The new dukes
FOR if God gave the land for the People, somehow the People do not seem to have collected. The dreadnoughts are long gone; the dukes are with us still. And they have been joined by a new aristocracy: the barley barons who are destroying the hedges in East Anglia and the absentee lords of the forests who are covering the British uplands with conifers, largely at the taxpayer's expense. While every obstacle Is put in the way of builders wishing to put LIP three-bedroomed semis, every encourage- ment is given to the tree-blanketers. According to the Daily Telegraph, Mr Terry Wogan recently bought 628 acres of Caithness moorland for £57,210. It will cost him £262,000 to plant and maintain his conifers. The Forestry Commission will pay him some £62,800 of that in planting grants. Sixty per cent of the remaining £200,000 can be written off against the top rate of tax. Thus, one way or another, the taxpayer will put up some 70 per cent of the forestry costs. Even Mr Alex Higgins's mournful expression must lift as he con- templates a similar tax-free bonanza await- ing him in Sutherland.
By contrast, house-building has been crippled, from an annual rate of 300,000- plus before the war, and also in the 19605, down to 200,000 a year or less in recent years. In the 1930s, land was being de- veloped at the rate of about 12,000 hec- tares a year. The present figure is less than 8,000 hectares, about half of which goes on housing. The Green Belts creep forward. Old development plans of the 1960s and 1970s show about 1.475 million hectares as Green Belt. At the end of 1983, the county structure plans showed nearly two million hectares waiting for approval as Green Belt land.
And are our Green Belts not the envy of the civilised world? Should we not realise how lucky we are to be able to travel along the motorways of southein England — one of the richest areas in Europe — and see only the occasional huddle of red roofs tucked discreetly by the railway line? And in any case are there not thousands of acres of suitable derelict land waiting to be developed in the cities? No matter if half the urban sites are sandwiched between the marshalling yards, the coal depot and the gasworks and are twice as expensive to develop as green-field sites. The People must be tidied away somewhere. How eloquently the Prince of Wales spoke for us all when he told the builders to build in the cities first, instead of desecrating 'scarce farmland'.
Too bad if this means that the average price of a building plot has had to rise by 1,550 per cent over the past 20 years, that the cost of the site has risen from ten per cent of the total house price in 1964 to 40 per cent in parts of the South-East today, that the price of an average dwelling should have risen from £10,000 in 1970 to well over £30,000 today, while the income of the average building society borrower has only gone up from £5,000 to £10,000. Too bad if the home counties have all beerl reducing the housing allocations in their structure plans, by 20 per cent or more the case of Berkshire, Hampshire and Hertfordshire. Too bad if the parts of Cheshire, Warwickshire and Shropshire where people actually want to live are noW virtually closed to housebuilders. Too bad if hundreds of thousands of men and women cannot afford to move to take up a job. Too bad if a modest car repair workshop in the shabbier reaches of Isling- ton can now cost £250,000. True, it is the misplaced encouragement of mortgage tax relief which is principally responsible for so horribly inflating house prices and hence land prices, but it is the selfishness of the southern counties which turns the screw.
Meanwhile, as the houses get smaller, the farms get bigger, and the farmers fewer. In 1946, there were some 500,000 farmers in the UK; today there are less than half that number. The great and good Sir Richard Body, virtually the only farm- ing MP who is prepared to criticise the industry, claims that 'our farmers have been disappearing from the land at a rate faster than at any time since the Black beath, and 3,000 a year are still vanishing'. And nobody seems to mind — not the Ministry, not the National Farmers Union, not the MPs, whether Labour or Tory. All are happy to see the growth of Big Farm- 1,11g, Agribusiness and the restriction of pudding outside the towns — the Tories ?ecause they don't want the view spoilt and Labour because it wants to keep its clients Pent up in its city fiefdoms. What is mildly described as an 'environ- mental dilemma' looks to me suspiciously like a moral issue. The main growth of employment is taking place in East Anglia south-east England — and will be for tne foreseeable future, regional policy or nn regional policy. The shortage of homes to buy in those areas is chronic — prices have been rising by 15 to 20 per cent over the past year alone. Homes to rent are all but extinct. Can anyone seriously claim to be concerned about unemployment and the plight of the poor and refuse to contemplate, say, a doubling of the piresent rate of house-building in the bottom right- hand quarter of England? For ultimately, the consequences of the shortage reverber- ate back into the city centres and hurt the poorest most. There is no cheap housing to rent for the 'real poor' of Alexandra Artley's heart-rending article (`The poor of London', 13 December), no cheap housing that the not-quite-so-poor could dream of buying. The unspoilt view from the bottom of one's Home Counties garden is dearly bought. The 1947 Planning Act was the child of war as well as the child of socialism. It was grounded in confused assumptions of permanent scarcity. There is indeed a fixed supply of unspoilt coastline and Lakeland. But the shortage of timber, like the food shortage (Dig for victory'), may be only a fleeting consequence of war; whether you ought to remedy it by planting millions of trees here depends on assumptions about the nature of future wars and the relative costs of British and foreign timber. The scarcity of farmland is a still more slippery idea; it depends not only on relative cost advantages and disadvantages between one country and another, but also on crop yields and the type of farming pursued (organic muck and fallowing versus high- nitrogen, total agriculture). Yet all these different types of scarcity or supposed scanty fused into the same general post- war alarm which appeared to justify a comprehensive planning system. But if the age of scarcity is over, then the framework of planning cannot remain in- violate. If Mrs Thatcher's advisers are taking a leaf out of Dr Mansholt's book and suggesting that 20 per cent of Euro- pean Community cereal land should be taken out of production, if the NFU itself is talking of 'transferring to other uses' three million acres of agricultural land over the next decade, those other uses are them- selves bound to alter.
The NFU, in desperation, suggests for- estry for, say, one third of the surplus area. But no longer do they commend forestry er la Wogan, those huge plantations of conif- ers on hitherto bare uplands, supported by tax incentives for the very rich. The NFU suggests instead annual maintenance grants to help medium and small farmers, structured so as to encourage broad-leaved woodland and short-term coppicing. The cost to the Exchequer of a million acres planted with trees in this way might rise to a maximum of £50 million a year, as compared with £100 million savings on agricultural support. And the remaining bare highlands could be left unmolested.
If we are looking, first and foremost, to save money, a more reliable method would be for farmers to use some of the surplus land to introduce a year's fallow into an old-fashioned crop rotation, and so save huge sums of money on chemicals. Organic farming may sound cranky when the whole system is dedicated to maximising produc- tion at all costs. But when and if there are fixed production quotas for cereals, as there already are for milk, then the sums might begin to change. In the note on `Diverting land from cereals', which Mr Jopling recently submitted to his fellow agriculture ministers, he holds out the prospect of dramatic savings from making annual payments to farmers who leave land fallow. If a million hectares of Community land became fallow, at a subsidy cost of some £400 million a year, according to MAFF, the annual savings from the cereal production avoided would quickly rise to around £1,200 million over the five-year duration of the scheme. Of course, it seems perverse to pay farmers not to grow crops (although the American government has been doing it for decades), but then it seems perverse to pay them to grow crops nobody wants. And if these fallowing subsidies were looked on as a subsidy to keep the land `in good heart' in the traditional fashion, then they might not seem so perverse after all.
Yet we cannot delude ourselves that any such schemes would work impartially as between farmers, any more than• do the main methods of restricting production — price reductions and production quotas. Any reduction in subsidies is likely to hurt the weakest first. The small farmer on marginal land remains the vulnerable one. If his income were to be made up of various grants for fallowing or coppicing, plus `social payments' for hill farming, plus, say, income from the sale of the honey and wool he produces, his occupa- tion would increasingly become that of a nature - warden - cum - craftsman - and - old- fashioned-all-round-smallholder rather than that of a `serious' farmer- businessman. Again, what's wrong with that? On the whole, such a system would probably work out cheaper and nicer.
The end of scarcity reverberates into other land uses too. More farmers will put in for permission to convert their poorer land into golf courses and fishing lakes. And over all looms the shadow of De- velopment. There is plenty of land which is not in a Green Belt or a National Park or in an Area of Outstanding National Beauty, which indeed is not beautiful at all, but which has survived undeveloped only be- cause of the scarcity myth. How much lon- ger can the southern counties hold out against building on such land, putting for- ward, as Tory MPs do, the specious vision of a continuous subtopia stretching from Sheerness to Weston-super-Mare?
Until the next election, that is how long. Mr Nicholas Ridley has made it absolutely clear that he will do nothing to anger any potential Alliance voters south of the Trent in this parliament. But afterwards? Are Enterprise Zones to be restricted solely to the Midlands and the North? Mr Ridley's latest proposals for `cashless' (i.e. unsubsidised) Enterprise Zones in the East Midlands — Nottingham, Leicester and so on — are presented as magnets to attract development away from the South-East into a thriving but still under-occupied region of England. But are there not places in the South-East too where the same sort of thing could be tried — on a much smaller scale perhaps and only after the most scrupulous environmental fore- thought?
At present, the only general relief from the job-denying strangulations of the plan- ning policy is afforded by the Govern- ment's somewhat furtive policy of making it a habit to allow planning appeals unless there is overwhelming reason not to. Since even rural MPs have now spotted this tactic, it threatens to provoke widespread unpopularity without providing enough building land in the right places. Some- thing a little more daring must be tried, and something which puts the onus of decision and provision on the local author- ities themselves. Every serious study sug- gests that the county structure plans were and are inadequate and that the district plans which are to succeed them under Mr Ridley's new dispensation will be, if any- thing, more restrictive still.
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