Land Reform Bill

Due to its length the Bill may be found here.

This bill was written by /u/NicolasBroaddus on behalf of the behalf of the 32nd Government.

Opening Speech:

Deputy Speaker, thank you for your assistance.

I come before this House today to address a topic that cannot be avoided any longer: Land Reform. I am sure there are some who have looked at the bill I have presented and baulked at its length, indeed I wish it did not have to be as long as it has turned out to be. However, it is an unfortunate fact that, unlike almost every nation on the planet, Britain has never carried out proper land reform in the aftermath of feudalism. The land of the UK, our common bond and tether to life, still remains overwhelmingly in the hands of aristocrats, royals, oligarchs, and bankers. Only 5% of all land in England is owned by individual homeowners. Only 8.5% is owned by the Public Sector. The simple fact is that we have barely progressed beyond the days where the land was first Enclosed and stripped from the masses.

A lesson in history is needed to understand the scope of this problem, as its root dates back all the way to 1066, and William the Conquerer. Upon ascending as King of England, he distributed the land out to loyal barons, at the same time promising, in direct contradiction, to maintain the ancient rights of the commoners to the common land. It was he who first conceived of Crown Land in England, and brought that legal interpretation to the UK. However, it was undoubtedly the Tudors who most used this system to cement and expand their power, seeing only value in the at the time profitable wool trade. Vast expanses of common land were stripped, illegally and informally, through violence and intimidation, and converted into pastures that further destroyed the landscape of England. To quote Sir Thomas More at the time:

“The increase of pasture,' said I, 'by which your sheep, which are naturally mild, and easily kept in order, may be said now to devour men and unpeople, not only villages, but towns; for wherever it is found that the sheep of any soil yield a softer and richer wool than ordinary, there the nobility and gentry, and even those holy men, the dobots! not contented with the old rents which their farms yielded, nor thinking it enough that they, living at their ease, do no good to the public, resolve to do it hurt instead of good. They stop the course of agriculture, destroying houses and towns, reserving only the churches, and enclose grounds that they may lodge their sheep in them. As if forests and parks had swallowed up too little of the land, those worthy countrymen turn the best inhabited places into solitudes; for when an insatiable wretch, who is a plague to his country, resolves to enclose many thousand acres of ground, the owners, as well as tenants, are turned out of their possessions by trick or by main force, or, being wearied out by ill usage, they are forced to sell them; by which means those miserable people, both men and women, married and unmarried, old and young, with their poor but numerous families…”

That the nobility exploited the common people of a feudal society is hardly a revelation, I am sure, but this trend continues throughout British history, and the hands of our democratic institutions are bloodstained as well. Indeed, I mention this because the Inclosure Acts claimed at the time to be acting in the name of proper land usage and protection. They set up administrative structures, often unused and only in place so as to provide legal weight to the informal process enclosure mostly remained. However those structures were never maintained in good faith, public meetings so the commoners could consult on enclosure were supposed to be held, yet often private meetings of local barons were registered as such public meetings. These land barons were also allowed to simply choose their own surveyors and assessors to value and reach decisions on land. In 1786 there were 250,000 independent landowners in England, but by 1816 that number was reduced to 32,000. This cruel act had a double effect, both in taking the land into ever greater hoards of cash crop and hunting estates, but also in forcing rural small farmers into the cities to work for less in the factories of the emerging Industrial Revolution.

One often neglected aspect of the Inclosure Acts I would like to highlight was the seizure of lands formerly designated ‘waste’. While this distinction between ‘waste’ and ‘non-waste’ was simply an easy way to designate which land was easy to farm and what wasn’t for categorisation at the time, the lands that were classified as ‘waste’ had an importance that wasn’t yet understood fully. The vast majority of the wetlands, fens, peatlands, and heaths were taken into private ownership as a result of these acts. As a result they have been consistently neglected or exploited, out of greed or ignorance, and some of Britain’s most important biomes and carbon sinks remain in private hands. Even our beloved natural parks are not in public hands! Large portions of almost all of them are privately owned!

Truly that anonymous poet channelled the spirit of some force beyond when they wrote then:

“They hang the man and flog the woman Who steals the goose from off the common Yet let the greater villain loose That steals the common from the goose.

The law demands that we atone When we take things we do not own But leaves the lords and ladies fine Who take things that are yours and mine.

The poor and wretched don't escape If they conspire the law to break This must be so but they endure Those who conspire to make the law.

The law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common And geese will still a common lack Till they go and steal it back.”

My hope though, today, honourable colleagues, is that we can prove them wrong, that we truly have learned from our mistakes and intend to fix them. There was hope for a brief moment on this topic in the 20th century, when the Liberal government, in 1909, under chancellor David Lloyd George, decided to finally fully assess all land in the UK and tax it properly. The flagrantly self-interested blocking of this budget by the House of Lords caused a constitutional crisis, only averted by the Parliament Act 1911. Yet still, even after defanging the Lords somewhat, they did not go back and attempt this proper reckoning with the aristocratic estates again. Indeed, up through the 2002 changes to land registration and on to now, there has simply been the assumption that unregistered land in the UK will one day go to sale and be registered as a result of market forces. It is self evident that the land barons of the UK are smarter than that, to this day 17% of all land in England is still unaccounted for in any registry.

With the inexorable progress of climate change, I consider it my responsibility to try, at least one more time, to effect the change that is so desperately needed. To this end, this bill establishes a Land Commission and a New Land Registry. I intend to circumvent the fossilised structures that have kept this system in place by establishing new agencies, under the portfolio of my Ministry, that have the proper authority, with democratic and community oversight at every step. This Land Commission will be required to operate under proper civil service ethics guidelines, and will be headed by five Land Commissioners and one Tenant Farming Commissioner. These commissioners must not be a current office holder in any government position, and not have been one within the last year either. Should this bill reach Royal Assent, I will present candidates for these positions before this House for your approval. This Land Commission will be responsible for the first complete land assessment in the history of the UK, and for ensuring various existing laws regarding land use and the environment are being obeyed.

However, this formal structure for land ownership and management in the UK is just the skeleton of the plan proposed here for Land Reform. The major purpose of this bill surrounds the creation of Community Land Banks, and the empowering of ethical environmental and other local charities through the same mechanisms. With a proper Land Commission established which can value land and determine a fair market price, this bill will allow local communities and the aforementioned organisations to apply to purchase land if they make a convincing case that they will put it to better use. There are various steps to this process, and it has to be approved by my own office, or whoever holds it in the future, as well as by the Commons through a statutory instrument. The Government may then choose to assist in funding, or completely fund, the acquiring of this land by the relevant organisation. The establishment of this single universal mechanism alone will allow this long neglected issue to be confronted.

However, this simple mechanism, while universally applicable, does not, in the opinion of myself and this Government, suffice to confront the issue of land hoarders in the UK. For this reason, this bill includes measures that are less generous in their reimbursement. These measures only apply to landowners who possess 1000 or more hectares of land, and the harshest ones only to those who possess 5000 or more. To put in perspective how divorced these massive estates are from average landowners, the average farmer in England has approximately 49 hectares of land. We do believe that compensation, where appropriate, should be carried out, however we cannot set a precedent of rewarding the behaviour of these land barons. These are families who have sat on massive precious estates for centuries, intentionally avoiding taxes and assessment at every turn. They hold in their greedy draconic claws what could be the key to our salvation. 1 million acres of England’s deep peat, our single largest carbon sink, is owned by just 124 landowners. That amounts to 60% of England’s total area of deep peat, and often it is simply set alight for grouse hunts, damaging it further, or farmed in a destructive way as per the Fens. More than that, 84% of England’s woods are privately owned, the top ten individual landowners in that category own 20% of all the woods in England.

We are at a tipping point for our survival as a species, yet we in the UK, at the same time as we claim so much superiority and development over other nations, have not moved this issue forward from the days of the Normans. We face crises of power, of heat, of water. The fundamental thing that underpins them all is land ownership, I am reminded of a quote from the American author Wendell Berry:

“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.”

We have seen this truth reflected across the world, and we have seen in our own recent drought that we will not remain insulated from the worst effects of climate change. It is time to set right the injustice of enclosure. It is time to bring the land back towards working for the common good, instead of private wallets.

This division shall end on the 17th October at 10pm BST.