The land question

Agricultural land in England is worth something in the region of £25,000 a hectare. The same hectare with residential planning permission can be worth a hundred times that. Nothing has been done to the field. The difference is the permission, and the permission is granted by the public.

That gap — usually called the uplift, or land value capture when someone is trying to do something about it — is the subject of this episode. It sits underneath almost every housing argument Britain has, including the ones in why Britain stopped building homes.

Episode notes

• Where the uplift comes from, and why "the market" is not really the answer.
• Three attempts to capture it — 1947, 1967, 1975 — and why each was repealed.
• How Section 106 and the Community Infrastructure Levy work in practice, and what viability assessments do to them.
• The option agreement: how developers control land they do not own.
• What other countries do, with the usual warning about transplanting institutions.

The conversation stays deliberately practical. There is a strong theoretical case, running from Ricardo through Henry George, that land rent is the cleanest thing a state can tax. There is also a century of British attempts to do it, most of which were undone within a decade. Both facts matter, and the second one is usually left out.