The revelation that half of England is owned by less than 1% of the population (Report, 18 April) is a stark example of how broken our archaic system of land ownership is. This inequality is a sign of the wider inequalities in British society, but also has a more immediate impact: seriously exacerbating the housing crisis. The high cost of land for new homes, and lack of transparency around ownership, are some of the key causes of this national emergency. An acre of land becomes up to 275 times more expensive when it is granted planning permission for new houses. This means developers are incentivised to build high-cost luxury housing to recoup their costs and often try to minimise their affordable housing contributions.

The government should change the law to rectify this, allowing land to be sold more quickly and for what it is actually worth, rather than the vastly inflated sums it can command. This would allow public bodies and not-for-profit housing associations, which build the majority of affordable housing in the UK, to afford land to build genuinely affordable homes. If we want to solve the housing crisis, we must take aim at our broken land market.

James Prestwich

Head of policy, National Housing Federation

• Since the Thatcher government, landowners and landlords have seen an astronomical rise in the value of their land and hence in their wealth. They have also profited from tenants who have paid ever-increasing rents and from the taxpayers paying the cost of ever-increasing housing benefit. Meanwhile, all UK tenants pay that apology for a land tax called council tax. In the US, landlords pay the land taxes from their ever-increasing wealth. In the UK, the tenants pay the land tax from their ever-decreasing incomes. The result: ever-increasing inequality and social unrest.

Rev Paul Nicolson

Taxpayers Against Poverty

• Rob Evans’s excellent article is a reminder of the concentration of land ownership and the secrecy surrounding it. The figure is similar to estimates published by the royal commission on the distribution of income and wealth in 1979. The commission said: “The paucity of comprehensive up-to-date information on land ownership is remarkable.” It was promptly dissolved by the Thatcher government.

Richard Norton-Taylor

Author of Whose Land Is It Anyway?, London

• I grew up in America, not England, partly because of the frustration of having so much land in the hands of so few. It was one of the reasons so many English men and women left for North America or Australia.

In my book, Getting to Grand Prairie: One Hundred Londoners and Their Quest for Land in Frontier Illinois, I tell the story of a group of friends and relatives who immigrated to Vermilion county, Illinois, from 1847 to about 1857. Relatively prosperous working-class people – one man had a thriving business of installing gas lights in London theatres and shops – they were clear in letters about their limited prospects in England. Within days of arriving in Illinois, they bought farmland with gold. Owning land was so important to them that they and their descendants continued to amass it.

I grew up on a farm on that land, and I remember my father, the grandson of one of those immigrants, telling us that we were special because we owned land – a point of view he must have inherited from his English forebears.

Karen Cord Taylor

Boston, Massachusetts

• News that half of the land is owned by less than 1% of the population is not a surprise to many of us. It is one measure of the unequal distribution of wealth and the inequalities that are evident in other aspects of our lives.

The situation would be more bearable if land ownership brought with it a responsibility to care for the land on our behalf. Yet, large swathes are preserved as grouse moors and have become a monoculture with no trees, few species of plants and insects, and limited value to wildlife. Yes, it provides space for some of our breeding waders, but that is little compensation for the significant loss of other habitat and the recurrent downstream flooding due to the absence of trees and the reduced water-holding capacity of the land.

Equally, the large landowners could be more willing to allow responsible access. The UK has some of the best public rights of way and open access provision in the world – thanks to our past heritage and the foresight of postwar governments. Yet many landowners (for example, in my county of Northumberland, where a large proportion of land is owned by the aristocracy) show a reluctance to allow access and to dedicate rights of way, even when there are strong historical and public interest reasons for rights of way to exist.

While it is desirable to redress the balance on ownership, the large landowners would be held in greater regard if they were to engage with local authorities and wildlife organisations to increase access and wildlife diversity.

Alan Mitcham

Ponteland, Northumberland

• If Duke William of Normandy were to visit today’s England, he would feel very much at home: a hereditary non-elected head of state at the apex of a pyramid of feudal landowning classes, who gained their property by virtue of birth or by clandestine operations, and with many of the “natives” living in slums. Plus ça change.

Jane Ghosh

Bristol

• Can I suggest that the 1% who own half of England might like to pay for the refurbishment of the Houses of Parliament. Then our taxes can pay for the NHS, schools and social care.

Kath Fitzpatrick

Liverpool

• The imbalance could be addressed in a small but significant way if the tenant farmers on Crown Estate farms were given the same right to buy as council house tenants.

Peter J Brown

Redbourn, Hertfordshire

• Unless one goes down the extreme route of government confiscation, which has serious issues around the dangers of state power, the simple policy of taxing land values on the basis of its maximum permitted use should be followed.

Yes, it is morally wrong for a few dukes to own vast tracts of Scotland’s hills and glens, but the commercial value is not as significant as the private ownership of valuable development land, which, if undeveloped, pays nothing to public funds.

The drive to amass such land would be hugely diminished if the annual price for doing so reflected its value as created by public policy. It is so vividly simple that it amazes me that no British government has ever legislated for this morally just source of funding for central and local government.

Michael Meadowcroft

Leeds

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