15 ms·

Who Owns England’s Woods? (2020)

73 points by rvieira 6y ago

KoftaBob 6y ago
So mostly government/utility agencies and the royal family.
- cybert00th 6y ago
  Steady the buffs old chap, 4 out of 10 is hardly mostly
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- tialaramex 6y ago
  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.
dkarp 6y ago
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 https://www.gov.uk/your-property-boundaries#legalboundaries
- pmyteh 6y ago
  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...
  - moonbug 6y ago
    Always seemed odd to me that there's no way to compel a local authority to take ownership and responsibiltiy for an unadopted road.
    - pmyteh 6y ago
      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.
  - GavinMcG 6y ago
    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).
reedf1 6y ago
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.
- hpkuarg 6y ago
  I dream of the day when a modern nation-state's expenses can be paid by land value tax and land value tax alone.
  - d4rti 6y ago
    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+revenue+%2F+uk+land+area https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=uk+total+government+re...
    - mrow84 6y ago
      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).
    - iudqnolq 6y ago
      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.
  - tim333 6y ago
    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.
globular-toast 6y ago
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.
- panzagl 6y ago
  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.
- tweetle_beetle 6y ago
  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/ https://basc.org.uk/grouse/ [2] https://www.greatbritishlife.co.uk/things-to-do/peak-district-grouse-moor-burning-season-6522112 https://www.greatbritishlife.co.uk/things-to-do/peak-distric... [3] https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/boris-johnson-rule-of-six-hunting-shooting-exemption_uk_5f5f4ad0c5b6b4850803110f https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/boris-johnson-rule-of... [4] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/may/15/nearly-1500-jcb-jobs-at-risk-as-demand-for-machines-halves https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/may/15/nearly-1500...
fiftyacorn 6y ago
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
- tim333 6y ago
  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.
  - fiftyacorn 6y ago
    There used to be a lot of grants on land management. Not sure on that situation post brexit
stakkur 6y ago
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.
- the_svd_doctor 6y ago
  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.
  - stakkur 6y ago
    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-forests 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.
  - yodelshady 6y ago
    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.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- michael1999 6y ago
  Britania ruled the waves with a wooden navy.
- strathmeyer 6y ago
  There was a mini ice age after the first time they cut down all the trees in northern Europe.
- 6y ago
Cyder 6y ago
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.
- vmh1928 6y ago
  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 https://www.ngs.noaa.gov/PUBS_LIB/TRNOS88NGS19.pdf
da39a3ee 6y ago
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.)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

73 points by rvieira 6y ago

KoftaBob 6y ago

So mostly government/utility agencies and the royal family.

cybert00th 6y ago
Steady the buffs old chap, 4 out of 10 is hardly mostly
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
tialaramex 6y ago
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.

dkarp 6y ago

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

pmyteh 6y ago
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...
- moonbug 6y ago
  Always seemed odd to me that there's no way to compel a local authority to take ownership and responsibiltiy for an unadopted road.
  - pmyteh 6y ago
    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.
- GavinMcG 6y ago
  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).

reedf1 6y ago

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.

hpkuarg 6y ago
I dream of the day when a modern nation-state's expenses can be paid by land value tax and land value tax alone.
- d4rti 6y ago
  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+revenue+%2F+uk+land+area https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=uk+total+government+re...
  - mrow84 6y ago
    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).
  - iudqnolq 6y ago
    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.
- tim333 6y ago
  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.

globular-toast 6y ago

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.

panzagl 6y ago
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.
tweetle_beetle 6y ago
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/ https://basc.org.uk/grouse/ [2] https://www.greatbritishlife.co.uk/things-to-do/peak-district-grouse-moor-burning-season-6522112 https://www.greatbritishlife.co.uk/things-to-do/peak-distric... [3] https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/boris-johnson-rule-of-six-hunting-shooting-exemption_uk_5f5f4ad0c5b6b4850803110f https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/boris-johnson-rule-of... [4] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/may/15/nearly-1500-jcb-jobs-at-risk-as-demand-for-machines-halves https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/may/15/nearly-1500...

fiftyacorn 6y ago

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

tim333 6y ago
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.
- fiftyacorn 6y ago
  There used to be a lot of grants on land management. Not sure on that situation post brexit

stakkur 6y ago

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.

the_svd_doctor 6y ago
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.
- stakkur 6y ago
  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-forests 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.
- yodelshady 6y ago
  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.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
michael1999 6y ago
Britania ruled the waves with a wooden navy.
strathmeyer 6y ago
There was a mini ice age after the first time they cut down all the trees in northern Europe.
6y ago

Cyder 6y ago

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.

vmh1928 6y ago
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 https://www.ngs.noaa.gov/PUBS_LIB/TRNOS88NGS19.pdf

da39a3ee 6y ago

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.)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]