ownership on multiple occasions, only to swiftly suppress knowledge of these activities. The past two centuries (#litres_trial_promo) have seen four ‘modern Domesdays’ carried out by the authorities: the Tithe Maps of the 1830s; the 1873 Return of Owners of Land; the 1910–15 Valuation Maps; and the 1941 National Farm Survey. In each case these investigations faced huge opposition, were hushed up swiftly after they were carried out, and today have been almost entirely forgotten.
The first of these modern Domesdays occurred in the context of the upheaval generated by the French Revolution, which had caused the boulevards of Paris to run red with the blood of guillotined aristocrats and seen revolutionary Jacobins seize their lands. Napoleon ended the bloodshed but imposed new land taxes to finance wars abroad, levied with the help of a new system of land ownership maps called cadastres. These recorded not just the contours of hills and locations of buildings, but also the boundaries of estates – and who owned them. In turn, the Napoleonic Wars prompted the British state to grow, modernise and extend its powers. The British government began counting its population with the first decadal Census, and started to map (#litres_trial_promo) its territories accurately with the creation of the Ordnance Survey, so that it could better defend them. But in order to impose cadastral maps and land taxes, the authorities would inevitably run into opposition from landowning interests.
In England, it was in fact the Church, rather than the state, that first attempted a system of cadastral maps. The Church was modernising too, through the monetisation of tithe payments. For centuries it had been customary for farmers and landowners to pay to the Church one-tenth of their produce, levied in kind. This continued, despite the Reformation, until modern times. Then in 1836, the Tithe Commutation Act allowed tithes to be paid in cash rather than in goods. As part of the process of commutation, tithe maps were to be drawn up, to show who owned a parcel of land and how much they owed in tithes.
Into this process stepped Lieutenant Robert Dawson, a mapmaker with utopian dreams. Dawson was a cartographer who had been seconded to the Tithe Commission from the Royal Engineers. He knew that for the purposes of collecting tithes, fully accurate maps of land ownership weren’t strictly necessary. But Dawson saw this as an opportunity to push a much larger, more ambitious project – a detailed cadastral survey (#litres_trial_promo) of the entire country.
The Tithe Commission was at first enthusiastic, and backed Dawson’s proposals. They implored the government to help fund the accurate mapping of landowners, writing to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who appointed a select committee of MPs to examine the matter. But while the committee was hearing evidence, ‘groups of landowners (#litres_trial_promo) petitioned the House of Commons requesting that the tithe commissioners’ proposals for large-scale maps be defeated’. The English aristocracy feared that a full survey of land ownership might pave the way for new land taxes, as Napoleon’s cadastral surveys had on the Continent, or – worse – lead to social upheaval and even revolution. The committee concurred, and ‘an opportunity for (#litres_trial_promo) a cadastral survey of the full kingdom was lost’. Many tithe maps were still produced, but their coverage was incomplete, and in many cases lacking in detail.
Others, however, continued to press for a public register of land ownership. In May 1848, Lord Brougham, a lawyer and former Lord Chancellor, made the case in Parliament for a Land Registry (#litres_trial_promo) complete with cadastral maps. ‘I need hardly dwell (#litres_trial_promo) on the benefits of a registry for securing titles and facilitating transfers of property,’ he told his fellow peers. ‘England is nearly the only country which is still without this advantage … Connected with a registry should be an authentic and detailed map, the result of a survey of each county or smaller district – what the French call a Cadastre.’
Brougham sought to appeal to the landed establishment, explaining that a register of land could ‘improve the security of its possessors, and … increase the facility of its transfer’. It was an argument he felt should appeal ‘to the Members of this House, peculiarly the lords, as you are, of the soil of England’. But his speech also hinted at support for land redistribution. ‘It was reckoned by Dr. Beke, in 1801, that there were not more than 200,000 owners of land in England,’ Brougham related, compared to many millions of small landowners in France: ‘No one can believe that the working of any system is good which confines landed property to so few hands.’
His was a lone voice, however, and he had to wait: a Land Registry was eventually established, but not until 1862. Moreover, for decades after its creation, it registered pitifully little land – registration was voluntary rather than compulsory – and it was not a public register.
In the absence of a proper public Land Registry, advocates of land reform had to make do with proxy figures. The 1861 Census (#litres_trial_promo) provoked a commotion among radicals, as its records seemed to show there were just 30,000 landowners in a population of some 20 million people – although the census said nothing about how much each owned. This was grist to the mill of a new generation of radical liberals and socialists who wanted to see the grinding poverty of the Victorian slums redressed through a fairer distribution of wealth. It was also dynamite for democrats advocating an extension of the electoral franchise and the abolition of the ‘property qualification’ – the need to own land or capital in order to vote.
The 15th Earl of Derby – himself a major landowner, and the son of the former Conservative Prime Minister – sought to stamp out calls for land reform by disproving these claims. Addressing the House of Lords on 19 February 1872, he asked the Lord Privy Seal ‘whether it is (#litres_trial_promo) the intention of Her Majesty’s Government to take any steps for ascertaining accurately the number of Proprietors of Land or Houses in the United Kingdom, with the quantity of land owned by each?’ An accurate survey would be a public service, Derby went on, for currently there was a ‘great outcry raised about what was called the monopoly of land, and, in support of that cry, the wildest and most reckless exaggerations and misstatements of fact were uttered as to the number of persons who were the actual owners of the soil’.
Viscount Halifax, responding for the government, agreed, opining that ‘for statistical purposes, he thought that we ought to know the number of owners of land in the United Kingdom, and there would be no difficulty in obtaining this information’.
Halifax duly tasked the Local Government Board with preparing a Return of Owners of Land. Unlike the original Domesday, this was not produced by sending out surveyors, but by compiling and checking statistics already gathered on land and property ownership for the purposes of the Poor Law. This in itself was no mean feat: as is noted in the preface to the return, ‘upwards of 300,000 (#litres_trial_promo) separate applications had to be sent to the clerks in order to clear up questions in reference to duplicate entries’. No maps were made, but addresses were recorded.
The Return of Owners of Land was finally published, ‘after considerable but unavoidable delay’, in July 1875. Its initial conclusions gave heart to the landed governing classes: there were, in fact, some 972,836 owners of land in England and Wales, outside of London. Yet 703,289 were owners of less than an acre, leaving 269,547 who owned an acre or above. Even this, the clerks pointed out, was likely an overestimate, based on county-level figures: anyone who owned land in multiple counties would be double-counted.
It fell to an author and country squire, John Bateman, to interpret and popularise the return. In 1876 he published (#litres_trial_promo)The Acre-Ocracy of England, in which he summarised the owners of 3,000 acres and above. It became a best-seller, going through four editions and updates which culminated in Bateman’s last work (#litres_trial_promo) on the subject in 1883, The Great Land-Owners of Great Britain and Ireland. Bateman’s analysis confirmed the radicals’ worst fears: just 4,000 families owned over half the country. Meanwhile, 95 per cent of the population owned nothing at all. The landed elite had been exposed.
The return was swiftly buried because of its embarrassing findings. Landowners hated it. It was set upon by The Times, Tory in its politics, which declared that ‘the legend of 30,000 (#litres_trial_promo) landowners has been found to be as mythical as that of St Ursula and her company of 10,000 virgins’. It was castigated (#litres_trial_promo) by politicians, such as the MP George Brodrick, who criticised it for inaccuracies and double-counting, even though these errors had been easily corrected by John Bateman in his summaries. Radicals failed (#litres_trial_promo) to fully capitalise on its findings; although a number of MPs stood in the 1885 election on a promise of ‘three acres and a cow’ for landless farmers, the most they achieved in terms of policy was the 1887 Allotments Act. The moment passed; time moved on; and the return was forgotten.
The third ‘modern Domesday’ was attempted a generation later. In 1906, the Liberals were swept to power in a landslide election victory, bringing to an end the Conservative hegemony that had dominated British politics since the mid-1880s. The New Liberalism of the twentieth century was committed to much greater state intervention than the laissez-faire policies of Victorian Liberals, including a greater willingness to introduce new taxes to pay for social welfare. One aspect of the New Liberalism was a fresh commitment to land reform.
By now land reform had won the support of two of the century’s greatest statesmen: David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. Churchill, then a Liberal MP, wrote in his 1909 book The People’s Rights about the ‘evils of an unreformed and vicious land system’. He railed against ‘the landlord who happens to own a plot of land on the outskirts or at the centre of one of our great cities, who watches the busy population around him making the city larger, richer, more convenient, more famous every day, and all the while sits still and does nothing’ (#litres_trial_promo).Churchill’s solution to this social evil was to introduce a land value tax. A 20 per cent tax would be levied on the future unearned increase in land values. To do so, however, would require a full survey of the ownership and value of land across the country.
The Chancellor, Lloyd George, put forward such a tax in the ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909, alongside hikes in income tax for the wealthy and a super-tax on the very richest. When the ensuing vote triggered a constitutional crisis over which chamber of Parliament held the upper hand, the government went to the country to obtain a fresh mandate; the Liberals were returned to power, albeit only with the support of Labour and Irish Nationalist MPs, and the People’s Budget was forced through the Lords.
In order to levy the new land value tax, current site values needed to be known; so a valuation survey (#litres_trial_promo) was set up, dubbed ‘Lloyd George’s Domesday’. It took five years to carry out and involved the detailed mapping of land ownership across the whole country, using Ordnance Survey maps. This makes it an even more valuable resource than the Return of Owners of Land, which only noted the acreage owned, not where it was. It produced an astonishing volume of data: some 50,000 maps and 95,000 ledgers describing the owners and values of around nine million houses, farms and other properties.
The Liberals’ land value tax, however, came to a sorry end. Interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War, and with revenues from it outweighed by the costs of implementation, it was repealed in the 1920 Finance Act, under a government nominally still led by Lloyd George but dominated by the Conservative Party.
I spoke to Professor Brian Short, an academic who has researched the valuation survey extensively, and asked him whether any headline findings exist of who owned England at the time. ‘The 1910–15 survey remained unfinished at the start of the war, and stayed that way through to the repeal of the legislation after the war,’ he told me. ‘There was, unfortunately, no attempt to bring the massive amount of information to any summary conclusion – or at least none that I know of.’ He added: ‘I fear that the English have been very coy about landownership, and remain so.’
Scottish land reform campaigner Andy Wightman agrees, noting that ‘as the twentieth century (#litres_trial_promo) wore on, people forgot that there had ever been such records. The public had never had access to them in any case and … their very existence was very effectively concealed from all but those working in the Inland Revenue and valuation profession.’ They were eventually declassified and remain in the National Archives, but have never been digitised.
Frustratingly, the moment was also a missed opportunity to rescue the floundering Land Registry, which continued to register land at a pathetically slow rate. The Land Registry’s own official history admits that in 1909, its chief registrar had suggested ‘the setting up (#litres_trial_promo) of a “Domesday Office” – a merger of the Land Registry, Valuation Office and Ordnance Survey. The ownership records being compiled by the Valuation Office would have then been used to create a land register for the whole country … Lloyd George was in favour, but Lord Chancellor Haldane was opposed. Had the scheme been adopted, the Land Register would have been completed by now.’ Those words were written nearly twenty years ago.
The last and most recent of the modern Domesdays had a rather different aim. It sought not to tax the rich, but to ensure the country could feed itself in the face of total war. With shipping under assault from German U-boats and the country facing the threat of Nazi invasion, Britain embarked on ‘Dig for Victory’. The domestic side of this is well known: rationing, allotments, parks dug up for growing vegetables. Less appreciated today is the effort that went into identifying rural land that wasn’t being farmed, or had fallen into disuse during the agricultural depressions of the late Victorian period and inter-war years.
To this end, Churchill’s War Ministry mandated a National Farm Survey, overseen by the new War Agricultural Committees set up to direct farming. The initial survey was carried out in 1940–1, followed by a larger, two-year survey intended to inform post-war planning. This was seen at the time as a ‘Second Domesday (#litres_trial_promo)’ – which tells you how quickly the other modern Domesdays had been hushed up or forgotten.
Though principally an investigation into land use, the National Farm Survey also interrogated ownership and tenancy. It covered all farms over five acres – around 320,000 farms in total – covering 99 per cent of agricultural land in England & Wales. However, as an academic paper on the 1941 survey notes, although the ‘results were intended (#litres_trial_promo) to be for use by planners and agricultural advisors, the original records were not made available for general inspection’until 1992. And while various historical studies have now been done using the National Farm Survey, the records remain on paper only, stored in the National Archives. A 2006 report (#litres_trial_promo) made the case for digitisation of all the maps, but so far, no funder has been found.
What of the languishing Land Registry? Since its foundation in 1862 it had proved an embarrassing failure, and despite several further Acts intended to kickstart it – as well as the missed opportunity of 1909 – its progress remained glacial. Registration of land upon point of sale finally became compulsory after 1925, leading to an increase in activity. All information on who owned land, however, remained tightly guarded.
Incredibly, not even the police were allowed to access Land Registry records without the landowner’s permission, thanks to Section 112 of the 1925 Land Registration Act. This clearly hindered efforts to investigate corruption and money laundering. In the 1970s, the Director of Public Prosecutions wrote to the Land Registry pleading for greater transparency. In a document deposited at the National Archives, dated 18 November 1975, an anonymous official refers to the correspondence, and admits: ‘the Deputy Chief (#litres_trial_promo) Land Registrar has told me that the Registry is embarrassed by the extreme restriction imposed by Section 112 and would welcome an amendment’. But he adds: ‘On the other hand he did not think a greater liberalisation than that was called for – there was no reason why information about a person’s mortgages should be freely available.’
This neurotic secrecy was of a piece with Whitehall’s general paranoia during the Cold War. But by the 1970s, a less deferential public and a more inquisitorial press were starting to demand answers from government. The decade also saw a revival of interest in land ownership, prompted by a rise in land and house prices, concerns about financial speculators buying up farmland, and disquiet over wealthy sheikhs snapping up London properties in the wake of the oil crisis.
In 1973, on the centenary of the Return of Owners of Land, a Sunday Times journalist, Michael Pye, decided to write a feature story about land ownership for the paper’s colour supplement. He wrote to the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF), ‘We plan to contrast the top ten land holdings in 1873 with the largest ten today. I would be very grateful if you could help me in this exercise by letting me have access to a map of your land holdings … with perhaps an approximate figure for the total acreage involved.’
It was an anodyne and courteous request, but even this caused ructions at the department. An internal memo from a civil servant dealing with the request advised his superior: ‘The problem is (#litres_trial_promo) to provide the information requested without evoking further questions about politically sensitive matters … I trust you are satisfied that this presentation will prove acceptable … and will avoid as far as possible any embarrassing enquiries.’
A trade union researcher who dared to enquire about MAFF landholdings the following year got similarly short shrift. ‘Are we required (#litres_trial_promo) to provide this? – It doesn’t seem much of their business!’ exclaimed one mandarin in a handwritten note; to which another civil servant responded: ‘I suggest a polite reply regretting that the information cannot be obtained without undue effort – provided that is true of course.’ It wasn’t; the information proved easy to compile.
When the Spectator journalist Stephen Glover tried to write a piece on who owned the country in 1977, he found the only way to get the necessary information was to contact the landowners themselves. ‘This was usually (#litres_trial_promo) done on the telephone and naturally entailed difficulties,’ he recounted. ‘Often, the landowner was out shooting; once he unfortunately turned out to be dead; and once he was drunk. One landowner could not decide whether he owned 10,000 acres or 100,000 acres: “I do find it so difficult to remember what an acre looks like when I drive across the estate.”’
MPs had begun asking questions, too. The Labour government that took power in 1974 soon set up two inquiries that aimed to probe the concentration of land ownership. The first of these, the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth, tried to investigate who owned England, but was forced to conclude: ‘The paucity of comprehensive (#litres_trial_promo) up-to-date information on land ownership is remarkable. In the absence of a survey yielding data on the lines of the 1873 survey it is difficult to carry our analysis any further.’
The second, the Northfield Inquiry into the Acquisition and Occupancy of Agricultural Land, got some way further. But although its 1979 report (#litres_trial_promo) forms a valuable record of the agricultural land then owned by the public sector, financial institutions, and the then small number of overseas buyers, it strangely didn’t seek to investigate the large private landowners who own the great majority of land. Then Margaret Thatcher swept into office, and once again the moment for land reform was lost.
By now, however, many NGOs and investigative journalists were determined to break open the ‘secret state’ regardless of which party was in government. The Campaign for Freedom of Information was set up in 1984, perhaps an appropriate year for founding an organisation dedicated to the rights of the citizen against the overmighty state. It aimed to dismantle the culture of secrecy that pervaded Whitehall, and give people new tools by which to hold government to account. For fifteen years, under the direction of Maurice ‘Freedom’ Frankel, it campaigned tirelessly for a Freedom of Information (FOI) Act to give citizens the right to know what information was being held by public bodies.
The FOI Act finally came into force in 2005. Now, anyone can request information from any public body, simply by emailing them; the public authority is obliged to respond, and there’s a presumption in favour of disclosing information unless it’s covered by a specific exemption. Anthony Barnett, whose organisation (#litres_trial_promo)Charter 88 campaigned for an FOI Act as part of a wider set of constitutional reforms, has written about its ‘crippling impact on the old regime’. Certainly, those in government came to regret making such a powerful concession. In his memoirs (#litres_trial_promo), Tony Blair castigates himself for being a ‘naïve, foolish, irresponsible nincompoop’ for introducing FOI, and considers it one of his greatest mistakes; although he may have been forgetting about something.
Freedom of Information requests are one weapon among a small arsenal of tools and data sources that have proven invaluable for uncovering more about who owns England. I’ll be referring to these investigative tools throughout this book. Some of them were conceded by the government as the intense secrecy of the Cold War dissipated; others have come about through our membership of the EU, or with the development of digital technology; all have been fought for tirelessly by activists, journalists and citizens.
I’ve made extensive use of FOIs in asking public sector bodies to release maps of land and properties they own. Also useful are the Environmental Information Regulations 2004 (EIRs), an EU-derived piece of legislation that gives citizens the right to access specifically environmental information. EIR requests are harder for public bodies to refuse than FOIs, and since 2015 they have also applied to the private water companies, thanks to some great campaigning by an environmental law firm called Fish Legal. I’ve been able to use EIR requests to prise open what land is owned by certain water utilities – though some of them have claimed, bizarrely, that ‘land’ does not count as ‘environmental information’.
It remains harder to find out about private sector land ownership, but here too there has been change for the better. For years, you could only access company accounts at Companies House by paying a fee, making serious investigations prohibitively costly. Then, in 2015, Companies House opened up all its data for free. Its success in providing this excellent resource presents a clear business model for what an open Land Registry should look like.
More recently, Companies House has also started registering ‘Persons of Significant Control (#litres_trial_promo)’ – the ultimate owners or beneficiaries of registered companies. This is incredibly helpful for investigating complex corporate networks, and disentangling the inevitable knot of subsidiary businesses, shell companies and investments that the parent firms have set up or taken a stake in. For example, the scandal of ground rent (#litres_trial_promo) properties – homes that have been sold to people on long leases, but which often contain escalating ‘ground rent’ charges hidden in the small print, sometimes making the properties impossible to sell. One of the biggest owners of ground rent properties in England is Wallace Estates. They are owned by the Wallace Partnership Group Ltd, who in turn are owned by Albanwise Ltd. But who owns Albanwise? Thanks to Companies House publishing Persons of Significant Control, we now know: a mysterious Italian (#litres_trial_promo) billionaire called Count Padulli, who also owns a 4,500-acre estate in Norfolk. His country of residence, however, is stated to be the tax haven of Guernsey.
The increasing trend in recent decades to base companies overseas, and often in offshore tax havens, has presented a fresh challenge to obtaining information on who owns England. Offshore jurisdictions like Guernsey, the British Virgin Islands and Panama aren’t just attractive to companies for reasons of ‘tax efficiency’: they also provide a cloak of secrecy, with less transparent company registries than the UK. If you register a company in the British Virgin Islands, for instance, there is no obligation to reveal the Person of Significant Control who lies behind it.
Anti-corruption charities Global Witness and Transparency International have been pressing for full, public company registers to be implemented in all UK Overseas Territories – including Guernsey and the British Virgin Islands. For years, the government dragged their feet, before being outsmarted by a cross-party group of MPs who forced them to adopt (#litres_trial_promo) the measures in an amendment to legislation. Even so, the Overseas Territories won’t have to publish any corporate registers until late 2020.
Still, there have been big strides in mapping the land owned by offshore companies. In 2015, Private Eye investigator (#litres_trial_promo) Christian Eriksson and data journalist Anna Powell-Smith exposed the thousands of acres of land held by offshore firms, using FOI requests and clever mapping to obtain and display the data from the Land Registry.
Long before offshore tax havens were invented, however, the English aristocracy had perfected a system of avoiding taxes and protecting their inheritances: trusts. Many old landed estates are held in trusts, with trustees managing them on behalf of their beneficiaries, such as the heir to the dukedom or barony. This, too, can conceal the identity of the ultimate owners of land. Moreover, there is no public register of trusts. The Tax Justice Network continues to campaign (#litres_trial_promo) for such a register, to increase transparency and guard against trusts being used for tax evasion.
Clues as to the extent of an estate can be found, though, via a wholly legal tax exemption wheeze sanctioned by HMRC. The government allows some land, buildings and works of art to be exempted from inheritance tax and capital gains tax, providing they are made available for the public to view for a certain period of time each year. In return, the owner of the ‘tax-exempt heritage asset (#litres_trial_promo)’ must deposit a map with HMRC, alongside details of how members of the public can visit the property. Not everyone who has benefited (#litres_trial_promo)from the scheme, however, has been so keen to let in the great unwashed. In the 1990s, comedian-turned-activist Mark Thomas discovered that Conservative MP Nicholas Soames was avoiding tax on ‘a lovely three-tier (#litres_trial_promo) mahogany buffet, with partially reeded slender balustrade upright supports’, but wasn’t letting the public view it. He encouraged hundreds of people to make appointments to see the heirloom at Soames’s estate in Sussex. Eventually, the MP decided to simply pay the tax.
A similar resource exists where landowners have deposited estate maps with the local council to guard against future rights-of-way claims, using provisions in the Highways Act 1980 Section 31(6), as described in the previous chapter. Thousands of these maps lie buried on council websites; still more are likely gathering dust in council office filing cabinets. A few local authorities have had the good sense to fully digitise the maps and make the data available publicly, though many have not.
Many landowners are also the recipients of millions of pounds in taxpayer subsidies, in the form of various payment schemes for farming, tree-planting and environmental stewardship. These subsidies derive from the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), though the UK government shapes how they’re distributed. The data on farm subsidies can provide important clues as to the ultimate owner of a piece of farmland. Once again, however, this information hasn’t always been public. For years, ministers resisted its release, pressured by landowners’ lobby groups, who feared embarrassing stories would emerge about how much taxpayers’ money their members were receiving. But campaigners at the group FarmSubsidy.org persisted, and eventually the EU ruled that farm payments data had to become transparent. Some of the largest recipients of farm subsidies in recent years have turned out to be billionaire inventor-turned-landowner James Dyson, a Saudi prince (#litres_trial_promo) who owns large horse-racing studs, and the Queen, for her private estate at Sandringham.
The data on overall farm subsidies now published by the government doesn’t come with maps. That makes it harder to use for locating landowners’ estates. But farm subsidies under the CAP regime come under two ‘pillars’. Pillar 1 payments are essentially a subsidy for owning land, with few other strings attached; they make up two-thirds of the money handed out annually. Pillar 2 payments, on the other hand, are allocated for environmental stewardship. Natural England, the government body that was until recently responsible for handing out Pillar 2 payments, publishes maps of where the schemes operate, together with the recipients. These maps can be very helpful in pinning down who owns the land – although in many cases the recipients are tenant farmers, rather than the ultimate landowners.
Similar maps still exist for a now-defunct payment scheme for woodland management administered by the Forestry Commission, called the English Woodland Grants Scheme. Since estates often maintain control of the forests and hedgerows on their estates even where they have leased the fields to tenant farmers, these maps can prove a surer guide to who really owns the area. With Brexit meaning that a huge shake-up of the UK’s farm subsidy system is now under way, it’s vital that we make future payments to landowners more transparent, rather than going backwards to the era of secret subsidies.
Perhaps the biggest underlying change of the past fifteen years that’s made exploring land ownership easier is the development of digital technologies. Until the 1990s, cartography was mostly still done on paper. Since then, the growth of GIS (Geographic Information System) mapping tools has transformed how maps can be made and shared. An EU directive called INSPIRE has forced the Land Registry and Ordnance Survey to publish digital maps showing the outlines of all land parcels in England and Wales – but not who owns them, and with licensing restrictions in place on reproducing the maps. Machine-readable datasets and open-source software have made it easier to analyse complex datasets detailing who owns land, while modern web mapping allows us to create powerful online maps.
The Open Data movement has also sought to shift culture, both within government and wider civil society, so that previously closed data is made open and easily accessible. As Internet pioneer Stewart Brand put it: ‘Information wants (#litres_trial_promo)to be free.’
All these developments and work-arounds have increased our chances of finding out who owns England. But what of the present state of the Land Registry, set up over 150 years ago now, with the express purpose of gathering such information?
Here, the picture is not so rosy. The Land Registry remains incomplete: over 83 per cent of land in England and Wales has now been registered, but the ‘missing’ 17 per cent comprises millions of acres (#litres_trial_promo) of land whose owner is unknown. That’s because the rules around registration remain too weak: land is mainly only registered when it changes hands on the open market, and there are of course many old estates which have remained in the hands of the same families for centuries. Worse, the information it does have remains enclosed behind a paywall. Unlike Companies House, the Land Registry still charges for access to most of its data. You can buy (#litres_trial_promo)the details of a land title for £3 – but with 24 million land titles in its records, buying the answer to who owns all of England and Wales (or at least 83 per cent of it) would set you back a cool £72 million.
The Land Registry has also had to survive the recent near-death experience of attempted privatisation. In 2014, the then Chancellor George Osborne announced he was consulting on plans to sell off the Land Registry, as part of his austerity drive to cut public spending and monetise state assets. Coincidentally or not, Osborne had become a close personal friend of the Earl of Derby, descendant of the 15th Earl – the scourge of Victorian land reformers, whose idea for a Return of Owners of Land to quash the radicals had spectacularly backfired. It had been reported that Osborne had moved (#litres_trial_promo) into a house on Lord Derby’s Crag Hall country estate in the Peak District, and was a guest at festivals and falconry events in the grounds.
Privatisation posed a mortal threat to ever finding out who owns England. Had the Land Registry been bought up by a private investor, its functions would have been directed entirely to extracting profits from its data, and all hope of opening it up freely to the public would have been lost. Fortunately, a coalition of groups, including the Public and Commercial Services trade union (PCS), 38 Degrees and the MP David Lammy, sparked a public outcry and forced the government into dropping its plans.
In the aftermath of the privatisation attempt, the Land Registry has finally begun to open up. I met with its CEO, Graham Farrant, a number of times in 2016, alongside other campaigners for housing charities and environmental groups. For some years, an alliance of data-geeks and senior civil servants, from the Open Data Institute to officials working on housing policy, had been working behind the scenes to crack open the Registry. Catharine Banks from homelessness charity Shelter argued that to do so would ‘be a massive step (#litres_trial_promo) forward towards building the homes the country so desperately needs’.
To everyone’s surprise, Farrant agreed. He revealed that when he had worked previously in local government, he’d been appalled at the poor state of councils’ knowledge about even their own landholdings, and how many cash-strapped local authorities couldn’t afford access to the Land Registry’s data. With the threat of privatisation buried, he now wanted to chart a fresh course for the Land Registry; one that would see it both completed and opened up.
