Reflections on ‘land value recovery’ for UK rural areas, and its implications for housing affordability, wealth-building, rural land use, and community wellbeing

Abstract

Unimproved land values are produced through the agglomeration of human activity and by public investments, in critical infrastructure, that happen over generations. Following enclosure, those values are captured as rent by private landowners. This paper explores the logic and justice of ‘land value recovery’ in rural areas, achieved through a transference of tax liability from wages and productivity to land. After introducing relevant aspects of the current tax system in the UK and detailing the challenges faced by rural areas, it offers reflections on how land value recovery might impact on key challenges, centered on housing, farming and wider land-use, before peering into the ‘Pandora's box’ of broader economic implications of recovering land values. The paper concludes on the benefits for rural areas of socializing the rents produced by broader socio-economic activity.