According to ONS, the land value alone of UK accounts for 60% of its net worth and is “the most valuable asset in the economy, estimated at £6.3trillion (2020).

It accounts for 98% of all non-produced non-financial assets and these – as a proportion of all national assets including those produced (buildings, goods and services) or ‘financial’ (such as stocks and shares) – rose from 39% in 1995 to 58% in 2020. Almost all that rise in non-produced assets was due to increased residential land values.

The role of land wealth in our economy is commonly overlooked. Yet the cost of land, and access to it, affects all aspects of life. Land has no cost of production. Its value only arises from our demand for homes, businesses, food production, leisure, public services, transport etc. The same applies to all natural resources – oil, gas, minerals, the radio spectrum, solar energy, wind, water, rivers, oceans, etc.

In 2018, helped mainly by ALTER and its allies in the Coalition for Economic Justice (CEJ), a new All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Land Value Capture (LVC) was set up. Vince Cable was its first chair and the then Chair of ALTER, Joe Bourke, acted as its Secretary. He still does.

When Vince stepped down from Parliament, John McDonnell took over the Chair. The Labour Party has an active group of MPs – mainly on the left and including Jeremy Corbyn – who support Land Value Tax, called the Labour Land Campaign. The Green Party is a member of CEJ – north and south of the border. The SNP also supports it.

An APPG can’t exist without support from members of the governing party in the Commons and plenty of Conservative MPs in the last Parliament across a wide spectrum in that party also favoured various forms of LVC, albeit few backed LVT as strongly as the Liberal Party did in the 20^th century. Tory led governments consistently blocked all efforts to implement any form of LVC throughout that time.

Our current policy is set out in a leaflet produced by ALTER. We would scrap business rates and replace it with a Commercial Landowner Levy (CLL). In principle we also support moving council tax onto a land-value-only basis, paid by owners not occupiers. However the details have yet to be debated by Conference despite several attempts by ALTER.

The APPG for LVC currently focuses on land as terra firma, not other forms of natural capital. It looks into how land values arise, where land wealth is directed and ways to recapture at least part of that wealth to reduce and/or replace the taxes that distort our economy, and so often are avoided by those most able to pay.

Since Vince’s departure the only active member of the APPG for LVC was the Lord Tony Greaves – sadly missed by many of an older generation (mine!). But it is the children of younger Lib Dem MPs whose generation suffer most from the accumulation of unearned wealth through land value capture. So we hope of the new entry to green benches who will take up the place left by Vince and Tony.

The market economy as we know it is simply unsustainable with its predilection to tax ‘active’ labour and capital. Capitalism deleted Land – as a distinct factor – from the economic lexicon over 100 years ago. LVT is rarely taught now in universities in liberal democracies. Yet no human activity is possible without access to natural resources. Our very existence depends on Nature.

Whatever party Lib Dems are represented by in Parliament now, they should bring to their MP’s notice the existence of this APPG. Each Parliament has to revive all APPGs from scratch and this one should be a priority for Lib Dems – especially as John McDonnell has now been suspended from Labour.

You may be surprised how open to this subject all lawmakers are becoming, as governments of all colours in all advanced democracies struggle to finance the good things in life. So if you not familiar with ALTER’s agenda please follow the links above before you seek a meeting with your MP.

ALTER will not be holding a fringe at Brighton this weekend and will not even have a stand: we were slow to recover from the General Election. But please get in touch with us by email at [email protected]. I will be roving the corridors and meeting rooms at Brighton with the message and my mobile: 07413 480080!

* Dr Tony Vickers is a retired chartered surveyor who worked first for a national housing developer, then as a Military Geographer before entering Lib Dem politics in 1995. He is co-founder of ALTER and has served as a councillor in Berkshire for 20 out of the past 30 years while also lecturing in green economics at Kingston University until 2016. www.libdemsalter.org.uk