A bad idea: give every 18 year old their own plot of land
I think this is a bad idea, but I’m going to write it down anyway: whenever someone in the UK turns 18, we should give them a plot of land with permission to build a home on it.
Why? Because it’s hard to buy a home in the UK without help from your parents. Because too little land in the UK is used for housing. Because land ownership is important, and in the UK it is too concentrated in a few hands and skews towards older generations. And because it would give every young person a stake in the country, literally.
How would it work? Each local authority in the UK would work out how many people are likely to turn 18 in their area and identify plots of land for them. Local authorities oversee the planning system — they can take land that is currently used for other purposes and designate it for housing. Doing so normally creates a huge uplift in land value — most land is cheap mainly because the owner isn’t allowed to build on it.
What is more, local authorities can — with limits — compulsorily purchase land. They can, if government lets them, do so at the market rate before planning permission is granted. This enables them to make money by buying land cheaply, making it more valuable via planning permission, and then — in this case — pass that dividend on to local 18 year olds.
What could the 18 year olds do with the land? They could build a home for themselves (or contract someone to do it). They could sell it, perhaps to raise a deposit for a different home, or for whatever purpose they wanted. They could hold on to it as an asset. They could use it as an allotment, or turn it over to nature, or whatever.
There is an obvious risk of coordination problems here. Do people want to live in a patch of land surrounded by other vacant plots? What if they want to live in a bigger home, or a flat? Who would buy random plots of land?
This would obviously require some thought from local authorities. They’d need to conceive these places as new settlements (ideally on the edge of existing ones), provide infrastructure, zone land for employment and shops and parks and so on. But that is what local authorities are supposed to do anyway when planning new developments. The only differences here are the land ownership and big developers not being the default.
How much land would this involve? If we work on the basis of each plot being 50m2, and there being around 700,000 18th birthdays each year (it’s a bad idea, I’m not doing good maths on it), we’re looking at around 3,500 hectares per year. That’s about 0.025% of the land in England each year (even less if we extend this to the whole of the UK). If we did this for 30 years, about 0.8% of all of England’s land would be transferred to people aged between 18 and 48. That would increase the share of developed land from about 8.7% to about 9.5%. Maybe 50m2 isn’t enough?
Of course, this approach would have to be tailored by region. You can’t as easily give every young Londoner a 50m2 plot of greenfield land, and the value of it would be much higher there.
What are the benefits of this approach? It would forcibly increase the supply of land for housing ever year. It would give young people the opportunity to live near where they grew up if they want to, or to move away. It would give every young person in the country an endowment, give everyone more options in life, at fairly low cost to government. It would address the gap in wealth between generations. It would address, in a small way, the unequal distribution of land in the country, which owes far more to inheritance, luck and the way the country was governed a long time ago than we like to think.
Why is it probably a bad idea? Complexity — there are a lot of things that need to be done well for it to work. Fairness — today’s 19 year olds would feel pretty hard done by. And unintended consequences. There is a lot here that could go very wrong, from huge swings in land prices to sharp practice from developers buying up land from 18 year olds.
But the point here, and the reason I wrote this down, is that land is far more important than we think. It provides opportunities and privileges to some people and not others, and these can pass through many generations. My view on land is not that dissimilar to a medieval King’s: the land belongs, before anything else to the country. If we want to give young people a stake in the country, we could do a lot worse than giving them an actual piece of the land.
