House of Commons - Office of the Deputy Prime Minister: Housing, Planning, Local Government and the Regions

Select Committee on Office of the Deputy Prime Minister: Housing, Planning, Local Government and the Regions Written Evidence

Memorandum by Professor Iain McLean (LGR 33)

LAND TAX: OPTIONS FOR REFORM

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

— Arguments for land tax in the UK are venerable, going back two centuries to Tom Paine and David Ricardo. The arguments for it were set out by Henry George in the 19th century. George's arguments are economically sound, and they deserve better than his current reputation as a crank. Chancellor David Lloyd George attempted to introduce taxation of land values in the 1909 and 1914 Budgets but was defeated first by the House of Lords and then by World War I.

— It is both efficient and fair to tax economic rent. Economic rent on land is the amount it earns over and above that which it could earn in its next best use. This principle is endorsed by the standard text on the UK tax system, coauthored by Mervyn King, now the Governor of the Bank of England.

— Land tax is fair because most of the economic rent from land arises from the activities of public bodies, such as supplying utilities and granting planning permissions. It is efficient because it is one of the least economically distorting of all taxes. Unlike current and some past taxes, it does not suppress desired economic activity. It should be set at a zero level on agricultural land earning no economic rent, with a minimum taxable threshold of perhaps £20,000 per hectare.

— The well-known problem of the "asset-rich, cash-poor taxpayer" could be met by making the tax liability on a freehold house deferrable until the house is sold.

— The existing taxes that are in part land taxes are Council Tax, Uniform Business Rate, Stamp Duty, Inheritance Tax, Capital Gains Tax, and S 106 Agreements under the Planning Act 1990. All are defective for this purpose.

— The recent Barker Review of housing supply in the UK acknowledges that the tax regime contributes to its undersupply. It discusses the disadvantages of taxes on land transactions, but fails to draw the logical conclusion that the appropriate tax is on land values, not on transactions.

— The required data and software to implement land value taxation exist. In 1914 they did not.

— Property taxation acts as a macroeconomic stabiliser, but also as a source of local revenue. Therefore some at least of the proceeds of property taxation should fund the delivery of local services. Because it would be more robust than the present portfolio, land value taxation would help ameliorate the balance of funding of local and central government.

1. INTRODUCTION

The ODPM-led Balance of Funding Review was constituted in summer 2003 and is to report in summer 2004. Its remit to explore the balance of funding between central and local government has become more urgent as political protests against above-inflation rises in Council Tax in 2003-04 have led all parties to explore alternatives to the current local taxation regime. The ODPM Select Committee has announced an inquiry into these issues and has been collecting evidence. This paper explores whether a form of land taxation could substitute for Council Tax and Uniform Business Rate in whole or in part. More detailed information on the problems of the present local tax regime, and fuller details of my proposals, are in my jointly-authored pamphlet New Localism, New Finance (McLean and McMillan 2003). This pamphlet has been submitted to the Balance of funding Review group and is now submitted to your Committee as further background evidence.

The next section traces arguments for land tax since the French Revolution. It shows that land taxation is both fair and economically efficient. Section 3, Could a land tax work? concludes that it could.

2. CLASSICAL ARGUMENTS: PAINE, RICARDO, THE TWO GEORGES

2.1 Tom Paine (1737-1809)

In his Agrarian Justice (1797) Paine proposed:

To pay to every Person, when arrived at the Age of TWENTY-ONE YEARS, the Sum of FIFTEEN POUNDS Sterling, to enable HIM or HER to begin the World!

And also,

Ten pounds Sterling per Annum during life to every Person now living of the Age of FIFTY YEARS, and to all others when they shall arrive at that Age, to enable them to live in Old Age without Wretchedness, and go decently out of the World (Paine 1797/1995, p 409).

Agrarian Justice is a short manifesto addressed to the Directory which then governed France. Paine takes from John Locke the basic idea that in the state of nature all property is held in common. But:

ground-rent

Paine goes on to calculate national wealth and mortality rates, using UK data from Prime Minister Pitt the Younger's budget of 1796, plus some (heroic) actuarial assumptions about life expectancy. He assumes life expectancy of 30 at age 21, the age at which people are treated as entitled to receive settlements and therefore the age at which each would get his or her £15 citizen's stake to begin the world. He notes that fewer than half the babies born reach that age. He therefore assumes that 1/30 of those over 21 die in any one year, and that 1/30 of the (privately-held) assets in the economy change hands each year. The same proportion of national wealth is therefore available annually for redistribution, which Paine proposes to do by a 10% inheritance tax. He calculates that this would suffice both for his £15 endowment and his old age pensions.

Thus the Paine scheme begins by being a land tax based on Lockean ideas, but ends up as an inheritance tax on all assets, real and personal. There are three components to the argument.

1. Land was originally an unowned common-pool resource. It is therefore legitimate for the community to tax it. This argument itself comes in two varieties. One comes direct from Locke's Second Treatise of Government, Chapter V on property ("And a King of a large and fruitful Territory there [among the Native Americans] feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day Labourer in England"—Locke, 2nd Treatise § 41). Therefore, according to Paine, private appropriation of land is acceptable because it improves productivity: but the state retains the right to tax land that has been removed from the common stock. The second justification of land tax came from the French Physiocrats, who maintained that the soil is the sole source of wealth and the only proper object of taxation.

2. There is no natural right to bequeath, nor to inherit. Inheritance tax is therefore morally justified. Land reform was a common theme of the French and American Enlightenments. Reformers in both countries tried to sweep away the old rules of inheritance after their respective revolutions. The most eloquent of these reformers was Thomas Jefferson. According to Jefferson, as the dead cannot bind the living, all contracts should be void after 19 years.

3. It is legitimate to levy capital taxes on personal as well as real property. This is Paine's really original move:

effect of Society

In other words, personal property can only exist because of the norms and conventions of law and exchange. These are social constructs. Therefore the society which makes them possible has a right to tax them. This argument was used in the UK between 1909 and 1914. It is time to revisit it.

2.2 David Ricardo

David Ricardo (1772-1823) refined and formalised the ideas of the Physiocrats. In On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), Ricardo expounded his conception of rent with wonderful clarity:

Principles

Ricardo was the founder of classical economics. But he was also the godfather of Marxian and Georgeite economics. Rent invariably proceeds from the employment of an additional quantity of labour with a proportionally less return, argues Ricardo later in the same chapter:

ibid.)

Therefore, for Ricardo, land rents were inherently monopolistic. Landowners as landowners contributed nothing, unlike suppliers of capital and of labour, to the productive economy, and their rents rose inversely with prosperity. An abundant factor of production commands a zero rent. Under perfect competition, rents from capital and labour will tend to zero. Ricardian rents from land will not.

2.3 Henry George and David Lloyd George.

Ricardo's theory of rent helped to mobilise the Anti-Corn Law League and the Repeal of the Corn Laws in the 1840s. But what seem to be the logical implications of Ricardian rent theory for taxation were not drawn until two generations later.

In 1871, Henry George (1839-97) was a journalist in a San Francisco which was growing with astonishing speed thanks to the Gold Rush. Land and railroad owners were making conspicuous monopoly profits. The Central Pacific Rail Road controlled all overland traffic from the East, and its proprietors had extracted monopoly rents from the US people, via the US Congress, in the legislation empowering them to build the western end of the intercontinental railroad. (They were less straightforwardly crooked than their Midwest partners the Union Pacific, who bought up Congress with UP stock). George started to write what became Progress and Poverty (George 1879/[1911]). He opposed private property in land. However, Progress and Poverty advocates land taxation rather than land nationalization. George observes:

The best tax by which the public revenues can be raised is evidently that which will closest conform to the following conditions:

That it bear as lightly as possible upon production—so as least to check the increase of the general fund from which taxes must be paid and the community maintained.

That it be easily and cheaply collected, and fall as directly as may be upon the ultimate payers—so as to take from the people as little as possible in addition to what it yields the government.

That it be certain—so as to give the least opportunity for tyranny or corruption on the part of officials, and the least temptation to law-breaking and evasion on the part of the taxpayers.

That it bear equally—so as to give no citizen an advantage or put any at a disadvantage, as compared to others (George 1879/[1911], p.290).

Note that these Georgeite principles of efficient and equitable taxation go beyond, and are detachable from, the Ricardian theory of rent. They are obviously compatible with Ricardo, but one could support George's principles of optimal taxation (as for instance do Kay and King 1990, ch. 12 passim, esp. at p. 179) without being committed to full-dress Ricardianism.

In the last decade of his life George became closely identified with what his followers have always called "the single tax" (Barker 1955, p 509). They argued, not just that land should be taxed, but that only land should be taxed. This was to regress from Ricardo to the Physiocrats, and has unfortunately given the followers of Henry George a cranky reputation which has prevented their ideas from being taken as seriously as they deserve to be.

Henry George had far more influence on British and American policy than did Karl Marx. He visited Ireland and Britain during the Irish land campaign and British agricultural depression in 1881-82 and 1884-85. His ideas spread to the Liberal and Irish parties, and to some Labour and Conservative thinkers as well. They reached their apogee in Lloyd George's two budgets of 1909 and 1914. In the 1909 budget, Lloyd George introduced taxation of land values, to be implemented when a land valuation register was ready. This had inflamed the Duke of Buccleuch, but:

[A] fully-equipped Duke costs as much to keep as two Dreadnoughts—and they are just as great a terror—and they last longer.

Anticipating (and helping to provoke) the House of Lords' rejection of the budget, Lloyd George went on

The question will be asked "Should 500 men, ordinary men chosen accidentally from among the unemployed, override the judgment—the deliberate judgment—of millions of people who are engaged in the industry which makes the wealth of the country?" That is one question. Another will be, who ordained that a few should have the land of Britain as a perquisite; who made 10,000 people owners of the soil, and the rest of us trespassers in the land of our birth[?]. . . These are the questions that will be asked. The answers are charged with peril for the order of things the Peers represent; but they are fraught with rare and refreshing fruit for the parched lips of the multitude . . . (At Newcastle upon Tyne, October 10, 1909, quoted by Jenkins 1968, p 94).

These arguments descend from Paine, Ricardo, and Henry George. Others echoed them. In reading the quotation below, note not only who first said it in 1909, but who revived it in 2003.

Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains— and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labour and cost of other people and the taxpayers. To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist, as a land monopolist, contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived. (Winston Churchill, 1909, quoted by Barker 2003, p 116).

In 1909 Winston Churchill was a Liberal minister. His Georgeite speech was made in the Commons in defence of his colleague Lloyd George's budget. In 2003 Kate Barker, a business economist and member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England, was commissioned by Chancellor Gordon Brown to report on the stickiness of the housing market in the UK and to propose remedies. The analytical chapter from which the quotation comes carries all the implications of an argument in favour of land tax, although in her recommendations Barker rejects land tax on the grounds that betterment taxes have always failed. So they have; but betterment taxes are not the same as land taxes. The next section of this paper argues that land tax could work.

The land tax campaign of 1909-14 failed. By 1914 the register of land holdings was still not ready. Lloyd George returned to land taxation in his 1914 Budget, relying on his capacity for brilliant improvisation to work out the details. However, the outbreak of World War I put paid to land tax in the UK. Discussion has only restarted in a serious way since 2003. The Liberal Party has retained a commitment to "site value rating", but in 2004 its successors, the Liberal Democrats, dropped that commitment, for domestic property, in favour of replacing Council Tax by local income tax.

3. COULD LAND TAX WORK?

The standard text on the UK tax system, one of whose authors is now the Governor of the Bank of England, insists that "the underlying intellectual argument for seeking to tax economic rent retains its force" (Kay and King 1990, p. 179). Since 1947, land use in the UK has depended on its planning status. If a field is zoned for agriculture, it is worth a few thousand pounds per hectare. If it is zoned for business, it may be worth millions of pounds per hectare. Land value taxation is efficient (because it does not distort the incentives to develop land) and equitable (because it returns some of the economic rent to the people who created it, namely the local authority and its electors). Henry George recognised both of these properties. Tom Paine recognised the second. As Kay and King explain (p 181):

Suppose the award of planning permission increases the value of a plot of land from £5,000 to £1 million. Then even if the resulting gain were taxed at 90%, the developer would still be better off by almost £100,000 using the land for housing than retaining it for agricultural purposes. Substantial incentives to bring projects forward would remain.

There are two main objections: the expectation that the tax would not be permanent, and the costs of assessment. Property interests have always sat out past attempts at land taxation. This happened not only in 1909 and 1914, but also, as Barker (2003, Box 7.3) notes, in 1947, 1967, 1974, and 1985. On each occasion property owners had an incentive to delay transactions in the hope that their lobbying against the legislation would succeed. On each occasion, they did succeed. The inference to draw is not Barker's inference that land taxation is unfeasible. It is that any tax should be a tax on capital value, not a tax on transactions.

The second objection to land value taxation is the difficulty of assessment. This is less of a problem than it seems. The same difficulty faces both business rates and council tax, the two taxes that land value tax would replace (in whole or in part). Both of these taxes are linked to valuations that rapidly go out of date. Council tax bands are determined by houses' value in 1991. The next Council Tax revaluation is not due until 2007. The base for Uniform Business Rate is revalued only every five years. The more time that elapses between valuations, the more those whose assets have risen in relative value have an incentive to block revaluation. It was just such a revolt against rating revaluation in the 1980s that led to the Poll Tax.

Enough houses change hands every year that the capital value of every house in the land could be calculated annually. Estate agents do it all the time, in their ordinary business. Therefore there is no reason why a public sector valuer (the existing Valuation service or a successor) could not do the same. Commercial and industrial property changes hands less often, so that annual valuation of every parcel of land may not be feasible. But this is not an insuperable objection. At worst a government could stick with the existing five-yearly revaluation, which could be updated whenever a sale took place. A good deal of detailed work would be required in order to calculate the correct taxation basis when land is leased rather than sold (and any prospect of a land value tax would give owners an incentive to sell leases rather than freeholds). So land value taxation is not an option for tomorrow. But it could be an attractive option for 2009, the centenary year of the People's Budget. A National Land and Property Gazetteer is already being constructed, by uniting databases from the Ordnance Survey, the Royal Mail, and local and central government. In principle it can identify every taxable hereditament in the UK. And it is not a snooper's charter, because it contains information only about places, not about people.

A third objection, currently politically salient, is that any property tax including land tax penalises the "asset-rich but cash-poor"—who in current debate are characterised as "Devon pensioners". The first, robust, answer, is that Devon pensioners should face the real opportunity cost of continuing to live in large houses, and they have the options of taking in lodgers or trading down to smaller houses. A softer answer is that the tax liability on a freehold house could be deferred if the householder cannot pay, and become a charge on the estate when the house is sold. Local authorities would be able to borrow against this debt owed to them, and would therefore not be deprived of a cash flow.

Land tax would be a tax on land value, or more strictly on the economic rent deriving from land value. Therefore it should be levied at a zero rate at land that has no value above baseline agricultural use—a zero rate band up to £20,000/hectare has been proposed. Above that, it would not depend on whether land had a planning permission, but on whether the market believed that it would get planning permission—thus it would catch speculative appreciation in land values on urban fringes. A fourth objection is therefore that if it is partly a local tax (which on balance I think it should be), land tax gives local authorities an incentive to permit sprawling developments and US-like malls from which the 1947 system protects the UK. The answer to that objection is that councils, like Devon pensioners, should face the true opportunity cost of their decisions. And so should the people they represent. Refusing development comes at a cost which at present local citizens do not bear. They should face the open choice: Permit development and face lower local tax rates, or refuse it and face higher local tax rates. The ballot box should decide.

This argument works both ways. If an authority proposes a development that reduces land values—say an incinerator or a tannery next to a housing estate—it is right that those who take the decision should face the true costs in a reduced land tax income flow.

Finally, as a land tax would tax Ricardian rents, it must be a tax on that portion of the produce of the earth, which is paid to the landlord for the use of the original and indestructible powers of the soil, to repeat Ricardo's words. Therefore it is a tax on land, not on the structures that sit on the land. This means that a future valuation regime would have to separate those two. In the case of houses, that is both fair and uncomplicated. Every Sunday the papers tell you what improvements add value to your house and what do not. In the case of commercial and industrial premises, it is admittedly more complicated. However it is done in Denmark and some parts of the USA.

To get a feeling for the magnitudes involved, Table 1 reproduces the latest (Budget 2004) UK official estimates of the current yield of each tax.

Table 1

UK GOVERNMENT: CURRENT RECEIPTS

£ billions

Outturn
2002-03 Estimate
2003-04 Projection
2004-05

Inland Revenue Income tax (gross of tax credits) 112.6 119.1 127.8

Social security contributions 64.6 72.2 77.7

Corporation tax 29.5 28.7 34.8

Tax credits -3.4 -4.8 -4.1

Petroleum revenue tax 1.0 1.2 1.0

Capital gains tax 1.6 1.2 1.5

Inheritance tax 2.4 2.5 2.8

Stamp duties 7.5 7.5 9.4

Total Inland Revenue (net of tax credits) 215.8 227.6 251.0

Customs and Excise Value added tax 63.5 69.7 73.1

Fuel duties 22.1 22.8 24.4

Tobacco duties 8.1 8.1 8.1

Spirits duties 2.3 2.4 2.4

Wine duties 1.9 2.0 2.0

Beer and cider duties 3.1 3.2 3.3

Betting and gaming duties 1.3 1.3 1.3

Air passenger duty 0.8 0.8 0.9

Insurance tax premium 2.1 2.3 2.4

Landfill tax 0.5 0.6 0.6

Climate change levy 0.8 0.8 0.8

Aggregates levy 0.2 0.3 0.3

Customs duties and levies 1.9 1.9 1.9

Total Customs and Excise 108.7 116.4 121.6

Vehicle excise duties 4.6 4.7 4.9

Oil royalties 0.4 0.0 0.0

Business rates 18.5 18.7 19.1

Council tax 16.7 18.6 19.7

Other taxes and royalties 10.9 12.3 13.2

Net taxes and social security contributions 375.6 398.2 429.4

Accruals adjustments on taxes -0.3 3.0 0.8

Less own resources contribution to European Communities (EC) budget -4.4 -4.5 -3.7

Less PC corporation tax payments -0.1 -0.1 -0.1

Tax credits adjustment 1.1 0.5 0.6

Interest and dividends 4.5 4.1 4.9

Other receipts 19.8 20.3 22.7

Current receipts 396.2 421.5 454.7

Source for Table 1: Budget 2004, Financial Statement & Budget Report (London: HM Treasury 2004), Table C8.

Table 1 shows that tax proceeds on capital transactions are low, whereas even under the existing regime tax proceeds on (purported) land values are much higher. In the former class, IHT, Capital Gains Tax, and Stamp Duty jointly yielded £11.5 billion (0.03% of receipts) in 2002-03. In the latter class, business rates and council tax jointly yielded £35.2 billion (0.09% of receipts).

Neither class of taxation comes anywhere near capturing the windfall gains of which Winston Churchill spoke in 1909, nor anywhere near recouping any of them for the public sector. Consider the case of transport improvements, for example. The Jubilee Line Extension, from Green Park to Stratford, was commissioned in the early 1990s for completion in time for the opening of the Millennium Dome, at its North Greenwich station. Because it was common knowledge that government credibility depended on its opening by 1 January 2000, suppliers of both capital and labour to the project extracted huge rents, and its costs overran hugely (for that and other reasons). Nevertheless, studies by Transport for London show that, even at the bloated costs incurred, the Jubilee Line Extension could very easily have been financed by a land tax. Property values adjacent to its stations rose hugely—by £2.8 billion at Southwark and Canary Wharf alone. Even at stations not on the Extension, property values rose by more than the general rate. People living near Stanmore station at the other end of the line had a new means of getting conveniently to other parts of London—not only to the Dome, but also to Southwark and Canary Wharf. However, the UK government not only failed to extract any tax revenues from the uplift at Canary Wharf, it actually offered the area an undeserved and instantly capitalised tax break in the shape of stamp duty exemption for sales of commercial properties in "deprived wards" (McLean and McMillan 2003, ch 3).

Transport improvements cost money. The commonest source of land value gain, however, costs nothing except staff wages: namely, planning permissions for changes from a low-rent land use (such as agriculture) to a high-rent use (such as an out of town shopping centre). Here, the economic rent is created because planning law, for basically benign reasons, deliberately creates a scarcity. Left to themselves, market forces might produce a suburban Britain that looks like suburban America. Almost nobody at any point of the political spectrum wants that. Therefore, since 1947, there have been tight zoning restrictions on land-use planning in the UK. However, there has been too much sentiment and too little hard-headedness about the economic and social issues involved in the 1947 regime, which is still in place. The 1947 regime is very indulgent to farmers, which was appropriate after the blockades and food shortages of both World Wars, but no longer is. It produced socially desirable policies such as Green Belts by command-and-control, not by price signals.[17] And, although nobody wants an unregulated market in land use, a regulated market would so far outperform the present command-and-control regime that a robust land tax could produce a higher yield, at a lower rate in the £, than the existing UBR and Council Tax.

At present the UK has a raft of bad land taxes. They include Council Tax; business rates; Stamp Duty; IHT and CGT to the extent that they catch increases in land values (which is not much, as those who benefit can pay for sophisticated tax advice); and, probably worst of all, Section 106 Agreements. The last are agreements between a developer and a locally authority whereby the developer agrees to contribute to some socially desired outcome (such as subsidising social housing or urban transport) in return for the grant of planning permission. S.106 agreements are the worst sort of disguised taxation. They are extremely costly to both developers and local authorities; and the gains they produce are in no way commensurate to the cost. A simple auction of planning permissions would do far better. A tax levied on land value (and not on transactions, as IHT, CGT, Stamp Duty, and the abortive 1947, 1967, and 1974 land taxes all were) would be better yet.

4. CONCLUSION: IMPLEMENTING PAINE

Tom Paine's argument is sound. Landowners accrue monopoly rents, which society has a right to tax for two reasons: first, that Ricardian rents should be taxed even if they arise without policy intervention; second, that policy interventions confer windfall gains, which it is appropriate for the community to tax. Paine assumed that the right tax was inheritance tax, but this can be queried. It is unpopular; it is a tax on transactions, not on wealth; it is easy to evade. Death is an involuntary transaction, unlike those that trigger liability to CGT and Stamp Duty—but a taxpayer with foresight can give away assets before death in order to mitigate IHT liability.

Nothing in Paine's argument implies that IHT is the only appropriate tax, and Henry George succinctly gives the reasons why land tax is both the most efficient and the most equitable. It is efficient because it is hard to evade and because it minimally distorts economic activity. It would have beneficial effects on UK housing supply, as Barker's evidence shows, even though she shies away from that conclusion herself.

Admittedly, its transaction costs can be high, but these have to be incurred already for the existing tax regime of council tax and business rates. Also, the formal incidence of land tax lies on landowners, whereas the formal incidence of business rates lies on occupiers. In economic theory, this difference matters not at all, for the reasons given by Kay and King (ch. 1 passim). In practice it would create considerable problems of transition, because UK business premises are typically let on long leases with upward-only rent reviews. A tax change that transferred liability from occupiers to freeholders would in the long run be neutral because rent agreements would change to accommodate it. But there would have to be some (perhaps messy) transitional arrangements.

The official numbers given in Table 1 show that the yield of the existing (bad) land taxes is high. Better taxes, which stimulated real economic activity where the present tax regime suppresses economic activity (in the case of S.106 agreements) and encourages bubbles (in the case of Council Tax), could yield more while costing less (as a percentage of economic activity involving land). Policymakers have an opportunity to implement Tom Paine's dream. Which is also the dream of David Ricardo, Henry George, and Lloyd George. What better way than that could there be to mark the centenary of the People's Budget in 2009?

REFERENCES

Barker, C A (1955). Henry George. New York: Oxford University Press.

Barker, K (2003). Review of Housing Supply: Securing our Future Housing Needs. Interim Report—Analysis. London: HM Treasury.

George, Henry (1879/[1911]). Progress and Poverty, Everyman Edition. London: J M Dent.

Jenkins, Roy (1968). Mr Balfour's Poodle 2nd ed. London: Collins.

Kay, J A and King, M (1990). The British Tax System 5th edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

McLean, I and Mcmillan, A. (2003). New Localism, new finance. London: NLGN

Paine, Thomas (1797/1995). Agrarian Justice. In T. Paine, The Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings ed. M Philp. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

16 B/P 12-Property and Land, Taxation and the Economy-John Muellbauer, Nuffield College, Oxford Paper for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation [available from the Committee Office]. Back

17 Another telling citation from Barker refers to the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the Green Belt proposed by the 1943 Abercrombie Plan for green space in and round London had been implemented, but Abercrombie's idea of inner-urban parks on cleared bomb sites had succumbed to development pressures: "Children playing in London's increasingly busy streets, and without most of the new local parks that [Abercrombie] had promised, could console themselves with the thought that 10 or 15 miles away there was a belt of agricultural land that they would never be able to spoil" (S Inwood quoted by Barker 2003, p 36). Back



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