Councils and public bodies in England are poised to be handed powers to enable them to buy greenbelt land without overpaying as part of the government’s drive to build 1.5m homes by 2030.
Greenbelt landowners who are unwilling to sell would face compulsory purchase orders (CPOs) that would force them to hand over their land if the site could host a “quality housing scheme” in the public interest.
Under the proposed rules, which are being consulted on, these landowners could be forced to sell at a capped benchmark value that the government has said will provide “fair but not excessive return” for the landowner, as well as “maximising community benefits”.
It’s not going to work here either. It’ll end up being theft, as ever.
Price-setting doesn’t work with goods, because manufacturers stop production. Land isn’t a good, in that you can’t produce more or less of it. So this price-setting will work; and it will be theft too.
Apparently the original proposal was to share the uplift 50/50 between council and landowner with the council using there part to pay for infrastructure such as doctors’ surgeries, dental surgeries, schools etc but now there’s been talk of the council taking it all.
Of course this could (probably will) all get bogged down judicial reviews and even going to ECHR, which would be delicious irony.
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/labour-goes-to-war-with-the-nimbys/id1101754136?i=1000665032600
Oh, and its still theft.
Yes, CPO is a breach of the owner’s right to “quiet enjoyment of his property”. I expect the ECHR to be called in to decide on its legality.
Agricultural land costs £15k per acre. A building plot with planning permission can be £1 million per acre in the south. If you offered farmers £100k per acre for agricultural land they would bite your arm off, so no need for compulsory purchase. In the eyes of the law wouldn’t that make it the market price that would have to be paid for compulsory purchase?
There is a huge potential for fraud here. The council has the power to make £15k per acre become £100k to £1MM per acre land.
john77 @ 7.41, as it appears that two tier labour don’t give a fuck about the ‘rights’ of those who challenge them, how long before we see something similar to the Chinese government – “won’t sell up / move out? Send in the bulldozers”
A good tactic for farmer giles is to spam the planners for permission for building homes. When they say no we’re going down the nicking your land route, then the legals will commence.
andyf said:
“There is a huge potential for fraud here”
Not just fraud.
‘Nice bit of land you’ve got there, missus; be a real shame if there was a compulsory purchase order on it…’
Wasn’t this tried back in the 60s? The Wilson government?
ISTR the “National Land Corporation” or something, that would buy up land and “share the profit”.
Didn’t last long.
as well as “maximising community benefits”.
King Charles owns a lot of land, let’s send the “community benefits” (Somalis) to Balmoral.
If the uplift was split 50/50 then and the Council does actually pay for the ‘community benefits’ then Farmer Giles is going to be in a similar situation to now. The £1million an acre is only paid on the developable area, so less paid per acre for the storm water overflow areas, roads, verges, landscaping and on and on… Also deducted from the headline £1million an acre is the cost of stuff the developer has to do elsewhere. Got to build the kiddies school a new sports field, knock that cost off. Got to pay highways for a new road junction, knock that off. Fire brigade want more hydrants, knock that off. Environment Agency want loss of wild flowers replaced with a new meadow or marsh for loss of mozzies, knock that off, and on and on and on…
Come on, Steve: “let’s send the “community benefits” (Somalis) to Balmoral” is just you fishing for someone to say “Aye, well they’re short of grouse this year”.
Presumably Ange Whatshername will be in charge of the valuations, given her expertise in property management, CGT, and Council Tax.
“… drive to build 1.5m homes by 2030.”
Which has as much chance of happening by 2030 as Millibrains energy scams.
I’m finding it hilarious that this government looks like being even more utterly inept than its predecessor. Why are 1.5 million new homes ‘needed’? It’s driven purely by immigration. So it looks like Cur Two Tier Kier Stalin is doubling down a la Tower Hamlets in the belief that fast tracking immigrants to citizenship and maybe using the likes of ‘hope not hate’ to facilitate postal voting will be enough to overcome the fact that almost no indigenous working class voters will vote Labour ever again after his response to the riots.
An interesting strategy – high risk though!
DM – from your lips to God’s shotgun.
VP – If they were capable of self awareness they would be frightened by how many millions of British people found the recent violence cathartic.
Before hitting the greenbelt there should be an audit of Council-owned land and unused properties plus exisitng usable land within current urban areas and also unoccupied retail and housing
Then we will see if greenbelt development is really required or just easier
Make it easier to convert or demolish empty shops and turn them into housing.
That would alleviate a lot of problems and might even regenerate some of the concrete wastelands that Wilson allowed to be built.
( OK it’s not all his fault, but I like blaming him anyway ).
– It’ll end up being theft, as ever.
Sorry Tim, you can’t make the build-all-over-the-countryside omelette without sacrificing a few sacred cows.
It was always wrong and it can only happen by wrongness. Just be happy you’re getting what you want.
Loads of empty properties and brownfield land in Tyneside.
“Of course this could (probably will) all get bogged down judicial reviews and even going to ECHR, which would be delicious irony.”
I’m expecting just as during Covid that the ECHR is as captured as all the other organisations and will quite happily wave through left wing policies
In a former life I was a district councillor in a Surrey commuter ward surrounded by greenbelt, I can
personally vouch for just how much speculative ‘land banking’ of greenbelt is going on. And given some of the tactics used by those speculators my heart won’t bleed if they only get a normal profit rather than the abnormal profit they’re hoping for. As it is I think it will be possible to strike mutually beneficial deals for the speculators and local authorities if the regulatory environment can be made to basically destroy the potential for abnormal profits. There’ll be no need to resort to theft.
@MJW
That speculative land banking would be the farmer biting the hand off the developer offering him a reasonable price for the land and the developer taking on the risk that the land may or may not worth rather more. To me that seems a fair trade. What isn’t fair and is pure theft is the council being able to buying low and selling high because they have rigged the market.
It didn’t take Labour very long to identify the first* batch of kulaks.
* won’t be the last
What Gurzel Wummidge said. If the development uplift was shared 50/50 then landowners would almost certainly get more than they do now. As it is the development uplift currently pays for all the infrastructure costs (the roads, storm water drains and lagoons, sewers etc etc), social infrastructure (land and £££ for new schools , doctors surgeries etc), open spaces, whatever other things the LA demand via the S106 agreement (sports fields, allotments, cycle paths, improvements to road networks elsewhere impacted by the new site, bungs to all the local parish councils for ‘community infrastructure’ etc etc)). The remainder is shared between the developer and the landowner and will be way less than half the original proceeds.
If councils nick the land for next to nothing that value will be swallowed up by some combination of the council itself, the developers and the utility companies and the houses built under such a scheme will cost exactly the same as they do now.
If we hadn’t imported millions of migrants we wouldn’t need to be having this conversation. There would be enough houses already.
@ starfish
There has been one – ordered by the previous government years ago.
The audit showed that there was lots of land available but the councils chose neither to build on nor to sell over 90% of it.
A few exceptions; the former Workhouse in my town has been turned into luxury flats.
Councils are exceptionally well-placed to build affordable housing. They control the planning system, so they can acquire land, enable change of use and enable denser development, they own considerable land and property and they can borrow cheaply from central government. They can partner with housing associations to avoid right to buy, they can use restrictive covenants to keep affordable housing ‘in the community’.
They’ve done none of this. instead they’ve spunked tens of billions on commercial property (because they thought it would generate more income for diversity consultants and £250k CEOs) and several have gone bust as a result.
the houses built under such a scheme will cost exactly the same as they do now
Disagree. I reckon they’ll cost more. I offer no evidence other than the omni-incompetence of the British public sector.
” I reckon they’ll cost more. I offer no evidence other than the omni-incompetence of the British public sector.”
Oh I quite agree, I was just being generous.