Every so often I share some writing that did not make the cut of Marsh Fen and Town. In this case I look at land use, how agricultural land has been used outside its normal commercial capabilities, urban development not just within the Fens but wider and at the “green belt” and how this is misunderstood. Finally I look at land holdings, how they create shortage in housing and amenity to the profit of the owner and wonder whether this should be remedied fiscally by government.
As I looked at the development of the towns of the Fens of Lincolnshire and beyond I found myself exploring how land use developed and this extended to the concept of the green belt. I described how the Coronation Channel freed up a tranche of agricultural land to be developed for housing in the space between the flood relief channel and the town of Spalding. I also consider as I look at other towns the familiar pattern of a bypass road being created and then all that land between the bypass and the town then being developed often, in the case of the Fens, on high grade Agricultural land. Land use for agriculture, industry, dwellings and infrastructure is often challenged, and often misunderstood.
In 1966 the then Ministry of Agriculture introduced a land grading structure. This had five grades of farmland. Grades 1 (2.8% in 1966) and 2 (14.2% in 1966) were designated as naturally suitable for arable crops and at that time amounted to 17% of farmland. Grade 3 land, at that time 48% of the agricultural total, was generally pasture. Grade 4 land (18% in 1966) was defined as land with severe agricultural limitations and grade 5 was considerably worse for agricultural use.
The grading of land is largely determined by what can be grown upon it. Grade 1 land is particularly pertinent to the area as much of this can be found in the Fens of Lincolnshire. Agricultural land, especially in the first three grades, does rarely occur naturally in a useable state and mostly comes about by man’s intervention and management, typically drainage and/or irrigation. Once managed to a high agricultural standard that land is typically the most productive and it will require less inputs and resources for a crop to mature for harvest than the same crop would require on lower grade land. In this way, and perhaps somewhat bizarrely to some conservation-minded, the use of less resources makes this land the “greenest” in that fewer of the earth’s resources in the form of water, energy, minerals and chemicals are being used.
The important thing to realise is that agricultural land requires intervention by man, even pasture. This means that any form of farming in the Fens, or elsewhere, had to start close to where people lived. The Fenland cottager[i] that could continue to be found into the 1980’s in one form or another in places like Cowbit, Earith or the marshland villages of the Wash is possibly the closest to how this developed. The agricultural use of land develops near inhabitation. This can be seen historically with many Priory or Abbey towns that developed across the Fens such as Freiston, Spalding, Crowland and Ramsey.
The land to be adapted first was adjacent to settlements and in this way we see the first investments in drainage of land resulting ultimately in higher quality land being adjacent to towns and villages. As Fenland population grew and people moved you see these form along the higher ridges of land, typically carrying roadways that form as fingers along the Fenland map.
As a result of this you typically see in the Fens possibly more than many English regions a pattern of settlements expanding onto land that was previously profitably cultivated farmland. This encroachment onto a “green belt” would be expected to reduce the overall acreage of land being cultivated, but in fact the opposite has been true throughout the last few hundred years well into current times. This is because progressively more and more has been converted, in South Lincolnshire from marsh and fen, or further afield from moorland, heath, scrub and woodland into agriculture.
At a national level the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw a massive increase of roads, houses and industry as towns and cities sprawled into surrounding countryside. The twentieth century saw the number of farmers reduce, but the amount of land farmed increase. This was especially driven by the two World Wars and particularly from World War 2 onwards as ever-increasing grants and subsidies pushed farm production.
In 1953 total tillage was 12, 304,000 acres.
In 1967 total tillage was 12, 354,000 acres
In 1979 total tillage was 12, 315,000 acres.
Yet, between 1953 and 1979 an estimated 1,300,000 acres of agricultural land was lost to urbanisation. How can this seemingly contradictory state exist? [ii]
Where I live now in Northumberland some of this is obvious as you can see pasture and combinable crops on what used to be moorland. If you look around Lincoln you see crops grown on heathland. Around the coast of Northern Lincolnshire down to Skegness are vast areas of grass marshland that have been cultivated or turned into caravan parks – indeed this area has seen the virtual disappearance of dairy in the late twentieth century where it was once common-place. In the Wash there has been land reclaimed from saltmarsh up to the 1970’s, although there has been some areas of restoration of this.
So we see that as land has been lost to urbanisation other land has been taken into Agricultural production at a greater rate. At the same time improvements of drainage, irrigation and use of the tools of agronomy has seen land improve and increase its usage, and thus effectively improving its grade. This is also recognised in Grade 3 land now being split into Grade 3a and Grade 3b. This upgrading of land has been achieved at a cost and to grow certain crops on it was achieved by accepting either lower yields or greater use of chemical tools of agronomy.
Quotas and subsidies enabled such farming to continue with an artificial element of real cost viability. But ever increasing costs saw the viability of certain crops with higher input costs under question if high yields were not maintained. This was most visible with sugar beet and potatoes. It used to be common place to see sugar beet grown on grade 3 land, often, in my opinion, inappropriately – the same for other crops. As costs continue to rise and subsidy payments to farmers reducing and disappearing we see the ability for land to be commercially viable growing a shrinking range of crops in many areas. Sugar beet, potatoes, vegetables and rape in particular have become subject to an ever increasing cost profile without a matching return. This cost profile is now infringing on the commercial viability of more common combinable crops such as wheat or even barley in some cases. Thus we see a day of reckoning for farmers and a need for them to adapt to step off this cost treadmill. I have listened to farmers that have worked out that the managed grassland and hay has been the most profitable crop. This would not have been considered ten years or more in the past. Thus we increasingly see livestock and mixed farming returning to some Fenland farms.
There may be an environmental benefit to this change. Lincolnshire was once a vast swathe of pasture and grazing. Expectation was that farmers would be paid for such changes. My view is that farmers should make changes if it is the right thing for the successful function and profit of their farming business. If they receive payment for those changes they should view it as a bonus and not a reason to make those changes. My trust in farmers being supported by government is eroded regardless of the colour of the government. There is a growing pernicious factor behind this, and that is a merging of environmental and non-farming commercial interests driven by a green wolf in green sheep’s clothing. Land is increasingly being purchased for environmental projects because of funding that can possibly attract from two sources: Government either directly in grants or subsidies or indirectly in tax breaks; or from “green” investors wishing to offset their carbon foot print. The later often involves purchasing farmland to plant trees. The focus on tree-planting is an obsession that repeatedly ignores other carbon sinks in nature such as preserving and restoring peat moors, extending salt-marshes and simply having managed pastures.
There is also a bizarre and inappropriate attack on larger Grade 1 farms that we see in the Fens as not being green and a call to restore them to Fen. This is crass stupidity for the simple reason it overlooks the fact that this land can yield the greatest volume using the least resources by its very definition. It is therefore, albeit at some expense to habitat, efficient at being green.
The use of resources with the greatest return spreads to animal husbandry. Whilst large poultry, pig and dairy units may appear unpalatable to the environmentalist to exclude them as not being green does not stand up to critical thinking for in many cases they produce food efficiently with the lowest use of resources. Our friends across the North Sea in the Netherlands have accomplished this to a fine art. Yet, they are now battling to survive an onslaught from the “green sheep” without any thought for the efficient use of the Earth’s resources and the importance of the Dutch economy feeding Europe. If you look at African countries such as Zimbabwe and Rwanda they fully understand this and have no qualms about having larger scale livestock units alongside smaller farming operations.
Then there is the green belt issue that is much misunderstood. Green belt is often thought to apply to cities, where indeed it originated, but it also has a lesser significance to towns and villages.
The term “green belt” was created by a lady born in Wisbech, the social reformer Octavia Hill. Octavia Hill was a social reformer in the nineteenth century that was concerned with improving housing in London for working class people. Her concept of a green belt in London was part of a larger belief that all working class urban dwellers should have free local access to green areas for recreation with little or no requirement to travel very far. Following this principle she fought to protect urban green areas such as Hampstead Heath.
Barn Owls in the Fens offer an analogy to this experience. The population tends to thrive in the Lincolnshire Fens compared to other parts of the country largely because of networks of drains and dykes offer a green oasis for prey to flourish. In the same way the health and welfare of urban dwellers flourishes in the belts of green land.
By the 1920’s, after Octavia’s death, almost every city in Britain had some sort of movement or plan to improve the availability of green spaces with a green belt. The green belt did not have to be circular and here is a misunderstanding of its original purpose to provide accessible green spaces for working class city dwellers and this could be achieved by linking areas through a city, not around it. Sadly this misunderstanding was developing the green belt into being something else – a tool to prevent the urban expansion of cities, especially London. Effectively a green ring-fence.
Was this desire to constrict cities flawed? Perhaps not if you consider that cities require feeding by the countryside in order to maintain their population. The problem is the word “belt” creates an image of a green circle around a city. The original concept by Octavia Hill was the convenient access to green spaces. This has become misunderstood in the language used. The land in the green “belt” around a city is not usually easily accessible, or free to access as it is usually privately owned and subject to agricultural use and residential development. Indeed it is the desired location of residence of the middle class office worker, whilst the working class office cleaner can barely afford to live in a rented room in the city and travel to work.
Thus we see a housing shortage, or at the very least a shortage of affordable housing. What is needed is a more intelligent view of land use in towns, cities and countryside. Walk through any town or city from Spalding to Peterborough to London to the Midlands, and you will see disused land and buildings. If they are disused, or even derelict in some cases, surely this indicates a surplus of land? Sadly it reflects a mismanagement of the land resource. It is doubtful that any city planner or local government of any town or city in the United Kingdom has a complete understanding of the unused land and buildings.
People buy and hold land on the edges of villages and towns for “hope” value. Developers buy land, get outlying planning permission or put groundworks in before waiting to develop and cash in on their investment. In cities it is worse as buildings are bought and ill-maintained as they await an increase in value of land. This has become a disease that undermines the availability of both affordable housing and access to green spaces. Land is bought as public funds pay for new roads, tube stations and other amenities adjacent to that land. The land increases in value with no added effort or contribution to the economy by the speculator. The land remains banked and unavailable often for decades. Upon development and or sale the land is sold and a capital gain may become taxable, but this can be avoided by buying……….more land. If the uplift in value was taxed ongoing would it stimulate the acceleration of its use? If not, at least some of the costs that added to it’s value would be recouped into the public purse. Winston Churchill addressed this in 1909:
“Roads are made, streets are made, railways are improved and all while the landlord sits still. Every one of these improvements is effected by the labour of other people yet by every one the value of his land is enhance.”[iii]
The debate on this has continued since then. Both at the time of the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act and subsequently the idea of a Land Value Tax has had much cross-party support. Is it time for this to be re-examined? Would this stimulate the appropriate development of land or create problems of tax affordability? One thing for sure is that the current system does not work.
[i] In today’s parlance a “smallholder”
[ii] Agriculture The Triumph and the Shame page 39 Richard Body 1982
[iii] The whole speech is worthy of note as follows:
Land monopoly is not the only monopoly, but it is by far the greatest of monopolies — it is a perpetual monopoly, and it is the mother of all other forms of monopoly.
Unearned increments in land are not the only form of unearned or undeserved profit, but they are the principal form of unearned increment, and they are derived from processes which are not merely not beneficial, but positively detrimental to the general public.
Land, which is a necessity of human existence, which is the original source of all wealth, which is strictly limited in extent, which is fixed in geographical position — land, I say, differs from all other forms of property, and the immemorial customs of nearly every modern state have placed the tenure, transfer, and obligations of land in a wholly different category from other classes of property.
Nothing is more amusing than to watch the efforts of land monopolists to claim that other forms of property and increment are similar in all respects to land and the unearned increment on land.They talk of the increased profits of a doctor or lawyer from the growth of population in the town in which they live. They talk of the profits of a railway, from the growing wealth and activity in the districts through which it runs. They talk of the profits from a rise in stocks and even the profits derived from the sale of works of art.
But see how misleading and false all those analogies are. The windfalls from the sale of a picture — a Van Dyke or a Holbein — may be very considerable. But pictures do not get in anybody’s way. They do not lay a toll on anybody’s labour; they do not touch enterprise and production; they do not affect the creative processes on which the material well-being of millions depends.
If a rise in stocks confers profits on the fortunate holders far beyond what they expected or indeed deserved, nevertheless that profit was not reaped by withholding from the community the land which it needs; on the contrary, it was reaped by supplying industry with the capital without which it could not be carried on.
If a railway makes greater profits it is usually because it carries more goods and more passengers.
If a doctor or a lawyer enjoys a better practice, it is because the doctor attends more patients and more exacting patients, and because the lawyer pleads more suits in the courts and more important suits.
At every stage the doctor or the lawyer is giving service in return for his fees.
Fancy comparing these healthy processes with the enrichment which comes to the landlord who happens to own a plot of land on the outskirts of a great city, who watches the busy population around him making the city larger, richer, more convenient, more famous every day, and all the while sits still and does nothing.
Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains — and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labour and cost of other people and the taxpayers. To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist, as a land monopolist, contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived.
While the land is what is called “ripening” for the unearned increment of its owner, the merchant going to his office and the artisan going to his work must detour or pay a fare to avoid it. The people lose their chance of using the land, the city and state lose the taxes which would have accrued if the natural development had taken place, and all the while the land monopolist only has to sit still and watch complacently his property multiplying in value, sometimes many fold, without either effort or contribution on his part!
But let us follow this process a little further. The population of the city grows and grows, the congestion in the poorer quarters becomes acute, rents rise and thousands of families are crowded into tenements. At last the land becomes ripe for sale — that means that the price is too tempting to be resisted any longer. And then, and not until then, it is sold by the yard or by the inch at 10 times, or 20 times, or even 50 times its agricultural value.
The greater the population around the land, the greater the injury the public has sustained by its protracted denial. And, the more inconvenience caused to everybody; the more serious the loss in eco-nomic strength and activity — the larger will be the profit of the landlord when the sale is finally accomplished. In fact, you may say that the unearned increment on the land is reaped by the land monopolist in exact proportion, not to the service, but to the disservice done. It is monopoly which is the keynote, and where monopoly prevails, the greater the injury to society the greater the reward to the monopolist. This evil process strikes at every form of industrial activity. The municipality, wishing for broader streets, better houses, more healthy, decent, scientifically planned towns, is made to pay more to get them in proportion as is has exerted itself to make past improvements. The more it has improved the town, the more it will have to pay for any land it may now wish to acquire for further improvements.
The manufacturer proposing to start a new industry, proposing to erect a great factory offering employment to thousands of hands, is made to pay such a price for his land that the purchase price hangs around the neck of his whole business, hampering his competitive power in every market, clogging him far more than any foreign tariff in his export competition, and the land price strikes down through the profits of the manufacturer on to the wages of the worker.
No matter where you look or what examples you select, you will see every form of enterprise, every step in material progress, is only undertaken after the land monopolist has skimmed the cream for himself, and everywhere today the man or the public body that wishes to put land to its highest use is forced to pay a preliminary fine in land values to the man who is putting it to an inferior one, and in some cases to no use at all. All comes back to land value, and its owner is able to levy toll upon all other forms of wealth and every form of industry. A portion, in some cases the whole, of every benefit which is laboriously acquired by the community increases the land value and finds its way automatically into the landlord’s pocket. If there is a rise in wages, rents are able to move forward, because the workers can afford to pay a little more. If the opening of a new railway or new tramway, or the institution of improved services of a lowering of fares, or of a new invention, or any other public convenience affords a benefit to workers in any particular district, it be-comes easier for them to live, and therefore the ground landlord is able to charge them more for the privilege of living there.
Some years ago in London there was a toll bar on a bridge across the Thames, and all the working people who lived on the south side of the river had to pay a daily toll of one penny for going and returning from their work. The spectacle of these poor people thus mulcted of so large a proportion of their earnings offended the public con-science, and agitation was set on foot, municipal authorities were roused, and at the cost of the taxpayers, the bridge was freed and the toll removed. All those people who used the bridge were saved sixpence a week, but within a very short time rents on the south side of the river were found to have risen about sixpence a week, or the amount of the toll which had been remitted!
And a friend of mine was telling me the other day that, in the parish of Southwark, about 350 pounds a year was given away in doles of bread by charitable people in connection with one of the churches. As a consequence of this charity, the competition for small houses and single-room tenements is so great that rents are considerably higher in the parish!
All goes back to the land, and the land owner is able to absorb to himself a share of almost every public and every private benefit, however important or however pitiful those benefits may be.
I hope you will understand that, when I speak of the land monopolist, I am dealing more with the process than with the individual land owner who, in most cases, is a worthy person utterly unconscious of the character of the methods by which he is enriched. I have no wish to hold any class up to public disapprobation. I do not think that the man who makes money by unearned increment in land is morally worse than anyone else who gathers his profit where he finds it in this hard world under the law and according to common usage. It is not the individual I attack; it is the system. It is not the man who is bad; it is the law which is bad. It is not the man who is blameworthy for doing what the law allows and what other men do; it is the State which would be blameworthy if it were not to endeavour to reform the law and correct the practice.
We do not want to punish the landlord.
We want to alter the law.