Community land folly
Christopher Booker
Consider an Act of Parliament which would simultaneously do two things. The first is to remove from hundreds of thousands of the humblest people in our society the right even to protest under law against their forcible eviction from their homes, often in the most inhumane circumstances. The second is to give a handful of property millionaires the prospect of seeing their fortunes increased by tens of millions of pounds.
Would it not seem improbable that even the most right-wing Tory government would dare to introduce such an Act ? Would it not produce a howl of outrage from every Labour politician, trade union leader and newspaper in the land ? Yet last Tuesday precisely such an Act effectively became law—passed by a Labour government with scarcely a cheep of protest, except ironically from the right. When and if the history of our Alice-in-Wonderland times comes to be written, I doubt whether any chapter will seem more inexplicable than that which tells how Mr John 'Aire Valley' Silkin came to place on the statute book that quite astonishing piece of legislation known as the Community Land Act—for which Tuesday, 6 April, was the so-called 'First Appointed Day'.
The claim of the Community Land Act to a kind of unique surreality is that it flies directly in the face of almost every single lesson to be learned from the disastrous history of land, planning, development and housing in the past thirty years. Since 1945, as this poor overcrowded island has experienced the biggest building explosion in its history—nearly nine million new houses, the redrawing of vast areas of our cities to make way for hundreds of millions of square feet of new office blocks and shopping centres, the spilling out of new estates over tens of thousands of acres of farmland—we have above all grappled with two problems. The first has been to decide where, in the community's best interests, all this mass of new building was to take place. The second has been to ensure that the gigantic sums of money thrown up by this Niagara of new development did not just pass into a tiny number of fortunate hands.
We began, of course, in the heady dawn of post-war Britain with the mighty and visionary solution proposed by the first Mr Silkin, in his great 1947 Act. His Utopian answer was simple: first that all development should in future be controlled by highly-skilled teams of new local authority 'planners' ; and second that all private land profits should be nationalised.
Rarely can any brave political dream have been so shattered. Over the past thirty years, despite the most rigid planning control system in the world, we have seen our towns and countryside wrecked. We have seen vast areas of our cities simply transformed into derelict wastelands. We have seen millions of people evicted from their homes and herded into vast concrete ghettoes. And thanks to the entirely unworkable nature of the first Mr Silkin's 'development levy', not to mention the ludicrous Land Commission of the 'sixties, we have seen property developers given a greater tax immunity and amassing greater fortunes than anywhere else in the world.
From this catastrophe we should have learned two lessons above all. The first is that, almost without exception, the major planning disasters which have plagued postwar Britain have come about from 'positive' intervention in the development process by the planners themselves. If Centre Point was a disaster, then blame it on the planners of the old LCC who deliberately brought it into being as part of an abortive traffic roundabout scheme. If nearly 100 acres of central Cardiff are tqday lying completely derelict, it is as a direct result of the most ambitious attempt at city centre planning ever mooted in Britain. The tearing down of hundreds of thousands of sound houses in the 'sixties, and their replacement by inhuman housing estates and tower blocks —all this was 'planned' by the local authorities. Liverpool, Lincoln, Newcastle, Milton Keynes, Bath, Covent Garden, Piccadilly Circus—there is scarcely a single major environmental and social disaster or fiasco which did not begin with some set of highminded town hall planners drawing up a 'comprehensive development plan'.
As for the second lesson, which we finally learned during the years of the 'Barber bubble' property mania of the early 'seventies, it is that the only people who have managed to benefit from this catastrophic planning failure have been the property developers—who, when they have not been kept on so tight a rein that virtually no development took place at all (as in the days of Lewis Silkin's development levy), have simply run financially amok. And of the two or three hundred major commercial property coups of the past twenty-five years, there was scarcely one in which the local authorities did not play some kind of 'positive' role.
In the face of these blindingly obvious lessons, what does the second Mr Silkin's Community Land Act propose to do? One almost weeps to say it. Firstly he proposes vastly to extend the 'positive planning' role of the town hall planners to cover almost every development which is ever to take place: in other words, to give final and supreme power to the very men who have been responsible for all our worst catastrophes. And secondly, as the property industry has begun to realise in recent months with an increasing gleam in its eye, Mr Silkin proposes to give the developers the chance once again to share in profits on a scale which, after the Barber development tax and the collapse of the market in 1974, they never expected to see again.
On the one hand, as people are increasingly coming to realise (pace Bernard Levin in Tuesday's Times), the Community Land Act represents a really major erosion of individual liberty. Over the past twenty years, the scale on which local authorities have been able to take over people's perfectly sound homes, and all the miseries and injustices of the compulsory purchase system, have been one of the great insufficiently reported scandals of the age. But at least until now the hundreds of thousands of victims of these schemes have had the chance to put their case at a public inquiry, and to protest at the lunacy of the more absurd schemes put forward.
Now even this right is to be taken away. No longer in many cases will there even be a public inquiry. No longer will the victims even be able to question the purpose for which they are about to lose their homes or their businesses. It will simply be enough that the town hall planners have drawn a few lines on the map. And even though, in 'Circular 76/30' the Secretary of State for the Environment has asked local authorities to bear in mind his desire that older houses should where possible be rehabilitated rather than redeveloped, this is pretty cold comfort in view of what has recently been happening to thousands of people in Southwark, Lambeth, Sunderland and elsewhere.
On the other hand, in the field of commercial development, it seems that, so long as the market for shops and offices holds up, the property companies can look forward to a return Of bonanza days. For a while, it is true, the transitional development land tax at 80 per cent will continue to stop development as stone dead as did the old development levy. But as soon as the Act is working fully, and all land is first bought by town halls and then leased out to developers, it is cleat that the developers will soon have just as much of a whip hand as they did in the heady days of the 'sixties
and early 'seventies, when many of their greatest coups were derived from so-called 'joint schemes' with local authorities. Is not even Centre Point itself, for instance, owned by the GLC—at a ground rent of £18,500 a year? In almost every city centre in the land there are lesser examples. The growing optimism of the property world was neatly summed up by a strip cartoon in last week s Estates Times—the first frame of which showed a developer holding a copy of the Act saying, 'It must be repealed', and the second, on the line to the town hall, 'Thank you, Mr Director of Development-300,000 square feet, you say ? All pre-let to the Property Services Agency...I'll be right over • It is already quite certain that the Conmunity Land Act will be a fiasco. Even Mr Silkin admits that it will be many years before the 15,000 extra bureaucrats required to run it can possibly be recruited. We have already seen the absurdity of more than a third of the counties in England and Wales, including London and Manchester, having to have their land-purchasing plans foisted on them by remote planners from the DOE —because they could not work out in six months precisely what land in their areas needed to be bought for development in the next five years. We have even seen the farce of pages 73 and 75 in the recent PESC White Paper in which it is stated exactly how manY acres of land will be required in 1978-9 and 1979-80, and how much each acre will cost —showing that according to the Treasury the average cost of each acre between those two years will fall from £19,500 to £15,000. Indeed the whole spectacle of Mr John Silkin piously trying to recoup his father s 1947 failures has been quite pitiful and no doubt will eventually be as completelY forgotten as Fred Willey's Land Commission. But at the end of the day, after a gigantic waste of public money, and a few more major local planning catastrophes, We shall still be left with the same old basic problems. Perhaps as we wait for Mr Silkin's tower of cards to collapse, we should be giving more serious thought to how they can really be solved.
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