Just 1% of the population own half of the land in England and Scotland. And in England, homeowners only hold 3% of the entire country, according to Who Owns Britain? – a report from Common Wealth.

Modern times? Still a landed gentry, but with Instagram

To modernise the country, we must surely address land ownership and family dynasties of unearned wealth. Aristocracy, gentry, oligarchs and bankers own 30% of the entire of England, Common Wealth has revealed. Corporations own a further 11%.

The public sector owns just 5% of the land now. In fact, successive governments have sold off so much NHS land, that its estate has been reduced by 70% since 1982. This is yet another facet to the ongoing privatisation and underfunding of the health service. The amount of land the NHS has lost to one-off sales is equivalent to 19,000 football pitches. One example is private equity firm KKR, which is one of the NHS’ new landlords after buying up healthcare infrastructure for £1.6bn with Stonepeak Partners. These firms rent our NHS buildings to us rather than us simply owning them ourselves.

On top of that, local authorities have sold off £15bn in public land since the Conservatives began delivering austerity in 2010, which Keir Starmer continues today. And since 1979, when Margaret Thatcher launched the neoliberal elite counter to the post war consensus, governments have sold off 10% of Britain’s total land. This was aided by the way the Right to Buy scheme was delivered, whereby private landlords now rent off 40% of council homes that were once sold to low income people.

The super rich landowners

Common Wealth notes:

By reducing public resources and concentrating ownership, this sell-off has worsened the housing crisis and helped build an economy where wealth is increasingly generated through the ownership of land and the capture of rent.

Featured image via Unsplash/Jamie Davis

By James Wright

This post was originally published on Canary.