The left-wing Labour Party is reportedly planning on forcing landowners to sell their land at cut-rate prices to force more home building.
In a return to form, the Labour Party is reportedly eyeing a socialist-style scheme they claim will alleviate the ‘housing crisis’ by using the long arm of the state to force the sale of privately-held land at lower-than-usual prices.
According to a report from the Financial Times, Lisa Nandy, Labour’s shadow levelling-up secretary, is prepping plans to change the rules surrounding compulsory purchase orders (CPO), which allows government bodies to acquire land without the consent of the owner under circumstances in which it is deemed necessary to provide for the public good, in a similar manner to eminent domain in the United States.
At present, landowners who face such orders are entitled to a “hope” premium on their property, meaning that their land is valued at a price assuming that it would go towards development and therefore far more valuable than an average plot of land, the higher price compensating owners for having their land taken from under their feet.
Speaking to the paper, a Labour source said: “We want local areas to capture and benefit from a lot more of the uplift than they currently do when development occurs. We want to tilt the balance of power. It feels like the scales are tilted towards landowners — we want to re-tilt it towards the communities that want to see more houses built.”
It has been estimated that the UK has a shortage of some 4 million homes. While it is true that heavy bureaucracy and often local opposition have played roles in limiting the supply of new homes, the other side of the equation, demand driven in large part by mass migration, is often or near always overlooked in the political conversation surrounding the housing crisis.
According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), nearly sixty per cent of the population growth over the past decade was a direct result of legal immigration, which does not even account for the downstream impact of migration on population growth, given the British experience has shown migrants are more likely to have children than the native-born population.
It is estimated that at least 250,000 homes would need to be built to cover the demand caused by the past year of immigration, alone. It has also been estimated that net migration, which hit a record high of over 600,000 last year, has also increased the average cost of rent by 8 per cent over just the past year.
In all, the United Kingdom is adding the equivalent of a city worth of households to the nation through immigration ever year.
Despite this, neither the Labour nor the Conservative Party have been willing to set firm caps on the number of foreigners allowed into the country to ease the impact immigration has on the housing market, the strains it places on social services, or the negative impacts on wages for working-class Britons.