Real Estate

McDonnell wants community land trusts to boost housing


John McDonnell is drawing up plans to encourage more community land trusts — a form of mutual society — to own property and develop low-cost homes. The shadow chancellor wants to publish a report in the new year looking at how to expand the idea further.

Mr McDonnell outlined the plan during a speech on Monday evening in north London, when he said he wanted to see “the collective ownership of land”.

That phrase raised concerns that the Labour MP, a former Marxist, wants to pursue the communal ownership of land, an idea normally associated with communist regimes.

Other influential figures close to Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, have issued radical suggestions about land ownership in the recent past.

Andrew Fisher, Mr Corbyn’s head of policy, wrote a book in 2014 called “The Failed Experiment” in which he set out various radical ideas including a ban on private land.

Mr Fisher, who was a union official at the time, suggested in the book that land ownership was “ridiculous”, writing: “The land was here before we were born and it will be here after we are long since departed. Does this mean all land should be publicly owned? Perhaps.”

This month Lloyd Russell-Moyle, a pro-Corbyn MP, called for private homes to be “nationalised” by giving councils the right to buy them. The Brighton MP said council leaders should be given the first refusal on any house up for sale

“Why not give every council the first right of refusal with any houses put up for sale? And I don’t mean a former council house — I mean your private house,” he said.

But Mr McDonnell’s spokesman played down the idea that Mr McDonnell was even hinting at land nationalisation. Instead he was proposing “small scale” policies to empower local communities to get involved in local development, he said.

The shadow chancellor, in his speech to Red Pepper — a leftwing publisher — said he wanted to challenge the “existing power relationships” within society. “One of the big issues we’re now talking about is land, how do we go about looking at collective ownership of land, community land trusts, the development of those by local communities,” he said.

Typically, CLTs are a form of community-led housing organisations — widespread in the US — set up and run by members of the public to develop homes to ensure they remain affordable in perpetuity.

The sector has grown rapidly in the UK in recent years because of the housing crisis, although the number of homes provided is so far in the hundreds rather than thousands.

In the US the system is more established with more than 240 CLTs — the largest, Champlain Housing Trust in Burlington, Vermont, owns more than 2,000 homes.

Separately, Labour has drawn up plans for a land value tax, although Mr McDonnell has said this would only apply to commercial property and not residential homes — amid Tory claims of a secret “garden tax”.



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