Policy Pulse 06
The first major COVID inquiry report, miners' pensions, land ownership and COVID in prison.
Welcome to your weekly pulse of public policy. This week, we’re starting with a full-on COVID report, and ending with another policy area grappling with the consequences of the pandemic. In-between, we’re looking at pensions and land ownership.
Report of the week: Report of the People’s COVID Inquiry
For all that I was hesitant to lead off last week with a health policy report, this week there can surely only be one choice: the report of the People’s COVID Inquiry.
It’s a thorough review of events of the last two years, offering a good timeline for easy reference, and all the fish in the barrel are efficiently shot. Lack of preparedness, the stretched state of health and care services before the pandemic, slowness to recognise the seriousness of the new disease and act, the UK’s appallingly high death rates, the way in which the pandemic has hit already disadvantaged groups hardest, the over-reliance on vaccines as the only defence, and more – it’s all here.
Yet it didn’t make much of a splash: the papers mostly picked it up, some trade press reported it and a few organisations such as the BMA responded. But it didn’t feature prominently, if at all, on much broadcast news, or appear to cause any political ripples: as the first major inquiry into the pandemic, you’d have thought that it might. So what’s going on?
The big problem with this exercise had always been that its roots are showing like a dye job from two months ago. The prime mover behind the exercise is the campaign group Keep Our NHS Public, a strongly ideological and anti-Conservative body, whose origins can be traced back to anti-Thatcher health campaign groups of the 1980s. Of itself, this will make many outlets hesitant to cover it extensively, though whether from a general scepticism about the impartiality of its analysis or a specific desire to avoid aggravating relations with the government may vary.
Unfortunately, the origins of the report do indeed skew its analysis, which regularly veers into criticism of “privatisation” in the NHS and crude contrasts between public sector health bodies (invariably good) and private sector ones (invariably bad). It’s a constant source of frustration and alarm to those of us working in health policy to see so much energy and effort directed, however sincerely, to taking swings at the phantom threat of “privatisation”. As this article recently set out, there are enough bad things going on in respect of the NHS that we can’t afford to waste energy chasing illusions; and as I wrote elsewhere a few years ago, the charge of “privatisation” in the NHS truly is a conspiracy theory.
For all that, the report deserves some time, and probably more attention than it got. It will be interesting to see how it compares to the findings of the eventual public inquiry that is due to start its work next year: as the recent report reminds us, Johnson promised a chair would be appointed by Christmas.
Meanwhile, what next for the People’s COVID Inquiry? The report is heavily framed in terms of misconduct in public office; the Nolan principles wre breached, and there were major governance failures in successive instances of ineffective decision-making. Presumably there will be some sort of crowd-funded attempt to bring private prosecutions against ministers, using the arguments here. Legal action of this sort is always a Hail Mary pass, though you never know – it could certainly be a nuisance for those on the receiving end, if nothing else.
Letter of the week
This week’s letter is from MPs largely in (former) mining constituencies to the Prime Minister, requesting action on what certainly looks like an egregiously unjust outcome from the Mineworkers’ Pension Scheme established in 1994. It apparently contains a provision letting the government retain 50% of any surplus from miners’ pensions, which has netted it £4.4 billion since it started, far more than was expected at the time, and without paying in a penny itself.
The letter follows a Commons BEIS Committee report recommending that the surplus share be revised, to which the government’s response was described as “a slap in the face”: it essentially seems to argue that that was the agreement at the time so that’s the end of the matter. Budging the government on the issue looks likely to be a substantial challenge.
Question of the week: Is ownership of agricultural land being consolidated into relatively few hands?
This week’s question is another that was prompted by something George Monbiot said a while ago, and where I wondered whether it might be another example of him sincerely repeating a false claim made by others, like the one about soil examined in the first edition of this newsletter. Unlike that time, when he later apologised, Monbiot is on firmer ground here; indeed, it’s a subject on which he co-wrote a report for the Labour Party in 2019.
The claim that land ownership is bring concentrated in fewer hands was made specifically with reference to agricultural land when I first heard it, although wider questions of land ownership quickly open up when you start to look into it.
In fact, land ownership in the UK is famously obscure: HM Land Registry was established in 1862 to establish and document who owns the land in England and Wales, but around 17% of land ownership remains undeclared to it even today. The Land Registry itself is bullish about the opportunities offered by digitising and opening up land data (as in this 2018 article), but for campaigners including Monbiot the situation remains highly unsatisfactory: his recommendations included the establishment of a more powerful Land Commission for England and Wales, as already exists in Scotland.
Still, with the caveat that the facts are in places a bit unclear, we can certainly see that there has been something of a pattern of land ownership being consolidated over the last few decades; but as so often, that’s not necessarily the full story.
From the early part of the twentieth century, it’s certainly true that established patterns of land ownership were disrupted, and more land came into public ownership. The timber shortage after the first world war led to the Forestry Commission being established in 1919, which now controls around 4% of the UK’s land area (around two million acres). Much land has also been procured for military training (around half a million acres). Conservation organisations came to control a lot of land in the second half of the twentieth century: they account for around 2% of the total, with National Trust and RSPB having the most (albeit in very fragmented estates). Even in the later part of the nineteenth century, there was some land reform: a statutory right to an allotment was established, as were the first County Farms, to help smallholders into farming.
This trend towards public ownership has, unsurprisingly, been somewhat reversed since the 1970s. While the coalition government’s notorious attempt to privatise the Forestry Commission was quickly abandoned, other privatisations have had the effect of moving some publicly owned land back into the private sector. County Farms still exist, but half have been sold off over the last fifty years. Overall, around 10% of the UK’s land area has moved back into private ownership.
At the same time, land has become an ever more attractive target for private investment. It is relatively secure against inflation, which mattered a great deal in the 1970s and 80s particularly. It is also attractive from a taxation point of view: farmland has 100% relief from inheritance tax provided it is still in use for agricultural purposes when the owner dies. It can also qualify for Entrepreneurs’ Relief, reducing capital gains tax down to 10%: consider that when farmland is sold for development its value can increase by dozens or even hundreds of times, and you can see how big a tax advantage this can be.
Investors have therefore had good reason to pile into land. In 2017, only 40% of farm purchases were by farmers. Who else is buying land up? Pension funds have been investing since the 1970s, and now appear to control over half a million acres. Companies such as Tesco and BT are also large scale owners, while some corporate landowners make it their main business, such as Peel Estates which owns large portions of Manchester. These companies might by either for investment, or for future development. Overall, around 11.5 million acres are registered to corporate or commercial entities. Wealthy overseas investors are also buying in, picking up stud farms, Scottish estates and grouse moors.
However, this picture of change can be overstated. Overall, the remarkable thing about patterns of land ownership today is that they have not changed dramatically since the nineteenth century (although it may be fair to say that some change in the twentieth century has since been reversed, so this is a net position). In 1883, just over half of England and Wales was held in estates of over 1,000 acres, and in 1873 the “Second Domesday” found that just 4,000 people (men) owned half of England. Studies in 1993 and 2010 both found that over one third of England and Wales was in estates over 1,000 acres, and as of 2010 a quarter of all rural land was owned by 1,200 people, and half of it by 36,000. Ownership has become somewhat more diverse, but not enormously: the essential pattern of a small number of large landowners remains identifiable.
This might seem curious: in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many reformers expected large scale land reform to take place; today, many people might simply assume that at some point it did. Indeed, it might be argued that one political definition of modernity is that politics is no longer primarily about land and its associated rights. From 1066 onwards, when all land was held of the king, land was central to domestic politics: it is what gave wealthy and powerful people their wealth and power (through feudal dues of money and service, and later more recognisable rent arrangements), and when kings had trouble with uppity nobles it was often because they were trying to mess with people’s property rights. Religion clouded the picture from the sixteenth century onwards, but property rights were still a substantial element in the mix of the constitutional upheavals in the seventeenth century, and it was a major dimension (along with empire) in the Home Rule saga that concluded Gladstone’s career in the 1880s and 90s.
While political power once arose directly from land ownership, and hereditary land ownership at that, other forces weakened that link once Britain had industrialised. For one thing, land was now no longer the only source of wealth: commerce became one as well. For another, political participation was gradually decoupled from property rights by successive franchise reforms over the half century or so from 1867. Over the subsequent century, many aspects of life were increasingly organised by, and sometimes brought wholesale into, the public sphere. This included the planning system after 1945, but never the land itself. Why not?
The answer appears to relate mainly to circumstance. Whether any government ever could truly have taken on the vested interest of the large landowners and won is unclear, but none ever tried. The intervention of the two world wars played several major parts of this: it derailed Lloyd George’s ambitions for land reform by putting him in coalition with the Conservatives; and after 1945 Attlee’s government prioritised increasing food production over any thought of nationalising land; indeed, state support for agriculture and forestry has made landowners, often still the traditional aristocracy, large scale recipients of state support. Government policy has consistently been to influence the use of land by a combination of incentives and regulation, not by seizing control of it directly.
This matters: given that many aspects of government policy depend directly or indirectly on how land owners use their land, this makes the successful implementation of much government policy dependent on the effectiveness of this approach. Examples of this will become apparent as we go on.
Ownership of the land is of course also driven by the uses to which land can be put. One constant feature of British history (and I imagine many other places besides) is the long-term yo-yoing of whether owners let their land out to tenants, or take it in hand to farm it directly: I remember studying it as part of medieval economic history as a student, and the same issue crops up in modern discussions of land use and ownership. The changing face and fortunes of agriculture largely drive these decisions (although tax and subsidy arrangements for farming in turn drive those), and over the last hundred or so years there has been a major shift from tenancy to owner occupation, of which the investment trends noted above have been a part.
As I described when I looked at issues around soil quality, agriculture is in an interesting moment as the UK shifts towards its post-Brexit, and therefore post-Common Agricultural Policy, future. It may be that the new subsidy regimes incentivise improved productivity and improved environmental impacts… but possibly one or the other, rather than both at the same time. DEFRA is advocating the use of automation technology and “precision farming”, but this might lend itself to heavy specialisation in one or two crops at a large scale, rather than the more varied crop planting that can, for instance, improve soil quality.
Here land ownership issues intersect with other choppy currents, not least to do with our food supply chains. These have successfully squeezed farmers’ margins, so that they see only very small returns: this makes farming on a larger scale more attractive. High-intensity “megafarms” are indeed becoming more common, with soil-free vegetable growing and intensive poultry farms becoming more common (the first of the latter appeared in 2003; 1,400 licences for them have now been issued). DEFRA expects a number of farmers to exit the profession as the shift to new arrangements happens, most probably as part of a pattern of larger farms and, yes, larger and more consolidating land holdings. Young farmers may struggle to obtain land and enter the profession; the long-term consequences may be that we become even more reliant on food imports, if we can’t adjust our food supply chains, and possibly patterns of land ownership with them.
So land ownership does indeed appear to have become somewhat consolidated, and more focused in the private sector, but this is essentially a continuation of traditional patterns or, at most, a partial reversal of modest changes to those patterns in the mid-twentieth century. But that is not the full story of land ownership: we can’t really leave the topic without briefly looking at house prices.
The UK is not a property-owning democracy: homeowners own only about 5% of the country. The proportion peaked in 2003, from when the current housing crisis kicked in. Not coincidentally, the value of land has risen from around £1 trillion in 1995 to over £5 trillion today: overwhelmingly this is a matter of speculative inflation, rather than improvements being made. Across advanced economies including the UK, 81% of house price increases since 1950 can be attributed to rising land prices; by 2016, 70% of the average house price reflected the value of the land the building stood on, rather than the actual bricks and mortar of the structure. Land has become very, very expensive.
We don’t need to cover the full gamut of social impacts from this here – readers will be familiar with issues around rising inequalities, increasingly segmented communities, access to good jobs, schools and all that flows from that. But some of the big economic consequences directly arising from land ownership merit some attention (and here I’m leaning heavily on a persuasive section of the Monbiot report in particular). Creating such easy investment opportunities in land discourages those with wealth to invest from investing in the productivity of the economy: if there’s one thing that has bedevilled our economic history, it’s surely a failure to invest. At the same time, with housing prices so high, aggregate demand in the economy depends to a worrying extent on debt: and in the event of an economic shock, highly leveraged households will cut back all the harder, exacerbating the extent of any economic harm. These factors remain live problems in our economy today.
The more you look at it, the more land ownership emerges as a policy and political issue of major importance, that seldom appears to get the attention it perhaps should.
Matters of note
I recently read a reference in passing – and I’m afraid I can’t remember where – to the “success” of stopping the spread of COVID-19 in prisons. The extent of that success might be something to check as a future Question of the Week, but it certainly came at a cost, with prisoners confined near-permanently to their cells for prolonged periods and rehabilitation activities suspended.
A report from the Prisoner Policy Network offers views from a prisoner perspective on what the prison system’s recovery from the pandemic should look like. Its insights on where the system is starting from are particularly interesting. One prisoner is quoted as saying: “I have ‘regressed’ to the basics for so long that I’m not that bothered about the regime anymore. As long as I can phone my family, exercise and shower every day, I truly don’t care about anything else.” While from prison officers’ point of view, there are concerns that substantial numbers of officers who have joined the service over the last two years have no experience of large numbers of prisoners being out of their cells at once and may lack the skills to interact with them effectively.
It also reflects that the system has welcomed the side-effects from COVID control measures of reduced violence between inmates, and reduced self-harm. The reduction in violence may be genuine, but the reduction in self-harm may be an illusion and more a matter of prison staff simply no longer seeing evidence of it. It wouldn’t be the only system or public service to see its response to the pandemic more positively than the people who use it do.
And finally, it was reported last week that new guidance has been issued to informal civil service networks that link up officials with common interests, such as the Civil Service LGBT+ Network, and the Civil Service Race Forum, forbidding them from inviting in speakers who have been critical of government policy.
Ostensibly this is guidance aimed at maintaining the neutrality of the civil service, by advising caution about inviting in speakers who will pursue political agendas. However, it’s more likely of a piece with the current government’s modus operandi, of insisting that its political preferences are the only legitimate truth, and espousing alternative perspectives should be treated as a hostile act.
The guidance includes advice to check social media posts and any other publication of speakers’ views before inviting them in. If it is observed, the net result can only possibly be that banning anyone who has been critical about government policy means banning anyone who knows anything about government policy – and that can be said of to any and all governments, albeit to varying degrees. I must have unknowingly got myself banned a long time ago.
Thanks for reading
That’s it for now. If there’s anything above you’d like to give me feedback on, please do get in touch by email or on Twitter (@JMKPolicy). And please share, forward, subscribe, all of that good stuff. Have as good a week as you can, and I’ll see you next time.