Who owns england? - Open Data Manchester 27th March 2018
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The document discusses land ownership in the UK, specifically England. It provides statistics on the total land area of the UK and its constituent countries. It then introduces a website that has created maps and databases to investigate who owns land in England, which has long been a poorly documented topic. The website allows users to look up ownership of specific areas and see that in some cases, nearly half of the land is owned by just a handful of individuals or corporations. Reasons given for investigating ownership include addressing empty homes and discovering secret tunnels.
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Who owns england? - Open Data Manchester 27th March 2018
- 1. WHO OWNS ENGLAND? GUY SHRUBSOLE OPEN DATA MANCHESTER 27 MARCH 2018
- 2. How I started investigating land ownership… whoownsengland.org
- 3. How big is the UK? UK = 60m acres Scotland = 19.5m acres England = 32m acres Wales = 5m acres Northern Ireland = 3.5m acres
- 4. How big is an acre? It’s roughly the size of Parliament Square
- 5. Land ownership: England’s darkest secret…
- 6. So who owns England? map.whoownsengland.org
- 8. An example of how to investigate land ownership Nearly half of West Berkshire is owned by just 30 landowners….
- 9. Why investigate land ownership? #1 Empty Homes
- 10. Why investigate land ownership? #2 Secret tunnels!
Editor's Notes
- Always been interested in land, an environmental activist/ campaigner for over ten years, and then Brexit happened… and whichever way you voted and feel about the result (and I’m definitely a Remoaner) the Leave campaign’s slogan ‘take back control’ seemed to resonate with a lot of people. So after the referendum, I thought, who’s actually in control here? Who actually owns our country? And so it started as a project to try to subvert a bit the ‘take back control’ message and punch up rather than down.
- I decided to focus on England specifically, because that’s where I’m from, and because Scotland is already far ahead when it comes to questions of land reform, and there is the excellent blog whoownscotland.org.uk run by the legendary Andy Wightman, who has done some incredible mapping. I’m also in touch with people and groups keen to set up Who Owns Cymru (Wales) and Who Owns Northern Ireland. A note though: when it comes to data sources, it’s not always easy to disaggregate by nation, so sometimes I might refer to stats relating to the whole UK, or England and Wales (because the Land Registry currently covers both England & Wales). I’ll try to be clear what territorial unit I’m referring to throughout, but please ask to clarify if not!
- If only we could all have an acre each… how many people in this room own an acre or more of land? Hands up! Ok not many people. So who does own England?
- Well, investigating land ownership is actually surprisingly difficult… the Land Registry remains largely a closed book; £3 for every land title, 24m titles, £72m to buy the lot (and then you wouldn’t be allowed to publish them all and mapping is tricky!). 1000 years of cover-ups: Domesday Book was the first attempt but it was a swag list by an acquisitive king looking to tax more rather than a means for holding power to account… then 4 ‘modern Domesdays’ within the past two centuries that have been rapidly covered up or forgotten. Victorian Return of Owners of Land 1872: tell story briefly, showed that 4,217 landowners owned half of England & Wales. 95% of the population owned nothing at all. Today: if you take DEFRA’s farm stats as a proxy, 25,000 landowners own half of England. So it’s got a bit better, but that still considerably less than 1%the population owning half the land!
- With Anna Powell-Smith, we built this map of land ownership – first time anyone’s pulled all this data together and made it public – the landowners it displays own land covering about 10% of the UK. You can pick out particular landowners from the drop-down menu, and see their acreages. The Forestry Commission is the biggest single landowner shown here, then the MOD, then the Crown Estate. The red splodges is land owned overseas or offshore – Anna built the maps for Private Eye’s investigation into this. How we got hold of this data: FOIs, data.gov, EIRs, asking nicely, extracting data from the back-end of websites… As you can see it’s hard to disaggregate by country, as mentioned earlier, because some organisations and institutions cover more than one nation. And some of the landholdings may be long leases rather than outright freeholds.
- Land Registry for E&W has recently released its Corporate & Commercial dataset – 3 million land titles, all UK-based companies and public sector organisations. Unfortunately they’ve not released the GIS data alongside them that would allow them to be properly mapped. INSPIRE directive – polygons of all land parcels - Ordnance Survey licensing restrictions. But, once again thanks to Anna’s awesome mapping and coding skills, been able to map the point locations at least of 1.8m of these land titles. I’ll talk more in a bit about using the C&C dataset for investigations.
- The county in which I grew up. Guess who’s the biggest landowner in West Berkshire? Answer: the MP, Richard Benyon! Owns the 12,000-acre Englefield Estate, shown in light blue on the map. Other large landowners include Baron Iliffe, a media magnate; various branches of the Astor family; the MOD; and Steffan Persson, the chairman of H&M, who owns a huge estate registered in Luxembourg. How I investigated this: Highways Act maps > FOIs > mapping it using Google Maps, colour code the different owners > go through the data, clean it up, measure the polygons for the different landowners, add up the figures… supplemented this data with maps from a number of other sources: Environmental Stewardship maps (farm subsidies); offshore data.
- Was investigating empty homes in Kensington and Chelsea after the Grenfell fire disaster and was accidentally sent the names of all the owners of empty properties in the borough… Guardian story… continuing to press for higher taxes on empty homes > campaign launching soon!
- Looking into land ownership can lead to some cool adventures!