Simon Fairlie is a long-time critic of the way UK planning law continues to support a move away from the land, even now at a time when people are wanting to move away from the cities and back to the fundamental connection with our source of power – to heal the disconnection that Marx argued to be the source of our alienation. Fairlie’s insight into the way cities’ dependency on the countryside is killing rural life, and small scale localised farming in particular, is worthy of close study.

In the current edition of Green Building Fairlie invokes Adam Smith’s idea that urban and rural economy and society are different animals – rural is based around resource extraction while urban is based around trade and innovation.

In the article Zoning out the Peasants Fairlie goes on to argue that the imbalance between city and agrarian life is now so extreme that only the rich and agribusiness can flourish in the countryside. Rural community has been overly influenced by suburbanism and a culture of land speculation and dormitory syndrome such that it is nigh impossible for a person to get a foothold in agriculture starting from the basis of their backyard and smallholding. I have copied the whole article here:

Zoning out the Peasants: Simon Fairlie

When Jill Delaney applied for permission to put up a shed for her free range chickens three years ago, she was rudely rebuffed. “We must put a stop to these quasi-agricultural activities which are springing up all over the country,” said Salisbury planning committee member, David Parker, who later went on to explain; ‘What I mean by quasi-agricultural is a mess of peasant farming which prevents the Common Agricultural Policy from working efficiently in Europe’.

One might be forgiven for assuming that, in a democratic Britain, every farmer – big or small, peasant or patrician – had an equal right to build a chicken house. Not so. The right to put up any agricultural building is a question of wealth; it is unconditionally available only to those who own 12 acres or more, a sizeable holding by the standards of most European countries.

A similar hurdle stands in the way of those who may have, say, 15 or 30 acres, and who, like any farmer, want to live on their property. To obtain permission to move onto their holding, be it in a newly built house, a converted out-building, a caravan or a tent, they must first prove that, by the standards of the Ministry of Agriculture, they are ‘viable’ – three acres and a cow is not enough, nowadays you need over 50 dairy cows or 160 beef cattle. For many smallholders, accustomed to, or intent upon living partly off their own produce, this level of production is as unnecessary as it is unattainable.

Do we really need to shepherd all but an elite into suburban estates so that they may amble round a spotlessly managed country park on Sundays?

These obstacles, a familiar source of frustration to every small-scale farmer, are part of a national planning policy which could hardly have been better designed to prevent peasant farming from working efficiently in Britain. The policy of ‘zoning’, which divides rural land into two distinct zones, agricultural and development, was introduced with another more laudable aim in mind, that of stemming urban sprawl – and it has been fairly successful at doing so. Most people are grateful for green belts – agricultural land where building is restricted. But this success has been achieved by discriminating against the poor in general, and the small farmer in particular.

When planning permission, as we know it, was introduced in the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, it was recognised that land which retained full development rights acquired a scarcity value, known as ‘betterment’. The then Labour government therefore imposed a ‘Development Charge’ on developers of 100 per cent of this betterment. This was removed by the Conservatives in 1954. In 1967, Labour put it back on again, though at a lower rate, claiming that ‘it is wrong that planning decisions about land should so often result in the realising of unearned increment by the owners of land to which they apply’ – but the Tories removed it again in 1971, this time for good.

The unearned and relatively undertaxed income from betterment is now of staggering proportions. Agricultural land is worth about £1500 per acre while the price of development land – which was all once agricultural land – is 50 or even 100 times as much; this stupendous rise accounts for a large proportion of the increase in housing prices.

Who pays for this unearned increment? You do, if you’re paying rent or a mortgage. And who benefits? Owners who have seen the value of their property inflate; but more specifically , developers and speculators who successfully transfer land from the agricultural to the development sector, and the banks, building societies and estate agents who have a stake in the process.

The result has been that low income people in rural areas have been squeezed out of the market, while their homes have been bought up by urban incomers, often with money acquired directly or indirectly through betterment. For the would-be small farmer, however, the effects of betterment are doubly galling. Retiring farmers can make more by selling their farmhouse to a wealthy non-agricultural buyer and disposing of the fields separately. The prospective smallholder can therefore acquire land cheaply enough, but it often left without accommodation. Since planning permission for a dwelling is unlikely, our smallholder faces the prospect of renting or buying a house ‘within the development zone’ that he or she doesn’t really want.

Furthermore, since the price of housing and industrial land is high, while that of agricultural land is low, farm produce commands a weak price on the market compared to housing and manufactured goods. So our reluctantly non-residential peasant produces goods in the low-price, agricultural zone, but has to pay for accommodation and other attendant commodities in the high-price development zone. It takes an awful lot of organic cabbages or free range eggs to pay off £100 a week rent.

The policy of zoning might, perhaps, have seemed reasonable in the 1950s and 1960s, when it was deemed vital to increase Britain’s agricultural output and there were jobs galore in the towns. But in the 1990s, it is beginning to resemble a system of social apartheid, where the protected countryside is progressively given over to the combine harvester and the Range Rover, while rural self-sufficiency is discouraged and the poor are gradually herded into ’social housing’ on the edge of subu rbanescent villages. The paradox of agro-industrial efficiency is that it is socially inefficient, and hence self-defeating. Today, with millions unemployed, with large tracts of agricultural land being ’set aside’ and with a recognisable move away from the city, a planning system which zones smallholders out of existence is looking decidedly off-target.

The prospect of a vigorous peasantry farming surplus land and providing – as in France or Switzerland – high quality local produce for a discerning market, is starting to appear less like an ‘inefficient mess’ and more like a sensible solution to some pressing problems. As the policy of zoning comes under scrutiny in the next few years, so there will be questions raised about the pessimistic assumptions which lie behind it; is all human development intrinsically harmful to the environment? Is it utterly impossible to establish standards whereby people can live, work and build in the countryside without degrading it? Do we really need to shepherd all but an elite into suburban estates and sunrise industries so that they may amble round a spotlessly managed country park on Sundays?

The answer to these questions is, of course, ‘no’. Recently, permission was given for a group of underground houses to be built on greenbelt land in Nottinghamshire. The project involves the planting of over 3,000 trees and the establ ishment of a fish-farming pond and small-scale food-production – and, one may imagine, a chicken-house. David Pickels, the chief architect of Newark and Sherwood Council, stated that the project ‘broke all the planning rules’ but would create a ‘fine’ landscape. It is in this spirit that new canons for rural planning policy will be forged – for the betterment of the rural economy as a whole, rather than for a privileged few.