Britain’s housing crisis is not merely about a shortage of homes. It is the result of a system where land, the most fundamental resource – is hoarded, hidden, and manipulated by the wealthy, often at public expense. This is a crisis engineered through secrecy, deregulation, and the systematic retreat of the state from the business of building. To understand it, we must start with the land beneath our feet.
1. Who Owns Britain? We Don’t Know, And That’s the Point
Land ownership in the UK is among the most opaque in the developed world. Despite the Land Registry being a public institution, it still does not provide a comprehensive or freely accessible record of ownership. Every individual land title must be purchased separately, and even then, the true owner may remain hidden behind offshore companies or complex legal trusts.This deliberate opacity makes it nearly impossible to understand who owns what land, or to hold those owners to account for how it is used, taxed, or developed.
Before Brexit, a rare window into hidden land ownership was opened via the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Under this scheme, subsidies were awarded based on land area, not financial need or productive output. As a result, simply owning large areas of land entitled claimants to vast payments, and ownership records had to be disclosed to access the funds.Investigations revealed that between 2018 and 2021, more than a dozen billionaires, including Sir James Dyson, were linked to over €3.3 billion in EU farming subsidies. These payments often flowed through offshore companies, leaving the British taxpayer subsidising the wealthy without even knowing it.
3. Land as Leverage: The Renter Economy
Land in Britain today functions not as a place for homes, but as a tool of financial leverage. Wealthy individuals and institutions use land to secure loans, inflate asset portfolios, and generate rent, both literally and figuratively. This renter model extracts value from everyone else in the system, from councils forced to lease back land they once owned, to renters funnelling income into property empires.Even house-builders behave more like speculative land traders, acquiring sites, sitting on them, and releasing development slowly to maximise price, not to meet demand.
4. Infrastructure as an Engine of Speculation
Infrastructure, once a public good, is now a weapon of speculation. Major projects like HS2 or so-called garden villages are often routed and timed to maximise gains for those who already hold land in the target zones. This process is driven not by public need, but by insider access, lobbying, and backroom influence.Section 106 agreements and Community Infrastructure Levies, meant to return value to the public, are regularly diluted or negotiated down, allowing landowners to profit from state-funded investment without delivering the promised affordable housing or amenities.
5. The Collapse of Affordable Housing
Over 1.5 million council homes have been lost to Right to Buy, with few replacements built. Housing associations and councils are now forced to partner with private developers, who prioritise “luxury” or “executive” builds. Meanwhile, private rents have soared, propped up by over £23 billion annually in housing benefit – public money diverted into private hands.Home ownership has become increasingly unattainable, while homelessness and housing insecurity rise year on year.
It wasn’t always this way. Between the 1940s and 1970s, housing policy was driven by social need. Council house building reached historic highs, and developments were designed as full communities with roads, schools, shops and green spaces built in from the start.New towns like Milton Keynes and Harlow were created to alleviate urban overcrowding, reflecting a national ambition to house people well – not just profitably.At the same time, mortgages were tightly regulated. Lenders capped borrowing at around 2.5 to 3 times a single income, with strict affordability checks. This kept house prices relatively stable and aligned with wages. Dual-income mortgages and financial deregulation didn’t dominate until the 1980s.
The financial liberalisation of the 1980s marked a turning point. Credit was unleashed, borrowing limits lifted, and home ownership was sold as both aspiration and investment. House prices detached from incomes, and land became the golden ticket of speculative finance.New developments began to prioritise short-term gain over long-term planning, often being approved without adequate roads, schools, GP surgeries or water infrastructure. Today’s crises in the NHS, education and social care are exacerbated by these development choices.
Following Brexit, the UK government has replaced the EU’s CAP with a new Environmental Land Management (ELM) scheme, promising to reward environmental stewardship over landholding. While this sounds like progress, the absence of full transparency risks repeating past mistakes.Unless the public can see who owns land, how much they are being paid, and what they are delivering in return, the system will continue to reward secrecy and privilege.
One of the most persistent myths in British housing debates is that we’re “running out of land.” Politicians, developers, and media pundits regularly cite land scarcity as a reason for high house prices, implying that building more homes inevitably means sacrificing green spaces.But only around 6% to 8% of the UK’s land area is actually built on. Of that, less than half is residential. The rest includes roads, infrastructure and commercial space. The idea that there is no room to build is simply false.Developers prefer to build along existing roads and settlements, not because land is scarce, but because it’s cheaper to piggyback on existing infrastructure. This creates visible sprawl, giving the illusion of over development while leaving vast stretches of land unused or hoarded for speculative gain.The green belt, originally created to protect against sprawl, now includes derelict land, golf courses and low-grade farmland, yet remains sacrosanct in planning debates. In reality, it’s one of the earliest forms of green-washing: making public interest arguments to disguise profit-driven decisions.
- Create a transparent, open-access land ownership register
- End tax breaks and subsidies for undeveloped or hoarded land
- Introduce a Land Value Tax to capture unearned gains
- Empower councils to build homes and infrastructure directly
- Link planning approval to community benefit, not speculation
- Reinstate sustainable mortgage lending tied to income
Conclusion
Homelessness in modern Britain is not an accident. It is the direct result of policies that have prioritised wealth accumulation over public need. Land has been treated as an extractive resource, hidden from scrutiny, and exploited without accountability.Meanwhile, the public has been fed myths, that there is no space left, that the market must dictate outcomes, and that sprawl is inevitable. But history shows us that we’ve built with care before, and we can again.The ground beneath us should not be a tool of speculation. It should be the foundation of a fair, transparent, and just society.
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