Who Owns England’s Woods? (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Who Owns England’s Woods? (2020)

whoownsengland.org

73 pointsrvieira114 comments

Something that always seems wild to me in England is that there is no exact record of property boundaries. Specifically, in England and Wales there's usually no record of the exact boundary between two properties and who owns the hedge, wall, tree or fence between 2 properties[1].

There are only "title plans" held by HM Land Registry, that may or may not include information about who owns the wall and exactly what delineates the property line. If you want to see the "title plan", you even have to pay a small fee each time for the privilege. I can't understand why they would do that except to slow the flow of information.

I recently looked on US property websites and was surprised that the map showed the exact edge of the property as well as every other property around it. That just isn't possible in England. No such map seems to exist unless I've understood things incorrectly.

1: https://www.gov.uk/your-property-boundaries#legalboundaries

And worse - not all properties are even registered: there's no complete cadastral survey. It's now compulsory to register land on sale, but there are lots of pieces that haven't been sold in decades or centuries.

This can result in some quite odd outcomes. The road outside my house, for example, isn't owned by the local council like most roads, but is 'unadopted'. It's probably owned by the descendents of the builder who laid out the road and built the houses in the 1840s, but as it would be a liability rather than an asset (and was probably forgotten about shortly after the last house was sold in any case) nobody knows who that is.

There are ways around this. We have specialised title insurance to cover the risk that the road isn't actually a right of way, and there are provisions in English & Welsh law that give responsibility for road maintenance to the frontagers (like me) if the road owner isn't known. But it's added a surprising amount of friction. If there were a 'register or lose it' provision then it's likely something sane could be worked out once the land reverted to the crown. But as it is, we're in this weird semi-purgatory forever. No way of claiming adverse possession over a road, sadly...

Always seemed odd to me that there's no way to compel a local authority to take ownership and responsibiltiy for an unadopted road.

AIUI they (often?) will take it over, but only after it's been made up to the same standard that a new road would need to be for them to adopt it. Which is quite the undertaking, especially when you need to persuade each individual frontager to cough up for the building works.

It's not adverse possession, but does your jurisdiction not recognize implied easements?

Easements don't change ownership of the underlying land, they just establish a right to use/control the land in a particular way. Road access would (in many jurisdictions) be protected by an easement implied by necessarity (because access is a necessity) or an easement implied by past usage (analogous to adverse possession).

It does, and it's very likely that we'd eventually win in court if it became an issue. But AIUI, we'd need testimony to 20 years of continuous access as of right to our house (not any of the others on the street). As a newcomer, that's not entirely trivial - the people we bought it from were only here 8 years, and I think we'd need to go another two owners back to get the full 20. And in any case the court case (and inevitable buggeration in the lead up to it) would be expensive and unpleasant.

Anyway, the building society (mortgage holder) wanted better security than that, so insurance it is.

I wonder if aerial photos would show cars parked and help prove it.

Most roads are actually not owned by the local authority. Adoption means tthey take over responsibility but the freehold remains with the original owner. Title plans are drawn to the assumed highway rather than the original ownership. The definitive information is most likely to be in conveyance documents.

Amazingly the HM Land Registry [0] doesn't actually identify the ownership of all land in the UK. Specifically, land only needs to be registered when it is sold or transferred in certain ways - which puts it on the system, as it were. But there is no legal compulsion to register land that doesn't meet these transfer criteria, and such land won't be returned in a public search of the Land registry, especially for land that was last transferred before 1990 [1] when the current registration triggers were defined.

[Edit] Actually establishing who does own England is a somewhat challenging topic; see [2] for an example of one such attempt, and the list of sources that needed to be consulted.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HM_Land_Registry

[1] https://www.gov.uk/registering-land-or-property-with-land-re...

[2] https://map.whoownsengland.org/

> If you want to see the "title plan", you even have to pay a small fee each time for the privilege

You also get a copy when buying the house, as well as any covenants and details about any fences/walls etc that you have to maintain (either individually or with others)

Usually it just gets passed down in the buyer/seller questionnaire - until someone has a falling out with the neighbour then it all goes horribly wrong!

But yea, it is strange that we haven't started to do it more accurately, especially for new builds.

> it is strange that we haven't started to do it more accurately, especially for new builds.

Last time the surveyor came out he found the buried property stacks, dropped his GPS tripod right on top, and that was the property line. This was a house built in the 80s. I'm guessing each county in each state has a method for marking and surveying property.

> Specifically, in England and Wales there's usually no record of the exact boundary between two properties

I think that the logical explanation for this is that it just isn't important enough to record the exact boundary between two properties.

In the US, most of the land was (dubiously) obtained by the government from the natives, divided into large tracts, sold to land speculators who then divided it into smaller tracts, who then sold it to individuals and families far, far away from the land. The owner then had to go find it. This system pretty much required exact boundaries be known from the start.

In the modern US, most land boundaries aren't super important anymore. Want to build a shed in your backyard? Your local zoning rules probably say it has to be 10-15 feet away from the property boundary. If you build it 10-15 feet away from what you think is the property boundary, nobody is going to send in the surveyors to make sure and then tell you to move your shed 1.5 feet to the left.

The situations in the US where the exact boundaries are needed are probably the same situations where the exact boundaries are needed in the UK.

Property disputes cause huge amounts of distress and financial cost in England, partly because ownership of boundaries is unclear. Some people spend years and tens of thousands of pounds arguing over that 1 foot strip of land.

For the other stuff we have "party wall" laws which help a bit.

> Want to build a shed in your backyard? Your local zoning rules probably say it has to be 10-15 feet away from the property boundary.

In England you can build a shed right up to the boundary. Potentially you can have bits (like guttering) that overhang the boundary. I think this site is a nice explanation of how complex it can get: https://www.lyonsdavidson.co.uk/can-homeowners-overhanging-e...

In the US we also have right-of-ways granted to utilities, and while they usually work with you to avoid damage to structures and landscape, they don't have to. There may also be separate mineral rights (if I find gold ore on my property it doesn't belong to me) and water rights (I cannot legally collect the runoff from my roof in a barrel).

I suppose it's been technically hard to do - plans in the registry office aren't going to be accurate enough to distinguish a 1 ft strip. Maybe on a good aerial photo you could mark it? In Thailand they put concrete maker stakes in the ground with serial numbers on.

I have a metal stake at the corner of my property. It is possible for me to dig that stake up and move it. Thus there needs to be a record of where that stake should be so that if I do such a thing I can be caught.

In the Thai system the distances between the stakes are measured and recorded on the registry document.

And a lot of the boundary features predate accurate mapping. It could be a 500 year old ditch with a hedge planted on one side that is cut back every year. To draw a line hou would have to make an arbitrary decision that ignores the practicalities of hedges and ditches.

Also being able to locate things to a global reference system is a very new thing. Before GPS everything had to be measured relative to something else on the ground. That was never perfectly accurate and could have absolute errors of a few metres.

I was thinking in the UK there are usually historic walls, hedges etc. that form the boundaries. In Thailand the land is often just a patch of jungle that nothing has been built on before so I guess the marking stakes are a solution to that.

> Property disputes cause huge amounts of distress and financial cost in England, partly because ownership of boundaries is unclear. Some people spend years and tens of thousands of pounds arguing over that 1 foot strip of land.

How frequent is that? Based on the original link, it appears that there is a process in place for when disputes arise.

Disputes happen in the US too. We have legal descriptions that exactly specify property boundaries, but converting them from paper to dirt also costs a lot of money. And land shifts! A survey from 200 years ago might not be accurate anymore!

EDIT - your link says "These days, it is rare to obtain planning permission to build right up to the boundary"

My main argument is that the US and the UK have kind of settled on the same solution, which is to try to avoid situations where you need to know the boundary exactly. In both countries, if the exact boundary is important, you can pay lots of money to find out (and it will take a long time too).

I think that the "exactness" of the American property system gives people a false sense of precision that doesn't actually exist in real life. I live in the US state of Illinois. In the southern half of the state, the legal definition of the state (as defined by the US Congress when the state was created) is based on 3 different rivers (the Mississippi, the Ohio, and the Wabash). That was a long time ago, and now the river banks have shifted a little bit. So you have parts of Illinois west of the Mississippi River, parts of Missouri east of the Mississippi River, and even parts of Indiana that are west of the Wabash River. Legally - what is written down as law - this is not possible!

> EDIT - your link says "These days, it is rare to obtain planning permission to build right up to the boundary"

Not all structures need planning permission. Someone can build a 2 metre wall right on the boundary. https://www.planningportal.co.uk/info/200130/common_projects...

Furthermore, things that are non-issues between amiable neighbors on large parcels of land can easily become expensive nuisances when it comes time to sell.

For example, I have a dumpster that's probably sticking a couple feet into my neighbor's property. It's absolutely not a big deal, especially given that it's logically on "my land" given it's on my side of a driveway. But when the property was split up before I bought it, a survey line was drawn in an easy but not especially logical way. I'd never build a shed there because that would be an issue I'd have to deal with in the event of either property being sold.

In the US we saw the beginnings of the problem of inexact boundaries in England, so we carefully surveyed most of the country after getting land from the natives (I won't touch that issue). In the far east cost things were not done well (nw to the old stump that rotted away 200 year ago...), but most of the rest of the country has land borders known to within a few cm.

England land dates back to pre-history in some cases, so it isn't a surprise that it is hard to pin down where some boundaries are. It is also hard to fix this when two different owners disagree - someone will be screwed out of land they think they own (or given a fence they don't want to maintain)

> In the modern US, most land boundaries aren't super important anymore.

This depends enormously on density, lot size, and land value. My town has recently updated zoning to allow the construction of accessory dwelling units ("backyard cottages"), but whether a specific lot has a room for one often comes down to less than a foot. They are definitely going to require you to bring out a surveyor before you can get a construction permit.

> I recently looked on US property websites and was surprised that the map showed the exact edge of the property as well as every other property around it

The US does not have land registration. So, while it's nice that you got a web site with a map, that's worth almost nothing in court.

In contrast the small fee to the Land Registry buys you paperwork that a court of law is compelled to accept as the last word on who owns that land.

In the US if you're absolutely sure you own your plot, but alas somebody else has paperwork which they say proves they own it, you're looking at an expensive court case to find out who is right.

Which is of course why the US doesn't have a land registry, the lawyers and insurers lobby to ensure they get to keep charging people for the peace of mind that they're not going to wake up to find somebody else owns their home.

For those curious about how someone else might acquire that paperwork without provable fraud, one way is for someone who doesn’t actually hold title to will it to that someone else. Obviously the dead person can’t be convicted of fraud and the beneficiary can easily claim good faith. In some states adverse possession under color of title[1] like this has a significantly shorter period (7 years instead of 20 for some) before legal ownership can be claimed, presumably because it’s assumed the squatter acted in good faith. I wouldn’t be surprised if UK law is similar.

[1] https://wealthhow.com/difference-between-color-of-title-clai...

I am not an expert in any sense, but adverse possession definitely does come from England and originate in common law.

And this is why most (all) sales in the US include both lender and buyer title insurance. So if some court case comes up, the bank / buyer are protected.

99.999% of sales nothing happens, and the title insurance company gets $800 for doing nothing.

Quit the good gig if you ask me.

Probably kind of messy if one does go to court for being forged or some such though.

I assume:

1.) There is some cost associated with doing the title search which is probably fairly manual

2.) When something does go wrong, it's expensive

3.) If it really were a license to print money, I would, perhaps naively, expect more competition to drive prices down

> If it really were a license to print money, I would, perhaps naively, expect more competition to drive prices down

I would think the boringness of working in title insurance suffices to restrict the supply.

It's not really like that though.

Ask 100 people walking down the street who their preferred title insurance company is. no one will have one.

So at closing, usually it's the real estate agent who picks the title insurance company. So they do things like snacks and fancy coffee to real estate agents as you close, nothing to make the product better or cheaper.

In my city, the title company steered people closing at their location to a company that they 100% owned and charged inflated prices

https://www.housingwire.com/articles/41408-cfpb-slaps-meridi...

(post lawsuit, the only change as far as I now is a 1 page disclaimer that they own the title insurance company they are sending you to).

Many cities have only 1 title insurance options. Bigger might have 2-3.

https://archive.curbed.com/2018/2/26/17017142/title-insuranc...

Title insurance doesn’t even necessarily cover property border disputes. It can but it depends and some title insurances exclude it.

I see, so my assumption was wrong. I've just gone on Zillow to investigate a little more and they don't state anywhere where their "lot lines" come from. However, it seems to vary by location.

Some places don't seem to have any lot lines, others have some properties marked and others have every property clearly marked.

I'd be interested to know where they get that data from. Is it some public source or a proprietary database? Do some states have a list and others not?

If you want to see a real world example of freely available, exact and digital government land/building registry (including ownerships etc!), you can look at the Czech "Cadastre of Immovables": https://www.ikatastr.cz/ (zoom to street level to see plots). It covers every centimeter of the country.

Most jurisdictions (county usually) have publicly available GIS databases. However, these are secondary to the recorder of deeds which will contain the legal description of boundaries. The deeds are more accurate, but less precise than the GIS boundaries indicate.

Some towns provide parcel maps, often GIS maps, are those also unofficial?

As far as the courts are concerned, yes.

I was under the impression that the records at the county recorder or assessor’s office was definitive, excluding cases where the boundaries changed because of land usage and the like (ie, your neighbor built on your property and you ignored it, now he claims he owns it).

In Texas, as I understand it, the deed is the definitive document and need not be recorded with the county. However, recording it is required by lenders and generally a good idea---in case of multiple deeds showing up, the recorded one would take precedence. One exception is that, if you wanted to leave your property to someone on your death without it going through the probate process, you could execute a deed and not register it. When you die, the receiver registers the deed and everyone is happy.

This is state by state. In Iowa (and only Iowa to my knowledge) the state does have land registration which is worth something in court. In Iowa when property changes hand the legal record changes in a way that is easy to verify and holds up in court. Attempts at fraud are rejected by the state because they can and do verify that the seller has legal right to the property. If someone else has paperwork saying they own your land not court fight is needed because the state holds the final word on paperwork. (even then I suppose you can get identify theft fraud to transfer ownership, but this is harder to pull off than writing up a fictional title)

Even in states without the above, there are local records of ownership that you can bring to court that can be brought to court to prove who is right. Someone is going to be paying the land taxes and that is strong evidence of ownership in court. Banks require title insurance because the title insurance company will check the local records to verify that who you are buying from has rights to sell. However this will be an expensive court case as you say. Fortunately such things are rare these days.

Iowa has their system because about the time they became a state there was a big problem with fraud where someone would sell fake titles to land to multiple people. So Iowa put in place a system to stop it. Other states started when such fraud was rare and didn't need it, or started after title insurance was invented to take care of the fraud problems.

(Note, others have talked about squatters rights - I didn't touch on that, but it does exist in some cases)

Torrens title? Or are you talking about a different system?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrens_title

Good question, I do not know. Your wiki link doesn't list Iowa, but I don't know if it is because Iowa is somehow different, or if just they editors didn't know.

Yet the government knows who is the owner for tax-charging purposes.

So why would that record not count?

The taxpayer and property owner can be different parties -- for example, in the US, a commercial property that is rented to a tenant under a triple-net lease.

This is incorrect: it varies by state. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrens_title#United_States

(For example, in Massachusetts, where I live, you can look up any property on the Registry of Deeds: https://www.masslandrecords.com/)

Didn't know things were online in Mass. (Although, at least in my case, they seem to have images of the deed text but not the parcel drawing.)

Anecdotes from the US:

1) When I moved a couple of years ago, I discovered that the deed to our house had a typo. It defined the property we owned by referencing a map, which was on file with the County Register of Deeds. Except, when the deed cited the map, it mis-typed the page number the map was supposed to be on such that it referenced the map for a totally different property. The prior owner's deed had the same typo, back a couple of generations. The sale nearly fell through as the buyer's lawyer argued that it would be risky for them to buy the property given the typo and that a title insurance company might even refuse to insure the sale over the issue (not sure how much of that was real vs. theatrics). In the end, our lawyer tracked down an owner several generations prior in another part of the state, and sent a paralegal to his current house to have him sign new paperwork clearing the matter up.

2) A while back, I got a little too interested in the history of a local state park, which was a farming community before it was a park. I found some of the original deeds where the property was sold from the original farmers to the US Federal Government, and then to the State. The deeds defined the property by saying things like "beginning at a holly bush on the bank of Crabtree Creek, and extending for 500 yards north to a rock." A holly bush? Which holly bush? What about when it dies or somebody cuts it down? Which rock? The woods are full of rocks! In a world of Google Maps and GPS, it's wild to think that land used to be bought and sold this way, which apparently worked well enough for the time.

GPS has its own shortcomings as well due to continental drift!

"The Australian continent, perched on the planet’s fastest moving tectonic plate, is drifting at about seven centimetres a year to the northeast."

https://theconversation.com/australia-on-the-move-how-gps-ke...

My brother tried to by a house last October and only just gave up this month after two different lawyers were unable to establish the man selling it was the owner. He'd lived there for 60+ years though and no one else is claiming ownership.

> There are only "title plans" held by HM Land Registry, that may or may not include information about who owns the wall and exactly what delineates the property line.

Yeah the UK has been introducing a land registry, but as of 2019, 15% of the land was still not registered. https://hmlandregistry.blog.gov.uk/2019/05/30/registering-la...

In continental europe, Napoleon can be attributed to many of the land registries, but England never got conquered by him :).

It's the UK - nothing is that simple.

HM Land Registry is for England and Wales, Scotland has its own land registry (indeed a completely separate legal system) and NI does its own thing as well.

In Scotland if you build a property on someone else's land then they own the property. They are under no obligation to inform you either - so if you decide to build a windmill on top of a hill and then afterwards discover that the hill actually belongs to someone else then you are out of luck!

I think it's a good system. It ensures you as the party that wants to build do your due diligence and/or make sure everyone is on board.

It can cause a lot of grief if you're lawyer hasn't done all the possible checks as to who owns the land and you find you have been living in a new house that actually belongs to someone else...

And people wonder why conveyancing of houses is often so cheap!

NB Of course, in such circumstances I'm sure you'd have a valid claim against your solicitor who did the conveyancing - but I doubt if that would make up for the misery involved.

> If you want to see the "title plan", you even have to pay a small fee each time for the privilege. I can't understand why they would do that except to slow the flow of information.

I suspect they're trying to thread the needle between "People's home addresses are private" and "Who owns what land is public"

Right now (AFAIK) there isn't any public database I can search to find all the houses owned by Boris Johnson.

If you are a conveyancing solicitor, you can subscribe to the land registry database and just search it like any other with no need to pay per search, as far as I know.

The reason for the payment is that the Land Registry is required to be self funding. Actually I thought that they might have been incorporated as a private company already and sold off but not sure about that.

I think The IRS does as Boris got hit with tax when his mum died and he got hit with US tax.

> I can't understand why they would do that except to slow the flow of information.

To cover costs. Accessing those records costs somebody’s time and so unless HM Land Registry eats the cost, the interested party covers the cost. Same reason you pay for passes on government transportation or pay filing fees in court or for a driver’s license.

In Ontario Canada, we digitized the system and then sold it off to cover a deficit.

You can still pay the legislated $6 or whatever for each individual search, but they can slice and dice it and charge whatever they like for useful access to data only they have.

Now someone else can make a 10% return on equity at the public’s expense instead of just issuing a bond at 3%.

We like to sell off monopolies and maintain them here...

Australia has the same approach to selling off monopolies. Nice little earners.

I have a survey from my county office that shows everything. It was done by the previous owner but the county retains records. It shows retaining walls, 3 different types of fences, and it includes the different types of property markers they found and where.

Here in Lithuania it's the complete opposite, but given all ownership records are max 30 years old, it makes it a lot easier :-) A lot of GIS data is open to the public (no registration required) such as boundaries and utilities. There's even a mobile app.

I am somewhat surprised how much data is open, it even shows you substations. If you wanted to sabotage the electricity supply for an area it would show you how to do it :-)

https://regia.lt/map/regia2

(Turn on different layers in the menu on mobile)

> If you want to see the "title plan", you even have to pay a small fee each time for the privilege. I can't understand why they would do that except to slow the flow of information.

HM Land Registry is one of the few government agencies that turns a profit.

The fascinating thing about the UK is that there is no land value tax. Some people say that council tax is the UK equivalent - but it only applies to furnished dwellings. This means that a lot of land owners in the UK sit on large valuable pieces of land at almost no cost to themselves.

I dream of the day when a modern nation-state's expenses can be paid by land value tax and land value tax alone.

26,570 GBP / hectare / year, if all land was priced equally to replace total UK government revenue. [1]

1: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=uk+total+government+re...

An interesting figure! For easy comparison with the figures in the article it is around £10,000 / acre year - makes you wonder what some of the landowners listed would do in such a situation (and makes it obvious why they would fight very hard to prevent it coming about).

You're assuming all land is privately owned, which isn't true in the UK. Large tracts are owned by the government, the royal family, and nobody.

Not exactly a land value tax but zero tax Monaco is funded basically by the state owning and renting out property. I think similar in Dubai.

There are some practical advantages - if you've got a patch of dessert and charge tax on it you only can get so much but if you develop a luxury apartment complex on said land and rent them out you can get rather more. The state has an advantage over private developers as it can grant itself permission to build whatever.

I sometimes think you could do something like that in places like London - the state build lux accom to replace tax revenue rather than letting private developers clean up.

Kinda the opposite thing is happening right now in Germany. When introduced in 1968, the value added tax was 10%. Now it's 19%. Similarly, it was free for trucks to use the German highways. Now they have to pay fees. Only recently they expanded that to the federal roads as well (Bundesstraßen). As for the land, generally the federal government sells most of it to developers instead of developing it themselves (or letting developers develop and then charge rent on the land).

Sounds like you have some terrible nightmares!

Council tax is even worse as the occupier pays, not the owner

This is so true. Many building companies own hundreds of low quality apartments in the cities and literally don't pay.

What happens when a property is unoccupied?

If it is unfurnished and no one is living in the property then no council tax is paid.

This is not necessarily true. In many parts of the country, you get a month free but otherwise the tax would need to be paid, which I guess is to cover landlords who are between tenants. (saves some effort setting it all up and tearing it down again when it was only empty for a week or so). Also, you may not be able to claim that month if it has been claimed in the last year.

It's actually up to the local council[0]. Oxford at least give you a month zero-rated, then start charging again (I'm in this position due to a messy move).

[0]: https://www.gov.uk/council-tax/second-homes-and-empty-proper...

Oh wow:

> You may pay less Council Tax for a property you own or rent that’s not your main home.

> Councils can give furnished second homes or holiday homes a discount of up to 50%. Contact your council to find out if you can get a discount - it’s up to them how much you can get.

I'm sympathetic to the messy-move case, but discounting the tax for holiday homes seems quite regressive.

I agree, FWIW. The case when a property is uninhabitable because it's being rebuilt seems fair. Getting a discount just for leaving something empty (or using it once a month) does seem regressive.

Fortunately(?), councils are basically all skirting bankruptcy, as a result of having their central grants slashed. So these discretionary discounts are becoming rare in actual practice.

Who pays doesn't really matter too much. What matters the incidence of a tax, which is independent of who actually pays.

If the incidence falls on the owner, but the occupier pays, they'll pay a lower rent to account for the tax.

If the incidence falls on the occupier, but the owner pays, they'll charge a higher rent to account for the tax.

This why I don't really like public discussions of taxes; they completely ignore incidence. For example, there's a call to "tax corporations more", which is all fine and well, but a corporate tax is sufficient to do so. You also need to make sure that the incidence of the corporate tax falls on the corporation.

This is not really the case with the rental market. Since rental supply is almost completely inelastic in the short run rental prices are wholly determined by demand. Increasing property tax has marginal effect on demand so it doesn't lead to an increase in price.

> Since rental supply is almost completely inelastic in the short run rental prices are wholly determined by demand.

Yes, I fully agree with that. I don't see how that refutes my point though.

If the maximum renters will bear is $X/mo before they decide to move to somewhere cheaper, and landlords are currently charging $X/mo and you impose a tax on renters, they'll either ask for their rent to be reduced, or move away.

If landlords charging less than $X, and the tax is imposed on the renters, they'll stay as long as the total is still less than $X. If the tax is imposed on the landlords, they'll raise rents to $X.

Taxes don't change X. If landlords have to pay more taxes and try to raise prices they won't be able to rent the unit. If renters are forced to pay the tax they'll leave unless rent is lowered. Either way the incidence is completely on the landlord.

Oh okay, we're in complete agreement then. My point is that the incidence of the council tax and property tax should be the same, whether it falls on the landlord or the tenant. My belief was that it would fall on the landlord in either case, but I simply stated that the incidence would stay the same, to make the weakest claim necessary.

That's actually quite reasonable since the council tax finances local services (hence the name). The person who benefits from local services is the occupier, who may or may not be the owner.

The issue with council tax is that it is extremely regressive: there are 8 bands with (very approximately) only a factor 4, from £1000 to £4000 a year, from lowest to highest. This means that a person in a crappy studio flat on a council estate pays £1000 and another person in a Buckingham Palace style mansion worth tens of millions with tennis, swimming pool, whatnot, pays no more than £4000 since that's the maximum.

This may explain why the wealthy in the UK never complain about council tax and tend to oppose land value tax...

Take out the "valuable" because as you point out: there is no value tax. A lot of land owners in the UK sit on large pieces of land.

The idea that land has value even when unused is one of this quirks of reasoning that seems "common sense" until you actually stop to think about it, because it makes no sense at all. And is one of the driving forces behind disenfranchisement of indigenous groups in so many countries.

By that logic an empty plot of land in Manhattan would have no value.

If the owner is legally barred from using it and there is no hope of that changing in the future, then what value would there be?

Yes? That's literally the case: if there is no land tax in Manhattan either, then yes: that land has no value until someone decides to do something with it.

But it also shows off how much the idea that "land = value" has been hammered into you. By default, land's just land. It doesn't have value until someone slaps some kind of "land management scheme" on top of it.

Land definitely has value when unused. Land is the right to be in a certain geographic location, and exclude others from it. Why would that right not be valuable just because you're not using it? As the other commenter points out, that would imply that empty lots in cities are worthless, and we wouldn't see teardowns selling for millions.

No it is not. Land is just land, and different countries put different policies on top. Just because some land "is yours" doesn't universally mean you get to exclude others from it - as much as you think that's obvious and natural because that's how it is where you live/grew up, the idea that your land is off limits to others is entirely artificial. It's a choice your local government made with regards to land rights.

Other places take a very different stance, where land is just land, and you don't get to exclude people from it just because you own it. If you put the land to use, then that part becomes off limit, but merely "being the owner" doesn't confer the right to cordon it off, and people are allowed to freely traverse it. You only acquired the right to generate income from that land.

(e.g. folks can't go prancing about your crop fields, but if you own 100 acres and 80 of those are left alone because you live in a country where you value conservation, folks are entirely free to wander those 80 acres)

I didn't know pheasants were released each year for shooting. I assumed there was an established native population.

I've been clay pigeon shooting and it was fun but I was quite disgusted by the amount of waste involved. The shotgun cartridges are not only plastic themselves but eject a piece of plastic wadding out the end of the gun littering the environment. You can get biodegradable wadding but it's not required everywhere and the plastic cartridges are cheaper. Together with the released pheasants this strikes me as quite a big environmental impact.

If you think shotgun shells from pheasant hunting are a big environmental impact... well, enjoy the bucolic landscape you live in and don't ever go anywhere else, I guess.

I feel much the same way about hunting in general, but pheasant and grouse shooting seems especially pointless as it's so artificial and tangled up in fanciful class identities.

The body which represents the industry put together a campaign to push the story that grouse shooting is good for the environment [1]. There's an interesting infographic with some disingenuous facts like "heather moorland is rarer than rainforest" (because it's a man-made landscape favoured by gentry in Britain), "reduced risk of wildfires by controlled burning" (removing all the tress and then burning heather that replaces it [2] tends to have that effect) and "up to 5 times more threatened wading birds" (sounds better than killing raptors with conservation status to keep the grouse population high).

The strong rumour that the Conservative Prime Minister put in a special exemption to the coronavirus restrictions to allow Lord Bamford, one of his primary donors, to carry on shooting[2], (after his company declared 950 jobs at risk [4]) sums it up.

[1] https://basc.org.uk/grouse/

[2] https://www.greatbritishlife.co.uk/things-to-do/peak-distric...

[3] https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/boris-johnson-rule-of...

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/may/15/nearly-1500...

On that 'killing raptors with conservation status to keep the grouse population high', see https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-5429503...

A golden eagles satellite tag stopped broadcasting in the middle of a grouse moor in 2016. It was found last year, several miles distant washed up on a river bank, wrapped in a sheet of lead.

> Tayside and Central Scotland Moorland Group, said it was too easy to blame grouse moors, adding: "Hopefully the police can get to the bottom of it and people can be removed from unfair suspicion."

Literally the only group with a motive, and a strong historical precendent for similar activities in the industry, is upset that they are under suspicion. You couldn't make it up.

A lot of lakes are similarly stocked with fish for fisherman. Sometimes they drop the fish out of planes into the lakes.

The reason forest land ownership is so popular with the rich is it's free from inheritance tax and can be passed on for ever generating 1-2pct

Also forest / land owners tend to be wealthy as the income from woodland is very low so you have to be well off not to worry about that.

There used to be a lot of grants on land management. Not sure on that situation post brexit

Several years ago, I was curious about how 'bare' England looked compared to my country (the US is ~36% forested). It turns out that <10% of England is forested. The long history of deforestation in England is even worse than it is in the US.

I’m not sure that’s fair, given the relative density of the two. The US is truly enormous, especially compared to any European country.

I think England has a much longer history of habitation, and so it's understandable that deforestation is more extensive (thousands of years vs. hundreds). Here's an article I like about that process in England: https://aeon.co/essays/who-chopped-down-britains-ancient-for...

There are a lot of parallels in the US process of deforestation, except as you say on a much different scale. The US has lost ~75% of its virgin forests just since 1600.

For reference, less than half the population of London - or about 80% of the population of Scotland - would give England the same population density as the US.

Britania ruled the waves with a wooden navy.

There was a mini ice age after the first time they cut down all the trees in northern Europe.

The US has deforested far more land than is present in all of England. Look at the satellite map of the US and see huge swaths of uninterrupted farmland larger than entire European countries Most of the old growth forests in the US are long gone. A lot of what remains is new growth of >100 yrs old lacking the original biodiversity.

I don't recognize the right of humans within the same nation state to exclude other humans from tracts of land larger than their domestic environs (house, garden, etc). Is this a teenager-ish opinion? I do ask myself that. But I don't think it is. We are apes, on a planet with vegetation. There are certain things that are not available for exclusive ownership rights: air, water, scientific knowledge, and I would say the planet that we live on. Modulo the necessities of dividing the world into nation states and certain exclusions that governments may apply (armed forces training areas, etc). But basically, if you've got a big house and gardens, good for you; fine. If you've got a huge factory, OK, whatever, you can exclude people from the area. But can you own a moorland or woodland with natural habitat and exclude people from visiting it respectfully to walk on? No, I don't think you should be able to do that. Do you have the right to deny them access if they do not respect the land? Yes. Imagine if you grew up somewhere next to a parcel of land with natural vegetation and wildlife on it that you were deeply emotionally attached to. And then someone "bought it". Would you agree never to set foot on it simply because someone "owns" it? No, you are an ape on a planet and if you love an area of land you may walk on it respectfully. (If you can get into the country where it is located.)

Every state in the US keeps property records for tax purposes. Official surveys are often dine when bought and sold. Title insurance companies are strict about these things and mortgage companies require title insurance. It's all tightly regulated and you can look up online the exact boundaries of your property.

This document contains an abbreviated history of the establishment of the North American (US and later Canada and Mexico,) horizontal control(benchmark) network that allowed for the precise description of the location of land pre-GPS. The history part starts on page 19.

https://www.ngs.noaa.gov/PUBS_LIB/TRNOS88NGS19.pdf

So mostly government/utility agencies and the royal family.

Steady the buffs old chap, 4 out of 10 is hardly mostly

The answer is actually mostly "we don't know, a very large number of small landowners" but that's boring and the top line items are big landowners who collectively own about 20% of woodland.

The two categories you mentioned are represented (e.g. the Duchy of Cornwall is the personal land holding of Prince Charles, the Forestry Commission is a government department for looking after this sort of thing) but there's also charities (the National Trust and Royal Society for the Protection of Birds are charities) and the Church (specifically the Church of England) in that top 10 list.

And not so much royalty (only Charles is in that top list, and only his mother is in the second list of smaller personal estates, the Crown Estates do not actually belong to the monarch they belong to the country and so are effectively another government agency) as aristocrats: Dukes, Earls, Barons, these people aren't part of the royal family they've just inherited wealth and power.

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