Who owns Britain? Map displays unregistered land in England and Wales

[N_igma]

Curiously, this is a major area of discussion that affects how humans live, think, act and breathe yet no one is talking about it. Sad really.

 

[Artaxerxes]

Private Eyes offshore map is a good counterpart for this.

Private Eye Magazine | Official Site - the UK's number one best-selling news and current affairs magazine, edited by Ian Hislop

 

[Dogsauce]

LRB · Ian Jack · Why did we not know?: Who is hoarding the land?


Recent article on a similar theme

The state divestment of land is interesting - one way the Tory government sustained itself in the 80s onwards was by flogging off whatever they could. Prior to that the state was accumulating land for public benefit.

One of the recently retired councillors in Leeds was quite informative about this, pointing out how Leeds Council had bought land and buildings in Kirkstall Valley back in the 70s to develop a country park, but this never came to be because of the reversal of the idea of providing for the public good. A mill building they bought remains near-derelict with some companies renting space. A large bit of the land is a barely maintained ‘nature reserve’ starved of investment. Seems impossible to believe now that councils would invest in land for people to use, like they actually served their population. I think people no longer expect nice things.

 

[newbie]

Private Eyes offshore map is a good counterpart for this.

Private Eye Magazine | Official Site - the UK's number one best-selling news and current affairs magazine, edited by Ian Hislop

The same software engineer is behind both maps. She's made one on house prices too.

 

[Poi E]

Not hard to introduce a Torrens-style system of registered land title with indefeasible title on production of the title deeds. Of course, this would (i) remove the obfuscation of land issues which is at the heart of the class system (2) provide transparency which would not assist tax dodging and (3) would do land lawyers out of a shit load of repetitive work as they search for faults in title.

 

[brogdale]

LRB · Ian Jack · Why did we not know?: Who is hoarding the land?


Recent article on a similar theme

Useful article.

In 2010 David Cameron commissioned Philip Green to conduct an ‘efficiency review’ for the new coalition government, and he duly reported that the state, ‘the largest tenant/owner in the country’, was ‘wholly inefficient’ when it came to the use and management of space. The estate agent Savills, acting as a lobbyist more than a disinterested party, estimated in 2015 that England had enough surplus land to build two million homes, if only it could be released. Everybody could have a home, this and many other similar calculations implied, if only planners and bureaucrats would get out of the way and stop hoarding land.

In fact, the private rather than the public sector has been doing the hoarding. In Christophers’s words, ‘The private sector does not lack land; and nor, more significantly, does it lack land that is suitable for commercial development, or for which planning permission has been granted.’ A report in the Times last year showed that out of more than 1.7 million applications for residential planning permission granted between 2006 and 2014, fewer than half had been completed after three years. According to the Local Government Association in 2016, councils consistently approved more than 80 per cent of major residential planning applications; but the difference between the number of houses being approved and those actually being built was almost 500,000 – ‘and this gap is increasing.’ The hardly radical figure of Oliver Letwin identified the real brake on house-building when he published the interim conclusions to his inquiry into low completion rates last year. What governed the numbers, he decided, was the absorption rate – ‘the rate at which newly constructed homes can be sold into (or are believed by the house-builder to be able to be sold successfully into) the local market without materially disturbing the market price’. For ‘materially disturbing’ read ‘lowering’: to protect profits, developers are sitting on land that has been given planning permission. ‘Efficiency’ in this instance is a concept confined to the shareholder.

 

[StoneRoad]

Yeah, back when my late father bought the house / land in Wales there was no requirement to register it. Which caused all sorts of problems when he died earlier this year. No idea if my brother has registered the transfer yet (no mortgage or anything secured against the property) and I never got a look in, despite being the elder offspring.