Squeezed Out: The Kleptogarchy part 24

Squeezed Out

Farmland in Eastern England in 2021 cost about £8,410 an acre and in South East England £8,390 an acre, according to the agents Savills. Great Britain’s cheapest farmland was on average £5,460 an acre in Wales, where companies are now eyeing upland farms for tree planting as potential carbon sinks. Savills commented that “Investment in farmland is seen as a hedge against increasing inflation and we may see investors looking to diversify their portfolios with agricultural assets.”[1] Large productive farms in the UK sell for millions of pounds, one of their attractions being the easy exemption from Inheritance Tax at 40%. Within the UK, Europe, North America and across the industrialised world, most people live in cities. The rural population in the UK, for example, all those living in countryside areas and not just farmers, was 16% in 2018, and in the USA 17%.[2] In a locally provisioned world, a revival of small farms is surely essential.

Local authorities in the UK used to provide small ‘county farms’ for new entrants, but most of this land has been sold off as councils struggled to make ends meet. The acreage of county farms in England halved in the 40 years to 2018, an investigation by Who Owns England has found:[3]

“County Farms are farms owned by Local Authorities and let out to young and first-time farmers, sometimes at below-market rents. They’re a vital ‘first rung on the farming ladder’ for newcomers to a sector that has high up-front capital costs: by providing the land and buildings, the public sector is helping get fresh blood into an industry where the average age of farmers is 60.

“Yet the acreage of County Farms across England has plummeted from 426,695 acres in 1977 to just 215,155 acres in 2017.”

The investigation explained that:

“The origins of County Farms lie in the late-Victorian agricultural depression, during which widespread cries for land reform led radical Liberal MP Joseph Chamberlain to stand for election on the promise of “three acres and a cow” for landless tenant farmers. He went on to propose a solution whereby councils would buy up land and lease it out to small tenant farmers on cheap rents. A succession of government Acts in 1892, 1908 and 1925 created County Farms, sometimes called County Smallholdings.”

It all went wrong in the 1980s:

“Fundamentally, the problem is central government cuts to local authority budgets. …the period of decline has coincided with the era of privatisation, cuts and centralisation ushered in by Margaret Thatcher’s governments in the 1980s, and accelerated under the austerity budgets of the Coalition and current government.”

The county farm entry road has become a narrow path indeed.

In Wales, a planning policy called One Planet Development allows people who own or buy land to build a home on it, subject to strict conditions. It is popular with applicants but less so with councillors sitting on planning committees. Here is an example from Carmarthenshire, dating from 2016.

Alwyn B Nixon, Planning Inspector, allowed on appeal a mini eco-hamlet of four homes on 21.5 acres at Rhiw Las, Abbey Road, Whitland. The original planning application, from Rhiw Las Ltd’s Dr Erica Thompson, was submitted under Wales’ One Planet policy for sustainable development in the countryside. Her application was refused by Carmarthenshire County Council’s planning committee, who went against the advice of planning officers. There was an extra sting in the tail for the planning committee – Erica Thompson reported that the council was required to pay the full costs of the appeal.

One Planet policy allows new land-based live-and-work enterprises in the countryside provided that detailed rules are followed. The guiding principle is to use very small amounts of finite resources, and to rely on renewable resources which planet Earth can continuously provide.

The reasons that councillors gave for rejecting Rhiw Las Ltd’s application included their personal opinions that occupants would fail to make a sufficient living, that they could live elsewhere and work on the land during the day, that it would encourage similar applications, and that it was too far from a village. Committee members then asked the planning department to come up with valid reasons for rejecting the plan. In the end, planning officers extracted three policies from the 2014 Carmarthenshire Local Development Plan and applied them to the One Planet policy in such a way as to make it very unlikely that any One Planet application for a rural location could ever be approved in the county.

At the behest of the critical councillors, planning officers suggested that the proposed site, 3.5 miles from Whitland and 2.2 miles from Llanboidy, was inadequately served by an integrated transport network catering for pedestrians, cyclists and public-transport users, and so conflicted with policy ‘GP1’ of the Local Development Plan. They said there was also a conflict with policy ‘TR2’, because the site was too remote from public transport, and was accessed from a road which lacked a pedestrian pathway. They also cited policy ‘TR3’, requiring public transport to be accessible.

Erica Thompson lost no time in appealing against the refusal, and she was vindicated when the appeal was allowed.

Alwyn B Nixon said in his decision: “It is clear that there is some scepticism amongst local community representatives as to the feasibility of the proposals; also a concern that such development will fail to integrate with the wider community. However, I find that the proposals are supported by a detailed development programme which fully meets the specific requirements laid out in Welsh Government guidance for their consideration of land-based OPD (One Planet Development) in the countryside.”

In response to councillors’ concerns over accessibility and public transport, the inspector concluded that “the development would be acceptably located as regards as regards its accessibility to local facilities and the availability of alternatives for sustainable travel options” and “it accords with the provisions of the development plan, so far as material to the development concerned, in this respect”.

Mr Nixon continued: “I am aware that some opponents of the proposal feel it unfair that development of this kind can be permitted in the countryside, whilst strict controls apply to the location of other housing. Ultimately, however, determination of the acceptability of this proposal rests on an objective consideration of its own planning merits, assessed in the context of the One Planet Development policy”.

Erica Thompson and husband Chris Vernon had formidable intellectual resources to draw on during their battle with the council’s planning committee. Erica, a PhD in physics, is Senior Policy Fellow in the Data Science Institute at the London School of Economics, and Chris, with a glaciology PhD, is a climate scientist and an engineer. If they are convinced of the urgent need to live differently, why is there still so much resistance? Tess Delaney experienced this resistance. She tried to start a One Planet Development in Pembrokeshire. She failed to convince the planning authority, a tale related in her book NOPD. Pete Linnell, buildings and energy sustainability consultant, wrote an appendix in which he commented (p.181):

“Legal remedy is only available to those with spare resources which can be put at great risk by court action. Consequently, those with limited means do not have access to all the options available to secure an OPD consent in the face of determined local opposition.”

Pete Linnell’s analysis also questioned the lack of seriousness with which the planning authority and then the planning inspector treated the management plan prepared by Ms Delaney as a central part of her application. He quoted (p.187) the inspector’s report as stating that:

“Appellant has produced the Management Plan herself, and I cannot rely on the information in it unless it is backed by clear evidence to support the various assertions made. In this respect the Management Plan is deficient in a number or elements.”

Yet the inspector also said:

“Some planting and growing has already taken place in 2018 and 2019, and the Appellant has used the results of these trials to help make projections of future production levels at the end of a 5-year period.”

Somewhat contradictory statements? True, Tess Delaney was not a professional horticulturist, but that is not a condition of receiving planning permission under the One Planet Development scheme.

Tess was defeated. Local authorities have vastly more resources at their disposal than the average resident like Tess. Elsewhere, I have seen expensive resources like lawyers used to silence critics whose assertions were regarded by officialdom as untrue. Protection of the institution (and thus of themselves) has been more important to some senior officials than the rights of wronged or ignored individuals. As a rule of thumb, the greater the wrong, the stronger the effort to deny it!

If we apply this rejection tendency to climate change, we see that people whose current lives depend on fossil fuels, on synthetic chemicals and other heavily carbon-emitting industries, on long-haul transport and tourism and the suchlike, are unlikely to be in the vanguard of any movement towards a zero carbon world.

In Wales, vociferous opponents of OPD remain. They find change an uncomfortable concept, and they include many with a tendency to downplay the dangers of global heating, to prefer sheep and cattle farming over the horticultural basis of many OPDs, and to assume that Life As We Have Known It can continue far into the future.

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[1] The Farmland Market, Savills, January 2022, p.6.

[2] Data from the World Bank, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.RUR.TOTL.ZS, accessed March 31^st 2022.

[3] ‘How the Extent of County Farms has Halved in Forty Years’, by Guy Shrubsole for Who Owns England, June 8^th 2018. https://whoownsengland.org/2018/06/08/how-the-extent-of-county-farms-has-halved-in-40-years/, accessed March 31^st 2022.

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