I could hardly see the cottage because it was in a forest of Norway Spruce trees. Christmas trees, quite literally, planted everywhere by a landlady who didn’t trust tenants to look after the acre of orchard and thought she might make a profit selling the trees. She didn’t get round to cutting them and when I bought the house they were thirty feet tall and two feet apart and everything below them was dark and dead, and the house was dark and damp and dismal.
Changing land-use and vegetation takes time. I wanted to revive the traditional orchard around the house and get rid of the spruce trees. Apples trees grow slowly, so I thought it was more important to get rid of the trees than to start to restore the house. You need permission from the forestry authorities to cut trees down, above a certain limit. I feared that they would say I could only cut some of them down, so I decided to fell them all as soon as possible before they noticed.
A bit arrogant, you may say, and I agree. My reasoning was that the spruce was of little conservation value, and that to recreate the last piece of traditional orchard left in the village was of more value than leaving the dark dead spruce plantation, especially as I was also going to run the sward of the orchard as a wildflower meadow, another vanished feature of the village. So I went ahead and I had just finished cutting them all down when one of my neighbours dobbed me in and a forester arrived with a can of pink spray paint to label and number my stacks of timber and issue a writ.
I showed the forester old maps of the village, with 18 acres of small traditional orchards everywhere among the cottages, all now lost except mine, where two old cookers had survived among the spruces. I explained my other conservation plans, and he sympathised with me entirely and dropped the case.
The real point of this story is that I felt no animosity to whoever had anonymously reported me; in fact I assumed that they had done it out of concern for the environment and of course I approved of that, though I also thought that I might have respected them enormously more if they had come to see me and told me what they planned to do, and I could have explained my motivation and maybe reassured them that it would be an improvement, which indeed it is. It is now so good that orchids have moved in of their own accord. Nature has set its seal of approval on my work.
My place backs on to a small farm and a common and a run-down country house. It is in an oasis of orchard and trees and woodland, but it is surrounded by industrial farming. One of these farmers raises cattle. His farm is divided in two – the lower part is mainly floodplain grazing for his beef cattle. The top part is all arable, and is devoted to producing fodder for his cattle to eat in the winter when they are kept in huge covered sheds. This large wide open area – almost certainly one of the old open fields of the village – has a few well-kept hedges and about 6 oak trees. Like most of the arable land of the UK it is likely to have lost around 60% of its birds since the 1970s, along with most of the wild flowers, mammals and reptiles, and also to have suffered from the well-known ‘insect apocalypse’ which I don’t even want to think about, much less quote numbers. I’m a beekeeper, for God’s sake.
This farmer has now put in a planning application. The planning process, as well as having some effect on when and where building is permitted, also functions as a way of enriching landowners. If you have a traditional farm, for example, you will find it a simple matter to replace the ancient barns, stables and byres with modern steel-framed buildings somewhere else out in your fields. I could show you a dozen examples. You have now reclassified your original farm buildings as a brownfield site, with an automatic presumption in favour of you getting planning permission to develop it. You have now a brand new set of farm buildings and a million or two in the bank from the sale of your old barns. Nice work if you can get it. You were already sitting on land that had gone up in value due to institutional investment in land, followed by a system of subsidies that not only paid you for owning land but also increased the value of your land precisely because you can get paid simply for owning it. FarmSubsidy.org, a project of the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, a non-profit organisation working on transparency of public money, lists a person with my neighbour’s name and address and postcode as having been paid variously 753,422 euros, 237,181 euros and 126,283 euros in farm payments over the past 20 years. I’m by no means sure that that is the whole amount – I only did a quick search.
His planning application is for three holiday cottages in the middle of a large area of open arable fields, on a site where there was once a wood which has somehow disappeared. No doubt it was cleared as part of the remorseless degradation of farmland that includes ‘tidying up’ any wildlife refuge and using ponds as handy places to dispose of rubble, as well as liberal applications of poisonous chemicals. Because these are holiday lets the planning process is more relaxed, because they may not be in continuous occupation and are supposed to benefit the economy of the whole area, although holiday-let people mostly bring their own food and eat in the cottage, so the farmer will likely benefit most.
The people who reported my tree-felling to the forest official were allowed to remain anonymous, but if you submit an objection to the planners anonymously they ignore it, so if you want your objection heard your neighbour will soon know that you have objected. It’s enough to make you – or even me - think twice before strolling down to the local of an evening. I don’t suppose that farmer will be buying me a pint any time soon.
In the end of course I submitted an objection, based on the argument that the development was another step in the remorseless loss of biodiversity on this farm, but I softened it a little by suggesting (a ‘Section 106 proposal’) that if it were passed there should be a condition that he replanted the lost woodland with native species under the supervision of the wildlife trust so that the houses were screened and some habitat created.
You may possibly not know that the right to develop land was briefly nationalised in 1947 in that age of post-war idealism that created the NHS. All development proposals were required to secure planning permission from the local authority but the increase in value, the planning gain, which had been created by the local authority when it granted planning permission, was not handed on a plate to the landowner but retained by the local authority through a 100% tax on the added value. Much of this money was used by local authorities to create post-war new towns and to rehouse ordinary people whose lives had been devastated by the war. The added value was used to improve the lives of people in need and to improve society in general, rather than to enrich individual landowners.
In 1954 the tax on planning gain was quietly abolished when a Conservative government passed the Town and Country Planning Act. Planning gain was denationalised, and ever since then planning permission has enriched the richest people in the country and encouraged development proposals based not necessarily on some strategic assessment of need but more probably on the opportunities for rich landowners to get richer.
I don’t want his pint anyway. It might choke me.
“The 1947 Act, in effect, nationalised the right to develop land. It required all proposals, with a few exceptions, to secure planning permission from the local authority, with provision to appeal against refusal. It introduced a development charge to capture the planning gain which arises when permission to develop land is granted. This was abolished by the 1954 Town and Country Planning Act passed under subsequent Conservative government.[
Although for most of the post war period public bodies have had to pay full market value when acquiring land for development, there were limited times when they were able to buy land at its existing use value, that is to say a value that ignores the impact of a planned development and any prospective planning permission on its value. In the early New Towns, when there was a national development charge of 100 percent on development values under the 1947 Planning Act, public bodies, including the New Town Development Corporations, were able to buy land compulsorily at its existing use value. By this means they effectively capturing development value when development took place, either selling on serviced land to developers at its full market value in a new use or using the acquired land to ensure that social housing could be built at affordable rents.” [Wikipedia]
I don't want his pint anyway!
I know the farm you're on about: it's a prairie!