Viscount Halifax, responding for the government, agreed, opining that ‘for statistical purposes, he thought that we ought to know the number of owners of land in the United Kingdom, and there would be no difficulty in obtaining this information’.
Halifax duly tasked the Local Government Board with preparing a Return of Owners of Land. Unlike the original Domesday, this was not produced by sending out surveyors, but by compiling and checking statistics already gathered on land and property ownership for the purposes of the Poor Law. This in itself was no mean feat: as is noted in the preface to the return, ‘upwards of 300,000 separate applications had to be sent to the clerks in order to clear up questions in reference to duplicate entries’. No maps were made, but addresses were recorded.
The Return of Owners of Land was finally published, ‘after considerable but unavoidable delay’, in July 1875. Its initial conclusions gave heart to the landed governing classes: there were, in fact, some 972,836 owners of land in England and Wales, outside of London. Yet 703,289 were owners of less than an acre, leaving 269,547 who owned an acre or above. Even this, the clerks pointed out, was likely an overestimate, based on county-level figures: anyone who owned land in multiple counties would be double-counted.
It fell to an author and country squire, John Bateman, to interpret and popularise the return. In 1876 he published The Acre-Ocracy of England, in which he summarised the owners of 3,000 acres and above. It became a best-seller, going through four editions and updates which culminated in Bateman’s last work on the subject in 1883, The Great Land-Owners of Great Britain and Ireland. Bateman’s analysis confirmed the radicals’ worst fears: just 4,000 families owned over half the country. Meanwhile, 95 per cent of the population owned nothing at all. The landed elite had been exposed.
The return was swiftly buried because of its embarrassing findings. Landowners hated it. It was set upon by The Times, Tory in its politics, which declared that ‘the legend of 30,000 landowners has been found to be as mythical as that of St Ursula and her company of 10,000 virgins’. It was castigated by politicians, such as the MP George Brodrick, who criticised it for inaccuracies and double-counting, even though these errors had been easily corrected by John Bateman in his summaries. Radicals failed to fully capitalise on its findings; although a number of MPs stood in the 1885 election on a promise of ‘three acres and a cow’ for landless farmers, the most they achieved in terms of policy was the 1887 Allotments Act. The moment passed; time moved on; and the return was forgotten.
The third ‘modern Domesday’ was attempted a generation later. In 1906, the Liberals were swept to power in a landslide election victory, bringing to an end the Conservative hegemony that had dominated British politics since the mid-1880s. The New Liberalism of the twentieth century was committed to much greater state intervention than the laissez-faire policies of Victorian Liberals, including a greater willingness to introduce new taxes to pay for social welfare. One aspect of the New Liberalism was a fresh commitment to land reform.
By now land reform had won the support of two of the century’s greatest statesmen: David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. Churchill, then a Liberal MP, wrote in his 1909 book The People’s Rights about the ‘evils of an unreformed and vicious land system’. He railed against ‘the landlord who happens to own a plot of land on the outskirts or at the centre of one of our great cities, 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’. Churchill’s solution to this social evil was to introduce a land value tax. A 20 per cent tax would be levied on the future unearned increase in land values. To do so, however, would require a full survey of the ownership and value of land across the country.
The Chancellor, Lloyd George, put forward such a tax in the ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909, alongside hikes in income tax for the wealthy and a super-tax on the very richest. When the ensuing vote triggered a constitutional crisis over which chamber of Parliament held the upper hand, the government went to the country to obtain a fresh mandate; the Liberals were returned to power, albeit only with the support of Labour and Irish Nationalist MPs, and the People’s Budget was forced through the Lords.
In order to levy the new land value tax, current site values needed to be known; so a valuation survey was set up, dubbed ‘Lloyd George’s Domesday’. It took five years to carry out and involved the detailed mapping of land ownership across the whole country, using Ordnance Survey maps. This makes it an even more valuable resource than the Return of Owners of Land, which only noted the acreage owned, not where it was. It produced an astonishing volume of data: some 50,000 maps and 95,000 ledgers describing the owners and values of around nine million houses, farms and other properties.
The Liberals’ land value tax, however, came to a sorry end. Interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War, and with revenues from it outweighed by the costs of implementation, it was repealed in the 1920 Finance Act, under a government nominally still led by Lloyd George but dominated by the Conservative Party.
I spoke to Professor Brian Short, an academic who has researched the valuation survey extensively, and asked him whether any headline findings exist of who owned England at the time. ‘The 1910–15 survey remained unfinished at the start of the war, and stayed that way through to the repeal of the legislation after the war,’ he told me. ‘There was, unfortunately, no attempt to bring the massive amount of information to any summary conclusion – or at least none that I know of.’ He added: ‘I fear that the English have been very coy about landownership, and remain so.’
Scottish land reform campaigner Andy Wightman agrees, noting that ‘as the twentieth century wore on, people forgot that there had ever been such records. The public had never had access to them in any case and … their very existence was very effectively concealed from all but those working in the Inland Revenue and valuation profession.’ They were eventually declassified and remain in the National Archives, but have never been digitised.
Frustratingly, the moment was also a missed opportunity to rescue the floundering Land Registry, which continued to register land at a pathetically slow rate. The Land Registry’s own official history admits that in 1909, its chief registrar had suggested ‘the setting up of a “Domesday Office” – a merger of the Land Registry, Valuation Office and Ordnance Survey. The ownership records being compiled by the Valuation Office would have then been used to create a land register for the whole country … Lloyd George was in favour, but Lord Chancellor Haldane was opposed. Had the scheme been adopted, the Land Register would have been completed by now.’ Those words were written nearly twenty years ago.
The last and most recent of the modern Domesdays had a rather different aim. It sought not to tax the rich, but to ensure the country could feed itself in the face of total war. With shipping under assault from German U-boats and the country facing the threat of Nazi invasion, Britain embarked on ‘Dig for Victory’. The domestic side of this is well known: rationing, allotments, parks dug up for growing vegetables. Less appreciated today is the effort that went into identifying rural land that wasn’t being farmed, or had fallen into disuse during the agricultural depressions of the late Victorian period and inter-war years.
To this end, Churchill’s War Ministry mandated a National Farm Survey, overseen by the new War Agricultural Committees set up to direct farming. The initial survey was carried out in 1940–1, followed by a larger, two-year survey intended to inform post-war planning. This was seen at the time as a ‘Second Domesday’ – which tells you how quickly the other modern Domesdays had been hushed up or forgotten.
Though principally an investigation into land use, the National Farm Survey also interrogated ownership and tenancy. It covered all farms over five acres – around 320,000 farms in total – covering 99 per cent of agricultural land in England & Wales. However, as an academic paper on the 1941 survey notes, although the ‘results were intended to be for use by planners and agricultural advisors, the original records were not made available for general inspection’ until 1992. And while various historical studies have now been done using the National Farm Survey, the records remain on paper only, stored in the National Archives. A 2006 report made the case for digitisation of all the maps, but so far, no funder has been found.
What of the languishing Land Registry? Since its foundation in 1862 it had proved an embarrassing failure, and despite several further Acts intended to kickstart it – as well as the missed opportunity of 1909 – its progress remained glacial. Registration of land upon point of sale finally became compulsory after 1925, leading to an increase in activity. All information on who owned land, however, remained tightly guarded.
Incredibly, not even the police were allowed to access Land Registry records without the landowner’s permission, thanks to Section 112 of the 1925 Land Registration Act. This clearly hindered efforts to investigate corruption and money laundering. In the 1970s, the Director of Public Prosecutions wrote to the Land Registry pleading for greater transparency. In a document deposited at the National Archives, dated 18 November 1975, an anonymous official refers to the correspondence, and admits: ‘the Deputy Chief Land Registrar has told me that the Registry is embarrassed by the extreme restriction imposed by Section 112 and would welcome an amendment’. But he adds: ‘On the other hand he did not think a greater liberalisation than that was called for – there was no reason why information about a person’s mortgages should be freely available.’
This neurotic secrecy was of a piece with Whitehall’s general paranoia during the Cold War. But by the 1970s, a less deferential public and a more inquisitorial press were starting to demand answers from government. The decade also saw a revival of interest in land ownership, prompted by a rise in land and house prices, concerns about financial speculators buying up farmland, and disquiet over wealthy sheikhs snapping up London properties in the wake of the oil crisis.
In 1973, on the centenary of the Return of Owners of Land, a Sunday Times journalist, Michael Pye, decided to write a feature story about land ownership for the paper’s colour supplement. He wrote to the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF), ‘We plan to contrast the top ten land holdings in 1873 with the largest ten today. I would be very grateful if you could help me in this exercise by letting me have access to a map of your land holdings … with perhaps an approximate figure for the total acreage involved.’
It was an anodyne and courteous request, but even this caused ructions at the department. An internal memo from a civil servant dealing with the request advised his superior: ‘The problem is to provide the information requested without evoking further questions about politically sensitive matters … I trust you are satisfied that this presentation will prove acceptable … and will avoid as far as possible any embarrassing enquiries.’
A trade union researcher who dared to enquire about MAFF landholdings the following year got similarly short shrift. ‘Are we required to provide this? – It doesn’t seem much of their business!’ exclaimed one mandarin in a handwritten note; to which another civil servant responded: ‘I suggest a polite reply regretting that the information cannot be obtained without undue effort – provided that is true of course.’ It wasn’t; the information proved easy to compile.
When the Spectator journalist Stephen Glover tried to write a piece on who owned the country in 1977, he found the only way to get the necessary information was to contact the landowners themselves. ‘This was usually done on the telephone and naturally entailed difficulties,’ he recounted. ‘Often, the landowner was out shooting; once he unfortunately turned out to be dead; and once he was drunk. One landowner could not decide whether he owned 10,000 acres or 100,000 acres: “I do find it so difficult to remember what an acre looks like when I drive across the estate.”’
MPs had begun asking questions, too. The Labour government that took power in 1974 soon set up two inquiries that aimed to probe the concentration of land ownership. The first of these, the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth, tried to investigate who owned England, but was forced to conclude: ‘The paucity of comprehensive up-to-date information on land ownership is remarkable. In the absence of a survey yielding data on the lines of the 1873 survey it is difficult to carry our analysis any further.’
The second, the Northfield Inquiry into the Acquisition and Occupancy of Agricultural Land, got some way further. But although its 1979 report forms a valuable record of the agricultural land then owned by the public sector, financial institutions, and the then small number of overseas buyers, it strangely didn’t seek to investigate the large private landowners who own the great majority of land. Then Margaret Thatcher swept into office, and once again the moment for land reform was lost.
By now, however, many NGOs and investigative journalists were determined to break open the ‘secret state’ regardless of which party was in government. The Campaign for Freedom of Information was set up in 1984, perhaps an appropriate year for founding an organisation dedicated to the rights of the citizen against the overmighty state. It aimed to dismantle the culture of secrecy that pervaded Whitehall, and give people new tools by which to hold government to account. For fifteen years, under the direction of Maurice ‘Freedom’ Frankel, it campaigned tirelessly for a Freedom of Information (FOI) Act to give citizens the right to know what information was being held by public bodies.
The FOI Act finally came into force in 2005. Now, anyone can request information from any public body, simply by emailing them; the public authority is obliged to respond, and there’s a presumption in favour of disclosing information unless it’s covered by a specific exemption. Anthony Barnett, whose organisation Charter 88 campaigned for an FOI Act as part of a wider set of constitutional reforms, has written about its ‘crippling impact on the old regime’. Certainly, those in government came to regret making such a powerful concession. In his memoirs, Tony Blair castigates himself for being a ‘naïve, foolish, irresponsible nincompoop’ for introducing FOI, and considers it one of his greatest mistakes; although he may have been forgetting about something.
Freedom of Information requests are one weapon among a small arsenal of tools and data sources that have proven invaluable for uncovering more about who owns England. I’ll be referring to these investigative tools throughout this book. Some of them were conceded by the government as the intense secrecy of the Cold War dissipated; others have come about through our membership of the EU, or with the development of digital technology; all have been fought for tirelessly by activists, journalists and citizens.
I’ve made extensive use of FOIs in asking public sector bodies to release maps of land and properties they own. Also useful are the Environmental Information Regulations 2004 (EIRs), an EU-derived piece of legislation that gives citizens the right to access specifically environmental information. EIR requests are harder for public bodies to refuse than FOIs, and since 2015 they have also applied to the private water companies, thanks to some great campaigning by an environmental law firm called Fish Legal. I’ve been able to use EIR requests to prise open what land is owned by certain water utilities – though some of them have claimed, bizarrely, that ‘land’ does not count as ‘environmental information’.
It remains harder to find out about private sector land ownership, but here too there has been change for the better. For years, you could only access company accounts at Companies House by paying a fee, making serious investigations prohibitively costly. Then, in 2015, Companies House opened up all its data for free. Its success in providing this excellent resource presents a clear business model for what an open Land Registry should look like.
More recently, Companies House has also started registering ‘Persons of Significant Control’ – the ultimate owners or beneficiaries of registered companies. This is incredibly helpful for investigating complex corporate networks, and disentangling the inevitable knot of subsidiary businesses, shell companies and investments that the parent firms have set up or taken a stake in. For example, the scandal of ground rent properties – homes that have been sold to people on long leases, but which often contain escalating ‘ground rent’ charges hidden in the small print, sometimes making the properties impossible to sell. One of the biggest owners of ground rent properties in England is Wallace Estates. They are owned by the Wallace Partnership Group Ltd, who in turn are owned by Albanwise Ltd. But who owns Albanwise? Thanks to Companies House publishing Persons of Significant Control, we now know: a mysterious Italian billionaire called Count Padulli, who also owns a 4,500-acre estate in Norfolk. His country of residence, however, is stated to be the tax haven of Guernsey.
The increasing trend in recent decades to base companies overseas, and often in offshore tax havens, has presented a fresh challenge to obtaining information on who owns England. Offshore jurisdictions like Guernsey, the British Virgin Islands and Panama aren’t just attractive to companies for reasons of ‘tax efficiency’: they also provide a cloak of secrecy, with less transparent company registries than the UK. If you register a company in the British Virgin Islands, for instance, there is no obligation to reveal the Person of Significant Control who lies behind it.
Anti-corruption charities Global Witness and Transparency International have been pressing for full, public company registers to be implemented in all UK Overseas Territories – including Guernsey and the British Virgin Islands. For years, the government dragged their feet, before being outsmarted by a cross-party group of MPs who forced them to adopt the measures in an amendment to legislation. Even so, the Overseas Territories won’t have to publish any corporate registers until late 2020.
Still, there have been big strides in mapping the land owned by offshore companies. In 2015, Private Eye investigator Christian Eriksson and data journalist Anna Powell-Smith exposed the thousands of acres of land held by offshore firms, using FOI requests and clever mapping to obtain and display the data from the Land Registry.
Long before offshore tax havens were invented, however, the English aristocracy had perfected a system of avoiding taxes and protecting their inheritances: trusts. Many old landed estates are held in trusts, with trustees managing them on behalf of their beneficiaries, such as the heir to the dukedom or barony. This, too, can conceal the identity of the ultimate owners of land. Moreover, there is no public register of trusts. The Tax Justice Network continues to campaign for such a register, to increase transparency and guard against trusts being used for tax evasion.
Clues as to the extent of an estate can be found, though, via a wholly legal tax exemption wheeze sanctioned by HMRC. The government allows some land, buildings and works of art to be exempted from inheritance tax and capital gains tax, providing they are made available for the public to view for a certain period of time each year. In return, the owner of the ‘tax-exempt heritage asset’ must deposit a map with HMRC, alongside details of how members of the public can visit the property. Not everyone who has benefited from the scheme, however, has been so keen to let in the great unwashed. In the 1990s, comedian-turned-activist Mark Thomas discovered that Conservative MP Nicholas Soames was avoiding tax on ‘a lovely three-tier mahogany buffet, with partially reeded slender balustrade upright supports’, but wasn’t letting the public view it. He encouraged hundreds of people to make appointments to see the heirloom at Soames’s estate in Sussex. Eventually, the MP decided to simply pay the tax.
A similar resource exists where landowners have deposited estate maps with the local council to guard against future rights-of-way claims, using provisions in the Highways Act 1980 Section 31(6), as described in the previous chapter. Thousands of these maps lie buried on council websites; still more are likely gathering dust in council office filing cabinets. A few local authorities have had the good sense to fully digitise the maps and make the data available publicly, though many have not.
Many landowners are also the recipients of millions of pounds in taxpayer subsidies, in the form of various payment schemes for farming, tree-planting and environmental stewardship. These subsidies derive from the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), though the UK government shapes how they’re distributed. The data on farm subsidies can provide important clues as to the ultimate owner of a piece of farmland. Once again, however, this information hasn’t always been public. For years, ministers resisted its release, pressured by landowners’ lobby groups, who feared embarrassing stories would emerge about how much taxpayers’ money their members were receiving. But campaigners at the group FarmSubsidy.org persisted, and eventually the EU ruled that farm payments data had to become transparent. Some of the largest recipients of farm subsidies in recent years have turned out to be billionaire inventor-turned-landowner James Dyson, a Saudi prince who owns large horse-racing studs, and the Queen, for her private estate at Sandringham.
The data on overall farm subsidies now published by the government doesn’t come with maps. That makes it harder to use for locating landowners’ estates. But farm subsidies under the CAP regime come under two ‘pillars’. Pillar 1 payments are essentially a subsidy for owning land, with few other strings attached; they make up two-thirds of the money handed out annually. Pillar 2 payments, on the other hand, are allocated for environmental stewardship. Natural England, the government body that was until recently responsible for handing out Pillar 2 payments, publishes maps of where the schemes operate, together with the recipients. These maps can be very helpful in pinning down who owns the land – although in many cases the recipients are tenant farmers, rather than the ultimate landowners.
Similar maps still exist for a now-defunct payment scheme for woodland management administered by the Forestry Commission, called the English Woodland Grants Scheme. Since estates often maintain control of the forests and hedgerows on their estates even where they have leased the fields to tenant farmers, these maps can prove a surer guide to who really owns the area. With Brexit meaning that a huge shake-up of the UK’s farm subsidy system is now under way, it’s vital that we make future payments to landowners more transparent, rather than going backwards to the era of secret subsidies.
Perhaps the biggest underlying change of the past fifteen years that’s made exploring land ownership easier is the development of digital technologies. Until the 1990s, cartography was mostly still done on paper. Since then, the growth of GIS (Geographic Information System) mapping tools has transformed how maps can be made and shared. An EU directive called INSPIRE has forced the Land Registry and Ordnance Survey to publish digital maps showing the outlines of all land parcels in England and Wales – but not who owns them, and with licensing restrictions in place on reproducing the maps. Machine-readable datasets and open-source software have made it easier to analyse complex datasets detailing who owns land, while modern web mapping allows us to create powerful online maps.
The Open Data movement has also sought to shift culture, both within government and wider civil society, so that previously closed data is made open and easily accessible. As Internet pioneer Stewart Brand put it: ‘Information wants to be free.’
All these developments and work-arounds have increased our chances of finding out who owns England. But what of the present state of the Land Registry, set up over 150 years ago now, with the express purpose of gathering such information?
Here, the picture is not so rosy. The Land Registry remains incomplete: over 83 per cent of land in England and Wales has now been registered, but the ‘missing’ 17 per cent comprises millions of acres of land whose owner is unknown. That’s because the rules around registration remain too weak: land is mainly only registered when it changes hands on the open market, and there are of course many old estates which have remained in the hands of the same families for centuries. Worse, the information it does have remains enclosed behind a paywall. Unlike Companies House, the Land Registry still charges for access to most of its data. You can buy the details of a land title for £3 – but with 24 million land titles in its records, buying the answer to who owns all of England and Wales (or at least 83 per cent of it) would set you back a cool £72 million.
The Land Registry has also had to survive the recent near-death experience of attempted privatisation. In 2014, the then Chancellor George Osborne announced he was consulting on plans to sell off the Land Registry, as part of his austerity drive to cut public spending and monetise state assets. Coincidentally or not, Osborne had become a close personal friend of the Earl of Derby, descendant of the 15th Earl – the scourge of Victorian land reformers, whose idea for a Return of Owners of Land to quash the radicals had spectacularly backfired. It had been reported that Osborne had moved into a house on Lord Derby’s Crag Hall country estate in the Peak District, and was a guest at festivals and falconry events in the grounds.
Privatisation posed a mortal threat to ever finding out who owns England. Had the Land Registry been bought up by a private investor, its functions would have been directed entirely to extracting profits from its data, and all hope of opening it up freely to the public would have been lost. Fortunately, a coalition of groups, including the Public and Commercial Services trade union (PCS), 38 Degrees and the MP David Lammy, sparked a public outcry and forced the government into dropping its plans.
In the aftermath of the privatisation attempt, the Land Registry has finally begun to open up. I met with its CEO, Graham Farrant, a number of times in 2016, alongside other campaigners for housing charities and environmental groups. For some years, an alliance of data-geeks and senior civil servants, from the Open Data Institute to officials working on housing policy, had been working behind the scenes to crack open the Registry. Catharine Banks from homelessness charity Shelter argued that to do so would ‘be a massive step forward towards building the homes the country so desperately needs’.
To everyone’s surprise, Farrant agreed. He revealed that when he had worked previously in local government, he’d been appalled at the poor state of councils’ knowledge about even their own landholdings, and how many cash-strapped local authorities couldn’t afford access to the Land Registry’s data. With the threat of privatisation buried, he now wanted to chart a fresh course for the Land Registry; one that would see it both completed and opened up.
True to Farrant’s word, the 2017 Housing White Paper heralded a breakthrough for uncovering land ownership. It announced that the Land Registry would aim to finally complete its register by 2030; and that it would release free of charge its datasets showing the land owned by UK and overseas companies and corporate bodies – over three million land titles, covering a third of the land area of England and Wales. A source inside Number 10 has hinted that the impetus for this came from Theresa May herself. The Conservative Party manifesto for the snap general election that summer went further, announcing a commitment to merging the Land Registry, Ordnance Survey and Valuation Office to create ‘the largest repository of open land data in the world’. Labour’s manifesto promised for the first time to consider a land value tax, showing that the resurgence of interest in land spanned the political spectrum.
There is still a long way to go. Despite the government’s manifesto commitment, Ordnance Survey’s hold over mapping licences makes it very hard to properly map land ownership in England. To Anna Powell-Smith, my collaborator on whoownsengland.org, OS remains ‘the great vampire squid wrapped around the face of UK public-interest technology’. And although it has now released details of the one-third of land in England and Wales owned by companies and public sector bodies, the Land Registry remains resistant to overcoming the final taboo: publishing the details of the private landowners who own the remaining two-thirds.