Thursday, April 18, 2019

Who Owns England?

Half of England is owned by less than 1% of its population. 

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.

About 25,000 landowners – typically members of the aristocracy and corporations – have control of half of the country. Major owners include the Duke of Buccleuch, the Queen, several large grouse moor estates, and the entrepreneur James Dyson.

If the land were distributed evenly across the entire population, each person would have almost an acre.

Guy Shrubsole, author of the book in which the figures are revealed, Who Owns England?, argues that the findings show a picture that has not changed for centuries. 
“Most people remain unaware of quite how much land is owned by so few,” he writes, adding: “A few thousand dukes, baronets and country squires own far more land than all of middle England put together. Land ownership in England is astonishingly unequal, heavily concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite.”
Shrubsole estimates that “the aristocracy and gentry still own around 30% of England”. 
This may even be an underestimate, as the owners of 17% of England and Wales remain undeclared at the Land Registry. The most likely owners of this undeclared land are aristocrats, as many of their estates have remained in their families for centuries. As these estates have not been sold on the open market, their ownership does not need to be recorded at the Land Registry.
Shrubsole estimates that 18% of England is owned by corporations, some of them based overseas or in offshore jurisdictions. The list is headed by a large water company, United Utilities, which said that much of its land consisted of areas immediately surrounding its reservoirs.

Shrubsole estimates that “a handful of newly moneyed industrialists, oligarchs and City bankers” own around 17% of England.

He concludes that the public sector owns 8% of England.

Conservation charities, such as the National Trust and the Woodland Trust, collectively own 2% of England, while the church accounts for 0.5%.

He calculates that the land under the ownership of the royal family amounts to 1.4% of England. This includes the Crown Estate, the Queen’s personal estate at Sandringham, Norfolk, and the Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster, which provide income to members of the family.

Prominent on the list are the Boughton estate in Northamptonshire, belonging to the Duke of Buccleuch, the Woburn estate, which is owned by the Duke of Bedford, and the Badminton estate in Gloucestershire, owned by the Duke and Duchess of Beaufort. Several large grouse moor estates and Beeswax Dyson Farming, a farm owned by pro-Brexit businessman James Dyson, are also high on the list.

Carys Roberts
, chief economist of the left-of-centre thinktank the Institute for Public Policy Research, said  that the concentration of land in a few hands was a big reason why wealth as a whole was so unequal in the country, as those without land were prevented from generating more income.

She added: ”We have this idea that the class structures have changed so that the aristocracy is not as important as it used to be. What this demonstrates is the continuing importance of the aristocracy in terms of wealth and power in our society.”

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.


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