Building hopes: why the UK needs a new land use strategy

Our progress on this planet, and even the survival of our species, is fundamentally linked to how we use the land around us. Recent weeks and months have seen various reports on this topic. The IPCC’s report on climate change and land gained particular traction, with the press highlighting the importance of people adopting more plant-based diets. This followed a report of the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) regarding land use.

A key paper on this issue, published shortly before the IPCC study, sought to address land ownership and use here in the UK. Written for consideration by the Labour party, it makes clear that while the IPCC report was reporting on more ‘distant’ issues of desertification and forest loss, here in the UK we also have major problems. At the moment, very little seems to be taking place to address these, with the connections between land use and climate change even where they are made, are not being addressed. The recommendations in the CCC’s report, in particular, were incredibly weak, as well as being nebulous.

Home truths

This problem became particularly clear to me a few years ago, whilst I was acting as chair of the West of England Nature Partnership (WENP). There was an emerging trend for accounting for the value of natural capital, and one could have been forgiven for thinking that once we had done this, our land use questions would all be answered. The way we saw it at the WENP was that by the time we had measured the economic value of all this wonderful natural capital, there just might be nothing left of it.

Looming large in our minds was how the West of England region’s plan to build some 100,000 or so new homes could possibly be achieved without harming the natural environment. The short answer, of course, is that it can’t; I can design a new development in a manner that integrates green space, and green rooves and walls, and features that help to make the impact less than it might otherwise be, but in reality, we’re dealing in shades of negative impact.

There is considerable noise and disruption in the construction process; the materials themselves have their own ‘embodied’ carbon impact; and then there’s the loss of value of the land in its prevailing use, not to mention the wider impact of the development itself and the changes it brings with it. None of this is costless, and we are kidding ourselves if we think that such changes can be impact-free.

Nonetheless, we started to consider how we might improve matters somewhat, and in my own mind, three things felt especially important:

1. Using land to build houses implies a decision against using the land in ways that provide other benefits to society, including biodiversity, recreation, mental wellbeing, climate regulation, air quality, and reduced risk of flooding. Those building houses, ‘the developers’, must compensate society for this loss.
2. Many new dwellings seem to have been designed in ways that are destined to make their occupants ill, with inadequate insulation and reliance on cars for access rather than encouraging active travel.
3. In the region as a whole, as in the rest of the UK, there are massive concerns regarding loss of biodiversity.

The fat of the land

The research that the WENP undertook led us to question the sanity of the existing arrangements regarding land use in the UK. At the moment, gaining planning consent for house building on peri-urban land increases its value from around £20,000 per hectare to £2,000,000 per hectare. It makes no sense for local authorities to be making decisions that give rise to such massive uplifts in value without considering how to ensure that any such value benefits society rather than private landowners.

With the demand for affordable housing on the rise, local authorities should be able to use their role in the planning process to society’s advantage. Yet in the current system, a lot of the things that might improve the health of would-be residents and contribute to a greening of the project are ‘value-engineered’ away. Developers often claim that because they have paid so much for the land they are building on, the project only stacks up financially if they increase the density of housing and squeeze out all the stuff that made the project look remotely decent in the first place.

There seem to be at least two ways in which local authorities can navigate this process for the benefit of society. One is alluded to in the Labour Party paper. It involves setting up Public Development Corporations which buy up land which is to be earmarked for housing development under compulsory purchase orders, and then determine the nature and form of the development before putting that out to tender. This might help ensure that planning for new homes is well thought out and makes provision for green space and environmental features, including zero carbon housing, encouraging active travel, and providing for zero carbon forms of mobility. a key change ought to be the fact that the absence of any uplift in land value allows for more affordable housing, and that construction and landscaping are to higher environmental standards.

Paying damages

The whole principle of compulsory purchase can arouse significant ire, so the second approach builds upon the compensation principle. It requires any builder to pay a levy on the land being built upon in lieu of the value that is lost to society. This immediately invites the question as to what that value is, including what we should assume might otherwise have happened to the land. This is where valuation approaches can at least shed some light on what is being lost through construction.

Losses in value can be significant: recreational benefits alone rise to seven figure sums for each hectare of green space in some urban and peri-urban areas, even before one considers what these areas do to the value of the built environment itself. We estimated figures varying from around £300,000 per hectare, to over £2 million per hectare, depending on vegetation type and location: this doesn’t need to be incredibly accurate – we just know that the value of what’s lost is a long way from zero, and in the same order as the value of the uplift.

If a schedule of levies, linked to different land-types, is established up front, then builders will know that they can’t afford to go ahead with projects if they pay silly money for the land on which they build. have the choice of spending some of the funds on ‘above baseline’ environmental features, but the balance of the compensation they were required to pay would be surrendered to a trust for investment in the natural environment.

Placing your trust

This trust – we called it the Natural Capital Trust – would adjudicate on the nature of measures that would be integrated within the project as a means to improve the quality of development. The compensation fund, net of the cost of the improvement measures, would then be invested in the restoration of the natural environment through a variety of landscape scale measures and more locally targeted enhancements. The merit of this approach is that as soon as the area of the project is known, so is the level of compensation: it won’t be ‘value-engineered’ away.

In systems such as those explained above, the uplift in land value becomes due as compensation for environmental losses. In some cases, however, the question might well arise as to whether we should really be building on land at all.

At this point, one’s forced to think about ‘a housing crisis’ differently: do we need more houses, or more accommodation within existing buildings? The model we have for planning our housing is in need of a radical re-think, not least because we are starting to understand what we need to do with land to address the twin threats – and they are twins, born of the same acts – of biodiversity loss and climate change.

We don’t have a choice about whether land, and what’s on it, affects us. Our fates are bound together: what happens to land will affect all of us, and precisely because the climate seems to respond to changes in emissions in a way that is indifferent to location, we’re all affected by the way land use changes anywhere on the planet.

Land use, biodiversity and climate change are different facets of the same, critical issue. Parliament has declared a climate emergency, as have an increasing number of local authorities. Taking these commitments seriously means we must work out the future of land use the UK. Given the short time that we have to avert the worst impacts of climate change, it’s high time we had a proper national strategy.

Featured image: Nick Hawkes, via Unsplash