LAND USE ISSUES Land use in changing times
- Jeremy Moody
- 2 days ago
- 9 min read
 | Jeremy has been Secretary and Adviser to the Central Association for Agricultural Valuers (CAAV) since 1995. He was closely involved with the Agricultural Tenancies Act 1995, several rounds of CAP reform, and now the new policies developing across the United Kingdom. He handles the many issues covered by the CAAV including agricultural tenancy and land occupation issues, taxation, valuation, planning, climate change and environmental issues, liaising with government at all levels and writing widely on both policy and practice.
He is an Assembly member of the European Group of Valuers’ Associations (TEGoVA) and Vice Chairman of the European Valuation Standards Board. |
Jeremy kindly agreed to write this article, following his scene-setting (and somewhat disturbing realisations) presentation at 2025 ACES National Conference in Bath. He harnesses his arguments and identifies trends below. |
Scene setting – finite land and competing uses
We can find needs for several Britain’s worth of land for our fixed land area. Housing, employment energy, food, timber, leisure, carbon, nature and more, the uses sought have been multiplying in number, scale and pressure over recent decades. We have the extraordinary “30 by 30” commitment that 30% of England should be managed for nature by 2030 – if meant, it is the biggest land use change since the harrying of the north in 1070. The government has very stretching goals for more housing, infrastructure and non-fossil fuel energy.
Yet not every acre is equally useful for one purpose, let alone everything. We have to make choices, indeed priorities, whether through the market or through policies and planning, recognising trade-offs in that. To state the obvious, those choices are better made with an informed understanding of location and suitability while we adapt to change and risk. Figures quoted for farming say 60% of output comes from 30% of our land, while 20% of our land produces 3% of calories. Renewable energy needs grid connections, putting it into conflict with farming and other concerns.
Where do society and economy require housing? How do we provide water where it is needed? When lowland peat areas are both productive farmland and a carbon issue, how is that managed? Markets may tend to reflect those: planning can take account of those; public debates now can simply resist change.
In an old country, made and remade since the Ice Ages, current land use is the complex result of physical capability, economics, past uses and changing circumstances, owner’s choices (with factors including wishes, ability, finance, etc) and then state intervention, whether by public policy or statutory intervention (as by compulsory purchase). Since 1947, development control and designations have often restricted change, save where used for action as with new towns, and led to high development land prices, smaller houses with smaller-sized rooms than in Japan and, especially, an under-housed younger generation.
Our choices include 900,000 acres of golf courses, 200,000 on farms for horses and more elsewhere, 720,000 were taken for WWII airfields, 300,000 farmed for bio-energy, and doubling our woodland area. Solar might peak at 600,000 acres, but recent large permissions might not total more than some 20,000 acres.
Fundamentally, whatever our policy success in mitigating climate change, we will have to adapt to it. The less our policies restrain change, the more we will have to adapt to extreme weathers – flood, drought, heat, storm, wildfire – with action for resilience, infrastructure and so on. For farming, climate change, science and management move what can be produced here and in the world. In the UK, maize is grown further north, a wine sector has developed with over £500m invested, but new pests and diseases come. How might we farm land that becomes at least seasonally wetter? While revision of Agricultural Land Classification is in mind, this is not only an imperfect measure, but overlooks the importance of on-farm and processing infrastructure, from underdrainage and irrigation to specialist processing.
Water and climate change land uses
One key issue for farming, as for other uses, is water: how we collect, store and use it efficiently, as well as managing soils for resilience with needs for reservoirs, irrigation and underdrainage.
Water matters more widely with the political salience of water quality (and so both land management and sewage infrastructure) and quantity (both excess and shortage). It is a growing constraint on development in areas such as Cambridge and Sussex. After years of emphasising low prices, the need for investment in infrastructure is now better recognised with its costs. Aside from its Strategic Pipeline Alliance pipe project, Anglian Water has major desalination proposals and has objected to a data centre at Brigg and the Kempston theme park for the pressures they would impose.
More broadly still, how does the government meet its inherited environmental goals, recently affirmed in the revised Environmental Improvement Plan? Can it afford them? It is struggling with the conflict between the legal primacy of nature and its development goals.
Biodiversity Net Gain is being tweaked and the intended Nature Restoration Fund may be a step on the road to reviewing the Habitats Regulations that can, in principle, frustrate the most important project in the world with no room for a balance of judgment.
Climate changes adds to the tensions. Many key SSSI designations are now 75 years old, often loosely defined for notification only. A superstructure of control has since developed, much under now legacy EU law. While the language is of “nature recovery”, what are the viable and valuable ecologies of 2050?
DEFRA has talked for some years of a Land Use Framework for England but now seems nearer to producing one, looking to “early 2026” having consulted last summer. It may be that it is indeed difficult to do or to agree what it should do. It might prove to be more of a guide for government to principles in making its policy decisions. Once published, we shall find who is disappointed. Of course, most actual choices, especially negative ones, ultimately lie with the owners and users of land.
The actual consultation seems expressed as a thought game: given coming climate change and if we mean our environmental goals, what changes in land use would that drive? Its core answer is that there would be a move of 9% of England to primarily environmental purposes, leaving some 60% for agriculture. That would dwarf the areas of land being taken for housing, solar or infrastructure.
The paper can be read to suggest that change might largely be in National Parks and AONBs, but may define where, for example, planning control might be tougher and with environmental payments. In turn, that might be more difficult for areas of good farming production. Of course, further thinking and possibly the complexity of the issues - once considered more specifically - may have changed those apparent thoughts when the Framework is published.
There are other pressures, notably the UK’s prime climate change risk of flooding and the potential role of insurance as those markets wrestle with modelling rapidly changing risks. Premiums will increase while cover reduces, terms tighten, excesses rise. Cover is withdrawn for storm in Florida and fire in California. FloodRe supports continuity for most affected housing in UK – until 2039 – and so for mortgages, but does not see adequate action from others. While we may look at ways to manage risks, will this add a new housing pressure?
Trees and forests recur in the discussion, but this can overlook the reasons for England being a less wooded country – now with more woodland than at the Domesday Book. The prime purpose of forestry, a physically, financially and legally inflexible land use with comparative advantage of much of Scotland and parts of Wales, is not the low value offsetting of carbon, but as the commercial source of raw material for a future low carbon economy. Operationally, it has to face initial costs with income deferred, or decades of risks including disease, storm, fire and climate change. Soils will often be a better store of more carbon.
Planning and other government policies
The government’s planning policies then enter the frame with a strongly pro-development agenda, intended as a key driver to recover economic growth (however, it can enable growth but might not drive it). In opposition, Kier Starmer talked of bulldozing the planning system to achieve change for housing. The 1.5m target for this Parliament may be unfeasible but is a long way short of probable housing need, as we have slowly but increasingly failed to meet it since the 1970s. Moreover, it is important to see that we do not have a single housing market but many varied ones, and in at least half the country, it cannot build houses at prices the market will stand.
We have the new Planning and Infrastructure Act, a second NPPF in consultation, and hints of the next Planning Bill alongside mandatory housing targets, prospectively streamlined processes, and more called-in for decision. Planning committees look to lose their role on decisions as the government says that democratic input is in the design of the local plan, meeting national requirements. Planning is now intended for national purpose, with mayors intended to deliver central goals.
Yet weak market demand, construction economics, regulation-imposed costs, land value capture burdens, and lack of capacity limit impact, while the government discovers that change takes time and confuses with local government reorganisation.
Such policies might lay the framework for a housing boom in the 2030s, as in the 1930s. Two major steps are the New Towns work, unlikely to see many houses in this Parliament, and breaking open the Green Belts. After 70 years in which this has been taboo - that is an extraordinary political feat - achieved by the language of the “Grey Belt”, but in reality only now protecting land that meets the core Green Belt purposes.
While housing is a major concern, much policy effort is on easing the delivery of infrastructure. More Development Consent Orders (DCOs) are intended for this Parliament than since 2008, and to be available for public infrastructure, like prisons and the new economy of data centres, gigafactories, laboratories and logistics. AI Growth Zones with their own power generation are canvased, as are small modular nuclear reactors.
Judicial review rules are being tightened and could be tightened further. More is being done to ease compulsory purchase, even if that can in practice prove to be a longer and more expensive way to achieve outcomes. The words and the policy action are there; delivery will be harder.
With the language of “builders, not blockers” and both judicial review for DCOs and council members’ focus on individual applications being curtailed, how might opposition to development manifest itself? Might elected mayors yet reject the delivery role government intends?
One key area is non-fossil fuel energy – its generation, transmission and storage. If there is a good grid connection, only heritage seems to weigh against the use of a site to reduce greenhouse gas emission. The mediaeval deer park had to be withdrawn from the West Burton application for it to proceed. Objectors’ points are not always valid. The scale of generation needed requires scale on the ground. While solar is one of the uses that takes farmland, it is a vastly more efficient generator of power per acre than the bio-fuel/mass crops that are also grown. Underground cables are more disruptive and costly than overground ones, delaying delivery and leaving a legacy of damaged land and drainage.
More government relaxation ahead?
The clock is ticking for all the government’s goals. We are now over a quarter of the way through this Parliament with little progress on the ground. Of the 1.5m houses, we might have built 300,000, leaving 1.2m to go. The Office for Budget Responsibility foresees a 400,000 shortfall. Delivery is still harder than making a policy statement: granting a permission does not build a house.
The government is very likely to go further as it realises the scale of its task. More permitted development rights seem probable, perhaps for farming with reservoirs and other key infrastructure. There has been Treasury talk of acting more strongly on the Rio Declaration and UK understanding of the Precautionary principle, as managing risk, rather than the EU’s more restrictive approach of avoiding hazard. There is talk of reining in the regulators to aid growth, with DEFRA’s Corry Report that might be Natural England, the Environment Agency, even perhaps the Office for Environmental Protection.
Returning to my interest in rural land, it will still be there but with its management needing the flexibility to adapt to accelerating change, including climate with extreme weathers, and economics. Without subsidy, farms become more varied, as many were a century ago, but often with a strategic choice of specialising and accepting risk or diversifying. The need to produce more food from less may see more production under some form of cover and more on-farm adding value. Ownerships may change but, where this becomes more environmental, farming is typically part of most environmental management. Whether rural or not, we need the full toolbox of options to find our choices to make our future.
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