If we want to solve the housing crisis, we must answer these three questions
All posts by Tony Gosling
Right to roam: Countdown begins to prevent loss of thousands of footpaths and alleyways
Countdown begins to prevent loss of thousands of footpaths and alleyways
Thousands of footpaths, alleys and bridleways across the UK face being lost forever within a decade under a clause in right-to-roam legislation, campaigners have warned.
From 1 January, walkers, horseriders – and even those taking regular shortcuts to the shops in towns – will have 10 years to apply to save any rights of way that existed before 1949 but do not appear on official maps.
Experts on land access rights say the clock is ticking to save routes that many people take for granted as public highways but that do not appear on official records.
The consequences of failing to act could be far-reaching, said Dr Phil Wadey, a space satellite scientist and vice-chair of the conservation body Open Spaces Society. Gathering the evidence and applying for paths to be recorded was “a painstaking and lengthy” business, warned Wadey, who raised the prospect of farmers taking down stiles and putting up fences, and field gates being locked.
“On 1 January 2026, old footpaths and bridleways that are not recorded on the councils’ official Definitive Map of Rights of Way may cease to carry public rights,” warned Wadey, the co-author of Rights of Way: Restoring the Record, a guide on how to collect evidence and make an application to register a right of way.
He said urban alleyways were of greatest concern, with shortcuts behind houses under threat from homeowners extending their gardens, or fencing off paths that have existed for decades.
A clause in right-to-roam legislation introduced by the Labour government in 2000 stated that any pre-1949 paths must be recorded by 2026 to continue to carry public rights. The Countryside and Rights of Way Act contained a provision that will extinguish those rights if the paths have not been properly recorded.
This could affect popular shortcuts on many housing developments; even if the homes were built after 1949, the path around which they were constructed could have existed for longer and so be at risk. The same applies to “desire lines”, or well-worn informal direct routes.
Given these are unrecorded paths, numbers are unknown, but campaigners believe potentially thousands are at risk. Wadey has made some 400 applications, called definitive map modification orders, or DMMOs, in Hertfordshire alone, including 30 for unrecorded urban alleyways in one district of Bushey.
Time was of the essence, he said, as cash-strapped local authorities faced huge backlogs in processing applications. “We have a rights of way network which is really historic and has been around for hundreds and hundreds of years,” he said. “We do take an awful lot for granted.”
Ferwins said it was essential to legally protect that network of routes to preserve “history, culture, heritage, convenience, and a way of making your life happier and healthier”.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs confirmed it was working on secondary legislation and guidance to ensure applications for routes would still be considered if an application were pending after the 2026 cut-off.
Wadey said: “The real worry is [about] rights of way that people are using every day – suddenly they will stop having that right, which means the landowner could close it at any instant. Some old roads, typically unmetalled green lanes, might disappear, as well as your urban alleyways.”
There were lots of instances where the basic route was recorded, but because of changes or inconsistent records, there might be a 20ft gap where a footpath should join a road, Wadey said. “And if you lose that gap, somebody can put a fence across it, quite lawfully.”
Anyone wishing to register a right of way can seek advice from their local authority, the Open Spaces Society, the British Horse Society, and The Ramblers,who all have volunteers with expert knowledge.
Citizens Land Security Bill – September 2004
Tony Gosling – The Land Is Ours/Ecovillage Network UK
10-12 Picton Street. Montpelier, Bristol, BS6 5QA
Object: To begin the process of returning the land in the UK to the people to whom it rightly belongs.
Methodology: Given that land and its associated rights – is a free gift to mankind as a whole not to particular individuals, this legislation will begin the process of divesting particular individual and corporate freeholders of title to excessive amounts of that land and distributing it fairly to whoever amongst the poorest in the land wishes to have it
Current situation: With roughly 10% of the population of the UK owning 95% of the land many ordinary people are entirely without security; the strain on current housing stock means prices are spiralling out of all realistic measure of a homes actual worth and the need for more homes is only being restrained by a draconian development control system.
Historical models: There are two historical models which will be referred to throughout this bill, both occurring in and around the 1880s in the British Isles. Firstly the handing over of title to land in Ireland to impoverished tenants through a series of acts of parliament culminating in the Wyndham Acts. Secondly the enshrining in British law the customary practices of the Scottish crofters through the Royal Commission into the grievances of the Crofters and the subsequent Crofting Act.
Powerful landed interests: human beings can be particularly nasty and graspingly territorial when it comes to the idea of controlling or owning land. Dirty tricks and underhand tactics to dilute or stop such a bill progressing through to legal enactment must be expected and allowed for. At all times it must be explained to landowners affected by this and subsequent bills that their land is held from the crown; it is not their own; and that in almost every case has been gained historically in various unethical ways including as a crude reward for bloodshed.
Stages of the bill
The setting up of a land commission of 12 individuals with a proven track record in land rights and a UK government ministry of land with the task of ensuring that all Britains citizens have access to land.
The identification by the commission of Britains top 10 individual and corporate landowners and the opening by the ministry of a list of individuals in various degrees of housing need to take part in the land resettlement programme. These individual will be prioritised by a points system similar to that used on local authority housing lists.
The organising of people in the land resettlement list into clusters of like-minded individuals and the setting up of individual workers co-operatives using the same rules of succession and land management as in the Crofting Acts. Each Ecovillage will contain a proportion of at least 50% of the land as collectively managed but ideally more like 90% collectively managed.
The selection by the commission of 10% of large landowners land for reclaiming by the crown (the current ultimate landowner) into the crown estates.
The appointment by the commission of a further group of 7 experts in Permaculture, Bioregionalism, alternative technology and low-impact land use to divide reclaimed crown land into areas which can readily support between 500 and 1000 people with a density of roughly ¼ acre per individual. This Ecovillage commission will designate particular areas as village centres and arrange for the building of large meeting halls. They will also clear and landscaping rail/roadways to be completed by the villagers themselves.
The transfer of freehold from the crown estates to the new co-operatives and the apportioning of interest free land ministry loans repayable over at least 80 years to build on granted land.
The Land Is Ours – www.tlio.org.uk
Ecovillage Network UK – www.evnuk.org.uk
Brown NT ‘detectors’ in Wiltshire
Take a look either side of this gate. There is no indication from the National Mistrust as to what the ‘innocuous’ brown pillars are for! All rather too 1984 & Edward Snowden for my liking B-)
Richard St George & Roger Kelly: Ecoville 2000 talks now online
High Quality audio with Roger and now sadly passed away director of the Shumacher Society Richard St George on one of Britain’s greatest ever Ecovillage design concepts
If the govt. was any good they’d have picked up on this
UK 2000 person autonomous ecovillage design
http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/69405
Who knows – perhaps someday someone will?
Tony
Roger Kelly HQ edited 00:49:40 128Kbps mp3
(47MB) Stereo
Schumacher socs Richard St George – on Ecoville 00:05:45 128Kbps mp3
(5MB) Stereo
UK 2000 person autonomous ecovillage design
Series: Bristol Broadband Co-operative
Subtitle: Ecoville 2000 was a brilliant ecovillage design squashed by the UK government
Program Type: Weekly Program
Featured Speakers/Commentators: Roger Kelly former director of Machynlleth’s Centre for
Contributor: Bristol Broadband Co-operative [Contact Contributor]
Broadcast Restrictions: For non-profit use only.
Summary:
Credits: Ecoville 2000 was a giant ecovillage project developed at the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales in the 1990s. Roger was director of CAT and one of the project leaders.
Notes: Ecovillage 2000 was the brainchild of two men at the Centre of Alternative Technology (CAT) in Machynlleth.
Roger Kelly was a pioneer of Housing Associations in the 1970’s. As director of Solon South-West he built and managed thousands of homes. Roger then moved to Wales, becoming director of CAT in 1988. Richard St. George was intent on putting the ideas of E.F. Schumacher into practice. Small is Beautiful, for Richard, marked the coming of age of the green movement. Specifically his emphasis on researching, designing and building the alternatives.
Richard and Roger had both been racking their brains over a dilemma. Small were acting as beautiful beacons for future sustainable development, but pioneering communities needed to be bigger to compete with the outside economy. The question was just how big?
The fundamental test of a community’s viability, Richard argued, is its ability to retain its teenagers and to enable people of all ages to to share positions of responsibility. strike a balance with everyone sharing the community’s positions of responsibility. So many times with Intentional Communities young people decided it wasn’t for them so many of them fled the nest after a generation or so they died out through being abandoned by their young people. What would keep them there would be a standard of living as good or better than the best civilisation has to offer combined with a real independent spirit
In the winter of 1994 Richard woke one morning to find himself snowed in. It looked like it might be several days until he found his way into work at CAT. A great time, he decided, to bite the bullet. Richard sat down and listed every service that we might expect in any civilised community: doctor, farmer, teacher, mechanic, builder, plumber, carpenter, printer, IT fixer, and the list went on… and on… and on.
Eventually it ran to over 220 roles under eleven headings, with a job description for each role. Agricultural; crafts; arts; sports; estate management; services; health; educational; commercial; technical and industrial. Over succeeding days for the two weeks he was snowed in, he worked out how many people, considering holidays, training, sickness, shift work, etc. would be need in each of these key roles. Children and the elderly would not be expected to do any work of course. He came up with a figure of each role needing from between one and 25 people to fill it.
[picture of ecoville house design] Meanwhile Roger was working on designs for the Ecohomes. Through his experience with the pitfalls of building social housing he decided on several constraints. Each family house would have an allotment sized portion of land immediately attached to it. Evidence in our cities is that if people have allotments adjacent they use them. But the price of urban land makes that very difficult to realise. Ecoville’s good sized gardens were for the family to use for growing, grazing or recreational space.
Then there was the density of housing. Roger knew that people tend to like living close to other families but not close to too many. He settled on ideal huddle of ten to twenty houses fairly close together, with the clusters being up to a kilometre from the village centre.
Each housing cluster would include individual houses (1), most with attached workshops; a building with communal facilities (2) such as a laundry, meeting room, boiler house or store for shared tools and equipment; and an area of horticultural land (3), providing principally for the residents’ own needs but also selling surplus produce.
The core of the design was the village centre – the existing farmhouse, outhouses and semi-derelict buildings (1-4). These fulfilled a dual function as accommodation for self-builders as the project was being constructed as well as fulfilling an ultimate function, with the addition of some new buildings (5) forming a central village square. Finally the village centre would contain workshops, an exhibition space, a café/bar and a small shop.
The acreage needed for the entire project would depend on what figure Richard came up with for the minimum viable population.
As snowbound Richard worked his figures through it became clear the figure would be higher than either of them had thought. When Richard eventually arrived for work at CAT he announced the magic number: two thousand. After totting up all the roles Richard looked at all the different reasons why a resident would not be able to fulfil that role. 25% were children, 10% elderly or infirm, 10% drop out, 10% away at university etc., 5% nursing mothers, 5% dad’s on paternity leave, 5% on holidays, sabbaticals and secondments leaving only 30% of residents as a workforce. This brought the number of roles needed, around 600 up to a figure of around 1000 total residents.
Under this figure residents were likely to have too much responsibility, Richard felt. Over 2000 would be too many for everyone to feel enfranchised. Once they were clear about the overall scale they started drawing up criteria, starting with water needs, with which to identify potential sites.
The response from UK planning authorities was almost universally negative. No British local authorities would consider seriously allowing permission for Ecovillage 2000 in their patch so, rather than let planning constraints and land values kill the project, in 1997 they decided to focus their efforts abroad.
[map of the site in france] Eventually the team decided the best bet was to build it on a site in France with a highly supportive local authority. A farmer’s son who owned the site had no-one to take on his farm and wanted to retire, sell up. Ecovillage 2000 became Ecoville 2000.
This was a mostly wooded site of several hundred hectares at Versels, Causse de Sauveterre in the Canton of Le Massegros, near where Roquefort cheese is produced. Here, the French government funded much of the Ecoville feasibility study which – 18 months after they first set foot on the land – cleared the way for planning permission to be granted. At this point the tale sadly ends, the farmer’s son changed his mind and his father decided not to sell the land.
Scottish Land Action Movement
THE LAND IS OURS
Questions or ideas? Please get in touch! Our email is mail@scottishlandactionmovement.org
http://www.scottishlandactionmovement.org/#backround-section
WE DEMAND…
1. A land information system
Currently only 26% of Scotland’s land is registered in the land register. To find out who owns what, we demand a mandatory system that is up to date and available to the public.
2. A Land-Value Rating (LVT)
There is no taxation on just land itself. We demand a move towards a more progressive tax, that takes into account the value and use of the land.
3. A cap on the amount of land any one private individual or beneficial interest is eligible to own
Huge private estates leave the land empty and barren. We would like them community-owned or broken up through the establishment of a National Land Policy, and updated laws of succession.
4. Greater powers for communities to buy and own land
Statutory rights of: registration of interest in land, pre-emption over land, and a right to buy land through a compulsory purchase order where there is a clear benefit to the community, both urban and rural.
5. Security for tenants in rented accommodation
How we live on the land affects us all – secure tenancies for private renters ensure communities can flourish.
6. A robust self-build sector
We believe incentives to self-build homes can offer alternatives to current housing schemes and strengthen communities.
7. Rights for tenant farmers
Tenant farmers currently have very little security over their tenancies, leaving them vulnerable to huge rent increases and evictions. We demand protective legislation and an inquiry into an optional automatic right to buy.
8. Hutting
Hutting should be encouraged and facilitated by landowners and planning authorities to encourage rural leisure.
9. Greater governmental aid
Establish a distinct governmental unit that will facilitate community buyouts, advise ministers, and provide support services. Increase the Land Fund.
10. Common Good lands
We demand that Common Good Lands be safeguarded, their management be democratic and modern, and information regarding Common Good lands and funds be readily available and up to date.
Look at our political structures, our economy, and our land, and you’ll find a fundamental lack of democracy.
Our focus is land. Who owns Scotland? Very few. Just 432 landowners have 50% of the privately owned land. That’s a mere 0.008% of the population.
The causes for this extraordinary situation go back centuries – feudalism was only abolished in Scotland a decade ago – but the concentration of land ownership has actually increased in the last 50 years.
The early years of the Scottish Parliament brought tentative progress in the form of the 2003 Land Reform (Scotland) Act; this legislation, with the provision of a Land Fund, encouraged a series of community buy-outs in rural areas. These have shown how extraordinarily successful communities can be when they manage their own affairs; producing off-grid electricity, increasing tourism, boosting local jobs… developments essential to stop the disastrous trend of rural depopulation.
But the case for much bolder, wider-reaching land reform never went away. It was heard frequently during the referendum debate; increasingly recognised as a central issue for those calling for social justice, democracy and equality in Scotland.
This isn’t just a rural issue. Land reform in Scotland has its roots in the struggles of the 1800s to oppose clearances and establish crofters’ rights – but now it is much broader. Soaring land values and monopoly control are what drive housing shortages, deprivation, urban blight. Our city centres are full of half-empty hotels, stalled developments, overpriced and ugly student housing.
Meanwhile rural communities decline further under – often absent – landowners; and vast swathes of the Highlands are set aside as playgrounds for the world’s richest, with troubling ecological and social consequences. This is an issue that affects everyone.
The Scottish Land Action Movement is a collective of activists all striving for the same goal – to deliver comprehensive and radical land reform in Scotland by 2016.
WHAT WE DO
We are a collective of activists all striving for the same goal – to deliver comprehensive and radical land reform in Scotland by 2016.
We believe that people-powered campaigning is the best way to do this. We have the backing of prominent researchers, journalists, activists and even politicians to help us reach our goal. However, it is the power of collective democracy that has founded this movement. Post-referendum Scotland is a place brimming full of passion and ideas – we believe there has never been a better time to fight for land reform, and with the support of a politicised nation, we can create a fairer and more just Scotland.
Our aim is simple – get enough people talking about our message, and change will happen.
We plan to provide a cohesive network for activists and campaign groups from all over the country to come together and learn from each other. We have a library of resources of all varieties so people can educate themselves on the topic of land reform, reaching far beyond just lairds in their castles. Land reform is just as important to communities in central Glasgow as it is to communities in the Western Isles, and the more knowledge we have about these issues, the more power we can wield in affecting change.
If you would like to set up a campaign or group, we will help you in whatever way we can with the resources at our disposal.
If you would like to contribute to our movement, our blog will be showcasing stories of communities in action, of campaigns, and examples of community ownership successes. Even just telling us why you think land reform is important – we want to hear from you!
Over the coming months we will be setting up petitions and meetings – please follow us on Twitter or like us on Facebook to receive up-to-date information.
Questions or ideas? Please get in touch! Our email is mail@scottishlandactionmovement.org
BBC documentary ‘Bitter Lake’ is ‘too dangerous’ for TV
Welfare Reform is ending the bribe for the Theft of our Land.
Look who owns Britain: A third of the country STILL belongs to the aristocracy
By Tamara Cohen for the Daily Mail 10 Nov 2010
More than a third of Britain’s land is still in the hands of a tiny group of aristocrats, according to the most extensive ownership survey in nearly 140 years.
In a shock to those who believed the landed gentry were a dying breed, blue-blooded owners still control vast swathes of the country within their inherited estates.
A group of 36,000 individuals – only 0.6 per cent of the population – own 50 per cent of rural land…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1328270/A-Britain-STILL-belongs-aristocracy.html
Harold Wilson Oct 1974 Elected On Land Nationalisation Manifesto
1974 Harold Wilson’s Labour election manifesto:
‘The Government have published plans for the public owner ship of development land which will get rid of the major inflationary element in the cost of building;
for public control and participation in North Sea oil;
for greater accountability and the extension of public ownership in industry;
for beginning the redistribution of wealth by new taxation on the better-off…… ‘
http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/man/lab74oct.htm
Harold Wilson plot, Treason & Conspiracy by MI5, 1968 Coup plot, 1976 Resignation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oG6FR03BqIQ
Yes two top BBC journalists Penrose and Courtieur were steered out into the long grass by the powers that be.
In 1975 Britain’s last honest Prime Minister, Harold Wilson was bugged, burgled bullied and hounded out of office by fascist, even Nazi, elements within MI5, the army and establishment who smeared him as a Russian KGB agent. As for books on this subject the best in order are as follows:
‘The Pencourt File’ by Barrie Penrose & Roger Courtiour (1978)
‘Smear!: Wilson and the Secret State’ by Stephen Dorril & Robin Ramsey (1992)
‘The Wilson Plot: How the Spycatchers and Their American Allies Tried to Overthrow the British Government’ (1988) by David Leigh
@paulmasonnews
Its official name was Navigation Street, and a glance at a 19th century map suggests its origin: an isolated row of terraced houses leading down to the canal that runs through the middle of my hometown.
Canals were originally called “navigations” and the people who dug them “navvies”. This term – still in use in the 1960s – was code for poor, itinerant, Irish manual workers. So we called it “Navvy Street”: it was where the poorest people in the town lived and probably served that function from when it was built to when it was knocked down and turned into a “close”.
Navigation Street was the place I thought of when the housing charity Shelterreissued documentary photographs from the 1960s to mark its 50th anniversary. If you flick through Nick Hedges’ photos now, you could be forgiven for thinking they depict some kind of uniform, northern industrial bleakness at of the time. But you’d be wrong.
Shelter was born because people realised dwindling number of classic slum streets were not the only problem: there was widespread hidden homelessness expressed through overcrowding. The private rented sector was utterly insecure and housing costs were devouring the incomes of the poor.
Skip forward 50 years and we too have rising homelessness – 54,000 families in England last year, up 36% since the financial crisis began. Housing charities record rising overcrowding, precarious tenancies, predatory landlords and unaffordable rents. The difference is it’s not only the poor who suffer.
The shared student house has been reincarnated as the shared young professional’s house, with some even forced to share rooms. According to Crisis, there are 3.5m households containing a “concealed” adult or couple in England.
Meanwhile apartments too small to live in are being built across southern England: their occupants will have jobs once considered middle class. Precarious tenancies, outlawed during the housing reform movement of the 1960s, have created a “complain and you’re out” culture.
If you wanted to photograph the modern housing problem you’d go to the coffee shops where young people perch over laptops, late into the night, rather than endure their overcrowded flat. You would photograph the sofa-surfers; the migrants forced to live in converted garages; the families packing their bags as rent hikes and benefit cuts in the private rented sector force them to move to the periphery of towns and cities, or throw themselves at the local council for help.
The root of this problem is not one of policy – though the row over social housing and housing supply will probably shape this parliament – the deeper problem is the financialisation of home ownership.
At one point, rising home ownership solved many of the problems identified the 1960s. The predictably steady rise in house prices over time, like predictable inflation, created an escalator for the working class. If you combined that with vigorous social housebuilding, as practised by both Labour and Conservative councils in the 1970s, you created affordability at both ends of the scale.
If you then dramatically slash the supply of social housing, through right-to-buy and reduced council building, you create a permanent imbalance that turns home ownership into a form of asset investment.
To economists who study financial frenzy, the British housing market has followed the classic curve: the certainty of rising prices and short supply draws more and more people into the market, knowing a crash cannot wipe them out – because when confronted with falling house prices, governments have used taxpayers’ money and micromanagement of the banks to halt a spiral of repossessions and falling prices.
We don’t know what Britain would look like if the same levels of explicit subsidy and implicit preference had been pumped into the social rented sector. All we know is that the current situation is not tenable.
But we can ask ourselves the following questions:
First: how much space are people entitled to live in? The market sets no limits; even such formal rules as they still exist (they are being weakened) are flouted by the young salariat.
Second: what is the optimal balance between the private, social and state-owned rented housing and the owner-occupied sector? This cannot be hard to fathom since many cities in the 1980s and early 1990s achieved housing markets that “cleared” in economic terms: in Leicester in the 1980s I had no problem finding a secure private tenancy; no problem getting the council to hound my landlord to maintain it properly; very little problem moving from there to a housing association flat; very little problem transferring, as a key worker, from there to a council flat in London. Yes, London.
Third: what do we mean by “affordable”– when it comes to either rents or prices on state-specified newbuild homes? Under both Labour, Coalition and the Conservatives the concept of affordability has become delinked from incomes and attached to a percentage of the market rate. The same state that decided nobody should be repossessed during the 2008-11 housing slump could decide that nobody has to pay more than a fixed percentage of their incomes on housing costs.
Maybe we need to start with principles: that everyone has a right to a home; that every person has a right to a minimum amount of space in that home; and that those who claim the right to own houses nobody lives in should pay a hefty, disincentivising penalty.
Yes, that’s an infringement of the market – but housing in Britain has never been a free market: it is being created and re-created through regulation and deregulation – on benefits, on affordability, on building standards, on right to buy. The point is to shape the market towards smart outcomes.
• Paul Mason is economics editor of Channel 4 News. @paulmasonnews