Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Land and How to Take It Back

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Wild Fell Wins Top Literary Prize for Nature Writing". Richard Jefferies Society . Retrieved 3 August 2023. It reveals how the “decorative pomp and verbose flummery” with which the great estates are surrounded disguises this theft, and disguises the rentier capitalism they continue to practise. It explains how the landowners’ walls divide the nation, not only physically but also socially and politically. It shows how the law was tilted away from the defence of people and towards the defence of things. It shows how trespass helps to breach the mental walls that keep us apart. Victoria Harbour building at Salford Quays, owned by Peel Holdings. Photograph: Mike Robinson/Alamy So who is right? This is a complex area, but one that is important to investigate. Can the Land Registry’s corporate ownership data help us get to the bottom of it? Hundreds attend mass trespass for the right to roam". The Argus (Brighton) . Retrieved 26 July 2021.

Despite what I used to believe, the landed aristocracy remain remarkably adept at retaining their land and other assets - many have owned the same estates they acquired as part of the Norman landgrab in the 11th century. I was less surprised to discover that many landowners use off shore companies to avoid tax and hide their ownership, and trusts and other ruses to sidestep inheritance rules. Shoppers in the Trafford Centre, a shopping mall until recently owned by Peel Holdings. Photograph: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Some interesting topics are covered within this book and a comprehensive breakdown of how England is divided up is covered, from the new money plutocrats who have brought vast estates within the English countryside, to the waning public sector - a body who is supposed to exist for the benefit of us, the people, but instead has been ruthlessly privatised and diminished under the guise of Neo-liberalism, since the 1980's and now only owns roughly 8.5% of our nation. Many receive agricultural subsidies which are paid simply for owning land (including environmentally damaging grouse moors), with no obligation to benefit taxpayers or the environment. They can use trusts and offshore ownership arrangements to avoid taxation or scrutiny (sometimes while also receiving subsidies). Properties in high-demand areas such as central London are left empty, treated as ‘investments’, and complicated ownership arrangements mean they may be bought with laundered money. Who Owns England? by Guy Shrubsole review – why this land isn't your land". The Guardian. 28 April 2019 . Retrieved 7 April 2021.This government seeks not to redress the imbalance, but to exacerbate it. Its proposal to criminalise trespass would deny the rights of travelling people (Gypsies, Roma and Travellers) to pursue their lives. It also threatens to turn landowners’ fences into prison walls. Last week I discovered illegal quarrying in part of the River Honddu in Wales. Had I not been trespassing, I would not have seen it and had it stopped. Criminalising trespass would put free-range people outside the law, and landowners above the law.

It is common for UK pension funds and insurance companies to buy up land as a long-term strategic investment. Legal & General, for example, owns 1,500 hectares of land that it openly calls a “strategic land portfolio … stretching from Luton to Cardiff”. Its rationale for buying land is simple: “Strategic land holdings are underpinned by their existing use value [such as farming] and give us the opportunity to create further value through planning promotion and infrastructure works over the medium to long term.” Shrubsole estimates that 18% of England is owned by corporations, some of them based overseas or in offshore jurisdictions. He has based this calculation on a spreadsheet of land owned by all UK-registered companies that has been released by the Land Registry. From this spreadsheet, he has listed the top 100 landowning companies. If we look at the Wikipedia article for Sir Thomas Grosvenor, 3rd Baronet, the first aristocratic owner of the Grosvenor Estate which passed down to the Duke of Westminster, we find that it was not his ancestral friendships with William the Conqueror which made him rich, but rather inheritance of the Estate from a certain Ms Mary Davies.* The headline revelation is that less than one percent of the population literally owns half the country. A tiny number of old aristocratic families still privately own around a third of it, while those who have joined the super-rich more recently own another seventeen percent. Fifteen million proud owner-occupiers of ordinary houses and flats, whose homes are supposedly their castles, together own only five percent of England. This it seems is probably a comparable area to that held by the micro-élite who actually do own castles. Renters, of course, own none.Though the veil of secrecy around company structures and what corporations own is at last lifting, thanks to recent data disclosures by government, there’s still much that needs to be done to make sense of this new information. The Land Registry needs to disclose proper maps of what companies own if we are to get to the bottom of suspect practices like land banking, and give communities a fighting chance in local planning battles. How the trespass movement is battling for a kinder, more inclusive Britain". New Statesman . Retrieved 30 July 2021.

My one query was who exactly Shrubsole means by "we", in the subtitle and throughout the book. Presumably it's just campaigner's shorthand for the 99 percent of the population who don't own very much of England at all, and have little chance of ever doing so. But putting it this way suggests some halcyon bygone days in which "we" did own the land, which is an unhelpful fiction. Peel Holdings tends not to show its hand in public. Like many companies, it prefers its forays into public political debate to be conducted via intermediary bodies and corporate coalitions. In 2008, it emerged that Peel was a dominant force behind a business grouping that had formed to lobby against Manchester’s proposed congestion charge. The charge was aimed at cutting traffic and reducing the toxic car fumes choking the city. But Peel, as owners of the out-of-town Trafford Centre shopping mall, feared that a congestion charge would be bad for business, discouraging shoppers from driving through central Manchester to reach the mall. Peel’s lobbying paid off: voters rejected the charge in the local referendum and the proposal was dropped. As these estates have not been sold on the open market, their ownership does not need to be recorded at the Land Registry, the public body responsible for keeping a database of land and property in England and Wales. This is going to be a great book, crucial for anyone who seeks to understand this country’ George MonbiotThe question posed by the title of this crucial book has, for nearly a thousand years, been one that as a nation we have mostly been too cowed or too polite to ask. There has, as a result, been some serious journalistic legwork in Shrubsole’s endeavour. Shrubsole ends his fine inquiry into these issues with a 10-point prospectus as to how this millennium-long problem might be brought up to date, and how our land could be made to work productively and healthily for us all’ Observer, Book of the Week Shrubsole, who works as a campaigner for the environmental charity Friends of the Earth, estimates that “a handful of newly moneyed industrialists, oligarchs and City bankers” own around 17% of England. The book doesn’t challenge the notion of land ownership per se. Instead, as is increasingly common post-Piketty, it’s really an argument for fairer distribution. Sometimes this touches on jingoism, and sometimes it leads to absurd demands (restoring gravelkind succession rights to female aristocrats). But ultimately it gives a sense that what the author really wants is a return to some sort of system of smallholding, which isn’t really appropriate to post-industrial societies. She said one effect of the sale of public land was that the public lost democratic control of that land and it could not then be used, for example, for housing or environmental improvements. “You can’t make the best social use of it,” she added. Farms owned by the Crown and wealthy landowners get hundreds of thousands of pounds every year in farm subsidies!!! Even when they're not actively farming, they just need to own the land, and the more land they own, the more dosh they get!!!!!!!! What a positively screwy system!!!