Wealthy and powerful landowners ought to visit homeless hostels in the London borough of Haringey, where single mothers sleep with their children in single rooms, some for two years or more in “temporary” accommodation with no certainty that they or their children will ever own or rent a secure affordable home of their own (Want to tackle inequality? Our land laws have to change first, 4 June). They should then visit the newly founded Christian church in a warehouse, where a whole floor is used to accommodate single homeless men at night, more and more of whom work during the day.

Power has been abused. Since the big bang in the 1980s, government policy has allowed a medieval grabbing of land to the detriment of the health and wellbeing of low-income tenants. The late professor Peter Ambrose wrote in 2006: “Policy will not be decided on who needs affordable housing most … but on which policy will offend the lowest number of current house owners.” As a landowner, the Church of England is among the powerful beneficiaries of that injustice. The archbishop of Canterbury has said: “It’s time for a radical look at what enables people to live in communities, to build relationships.” In particular, it is time for the fair sharing of all the land in the UK for the common good.

Rev Paul Nicolson

Taxpayers Against Poverty

• In 1979 I was only able to get an article on land values published in the obscure Vole magazine because the piece centred on Henry George, whose masterpiece Progress and Poverty had been published 100 years previously, setting out the simple, dismal proposition that commercial progress was always followed by poverty because land and property prices went up, leaving people short of money. Now George Monbiot and his colleagues may well have published the major report on the subject (for the Labour party) Land for the Many, but this suffers from the democratic deficit that the mass of homeowners are unlikely to vote for anything that adversely affects the capital gains they make from land price inflation. The present arrangement is cruel to the young and fundamentally dishonest.

DBC Reed

Northampton

• Of course it must be hoped that what George Monbiot and his fellow authors are proposing in their report Land for the Many will all come to pass, sooner rather than later and that the Labour party in power won’t shrink from realising these proposals. George Monbiot knows better than most, however, the grip and vice of land ownership, not least by Oxford and Cambridge colleges whose charitable statuses would need to be revoked before real reform could become reality.

In 1840 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon declared “property is theft” and equated property ownership with the ownership of slaves. In England (and the UK as a whole) William Blake’s “green and pleasant land” is greener and more pleasant for some than for others. We live in hope, however frail that hope must be.

Bruce Ross-Smith

Oxford

• Greater public access to Britain’s countryside as advocated by George Monbiot and his team would indeed be desirable. However, a general right of responsible access to land and water, as introduced in Scotland in 2003, would be more effective than the extension of the half-baked Countryside and Rights of Way (Crow) Act to their proposed new category of “uncultivated land and waterways”. Whatever this means (does it include woodland?), the terrain and water would have to be identified and mapped on the ground, with provision for landowners to object to the designation, as under existing Crow Act procedures. This would be a recipe for endless disputes and public inquiries as landowners fought to prevent their land being included. Environmentally valuable roughland would doubtless be ploughed up to render it “cultivated”. In addition, a universal right, as I argue in my book A Right to Roam, asserts emphatically that this right would be a citizen’s entitlement, not something that could be delivered piecemeal.

Marion Shoard

Strood, Kent

• We welcome calls to increase provision of parks and public spaces in urban areas. There is growing evidence that access to green space is an important determinant of health and wellbeing, and that many urban communities suffer from a deficiency of green spaces near to where they live.

As London and other cities grow, it is essential that all new development includes adequate provision for genuinely public green space. This should be accompanied by the necessary statutory powers and resources for these to be managed sensitively by democratically accountable bodies for the long term. The social and environmental value of too many existing green spaces is being eroded by incremental development and commercial events as local authorities struggle to cope with declining public funding.

The benefits of access to high-quality public realm can be extended and enhanced by a new legal provision for an “urban right to roam”, subject of course to limited exclusions such as private gardens. The public London charter currently being developed by the mayor should be a valuable first step in asserting the rights of the public to explore and enjoy the capital’s public spaces, and similar initiatives are likely to be needed in other cities. More radical measures will be needed to avert the creeping privatisation of land and ensure all urban communities can benefit from easy access to high-quality and well-managed green spaces.

Neil Sinden

Director, CPRE London

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