Change in the political economy of land value capture in England
Journal Paper by Philip Catney and John Henneberry
Town Planning Review, Vol 90/4 | August 2019
Variations in the character, performance and impact of policies and practices to capture land value for the community are usually examined by analysing experience in different countries. Such international comparative research is cross-sectional and does not cover the evolving relations between systems of land value capture and the economies, polities and societies within which they are set.
This paper examines the relations in England between the extant political economy and supporting ideologies, and the distinctive forms of land value capture that they produced. It traces the shift from a top-down, strategic approach in an era of corporatist government before 1979 to the subsequent extension and consolidation of bottom-up practice set within the context of neo-liberalism. The analysis highlights the evolution of the idea of land value capture and the policies and practices associated with it, especially the contestation that informed such changes.
Introduction
Land value capture (LVC) has been a subject of increasing interest in recent years. This is partly because the physically manifest, spatially fixed nature of real property is an attractive target for tax authorities in the face of rapidly accelerating global monetary flows. Assessments of the effectiveness of different approaches to land value capture focus on experience in different countries (e.g. Monk and Crook, 2016). Such international comparative research is cross-sectional. Consequently, it does not cover the evolving relations between systems of land value capture and the economies, polities and societies within which they are set. The paucity of longitudinal studies is unsurprising because there are very few countries where both the system and its context have exhibited substantive change. England is one such.
The first three major post-war attempts to address the ‘land problem’—the Town & Country Planning Act 1947, the Land Commission Act 1967 and the Community Land Scheme 1975–1976—were pursued in an era of corporatist government (Cox, 1984). In contrast, the use of planning obligations (POs)—latterly in combination with the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) – has developed within the context of ‘roll-out’ neo-liberalism (Peck and Tickell, 2002). Most histories of these systems have emphasised their fitness or otherwise for purpose (c.f. Lichfield and Darin-Drabkin, 1980). Little consideration has been given to the relations between these very different political economies and the distinctive forms of land value capture that they produced.
This paper addresses this lacuna by presenting a diachronic account of the evolution of ideas, policies and practices directed at land value capture, and interpreting it through the lens of discursive institutionalism. Our argument is that prevailing economic orthodoxies legitimise the efficacy of some policies and practices over others. There is, in short, a coevolution of approaches to LVC with paradigmatic ideologies of political economy. The centralised technocratic approach associated with corporatist post-war Britain ultimately gave way to a bottom-up, distributed system within neo-liberalism. Our analysis hence explores the processes of adoption, adaptation, opposition and reform to which the idea of land value capture was subjected.
