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

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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. The 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 An irrefutable and long overdue call for the enfranchisement of the landless’ Marion Shoard, author of This Land is Our Land This is an exhaustively researched labour of love, but the argument has a fatal flaw. It’s a book about the extent of ownership in absolute terms (who owns what percentage) but this really isn’t the point. Almost all of us, in England and many other nations, are born on the wrong side of the law. The disproportionate weight that the law gives to property rights makes nearly everyone a second-class citizen before they draw their first breath, fenced out of the good life we could lead.

Shrubsole writes that the bulk of the population owns very little land or none at all. Those who own homes in England, in total, own only 5% of the country. 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. This book has been a long time coming. Since 1086, in fact. For centuries, England's elite have covered up how they got their hands on millions of acres of our land, by constructing walls, burying surveys and more recently, sheltering behind offshore shell companies. But with the dawn of digital mapping and the Freedom of Information Act, it's becoming increasingly difficult for them to hide. Gradually, I pieced together a list of what looked to be the top 50 landowning companies, which together own more than 405,000 hectares of England and Wales. Peel Holdings and many of its subsidiaries, unsurprisingly, feature high on the list. But while the dataset revealed in stark detail the area of land owned by UK-based companies, it did nothing to tell us what they owned, and where. 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.

Mike Hannis reviews Guy Shrubsole's 'Who Owns England?'

From the Norman conquest, when William the Conqueror divided up the country among his barons, to the enclosure of 6.8 million acres of common land between 1604 and 1914 (“a land grab of criminal proportions”), Shrubsole shows how the land has been systematically stolen from ordinary people: “Today most of us are landless.” The aristocracy and landed gentry still own at least 30% of England and probably far more

He brings the material alive with examples and anecdotes, beginning with his childhood memories of West Berkshire, an apparently affluent, leafy county, but one riven by divisions by the Greenham Common airbase, and the Newbury bypass. Both spurred iconic protests and both are, in a sense, about land and who owns and controls it. Newbury MP and former environment minister Richard Benyon is also a wealthy landowner. There are grasps at disparate bits of theory (Doreen Massey, David Harvey, Adam Smith) but it’s clear that they haven’t really been understood, and the author doesn’t engage with them beyond citing the odd line. Public bodies including the Forestry Commission, the Ministry of Defence and all local authorities combined own 8.5 percent – only half the size of the 17 percent which remains 'unregistered land'. Shrubsole's educated guess is that most of this is also owned by the aristocracy. You could see the results of that failed campaign, as Shrubsole convincingly does, as the roots of many of our contemporary difficulties – “the housing crisis is a land crisis”. The laundered cash that has poured into London property, much of which lies empty, has been facilitated by a taxation system that largely ignores the productive and commercial value of land. In the shires, there is a radical shortage of building plots and a critical housing problem, while legacy landowners are subsidised to exploit the estates granted to them when the country’s entire population was equal to that of present-day Greater Manchester.

Summary

Shrubsole estimates that 30% of all England’s land is still owned by the aristocracy and gentry. The 6th Duke of Westminster at least had the grace to admit that he hadn’t become Britain’s biggest landowner by the sweat of his brow. When asked what advice he would give to young entrepreneurs, the billionaire said, “Make sure they have an ancestor who was a very close friend of William the Conqueror”. When he died he passed his entire estate to his then 25-year-old son who is currently the subject of a campaign by activists. A small number of ultra-wealthy individuals have traditionally owned vast swaths of land in Scotland. Last month, a major review conducted by the Scottish Land Commission, a government quango, found that big landowners behaved like monopolies across large areas of rural Scotland and had too much power over land use, economic investment and local communities. The quango recommended radical reform of ownership rules. Companies own a further 18 percent. A list of the top 100 reveals that the biggest landholdings are those of privatised water companies and grouse moor estate management companies. (As regular readers will know, Shrubsole has a loudly buzzing bee in his bonnet about grouse moors.) Conservation charities including the National Trust own around two percent. 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!!! 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.