Unearthing the deep politics of land value capture: The contested ideologies of development value

Land value capture is the contemporary name given to the policy area that is concerned with the social distribution of development land value i.e. land value uplift that arises from the prospect of development. At the core of the policy are the ideas that there is something either fundamentally unjust, or else simply inefficient, about private landowners retaining all this value uplift. This policy area has a long and contested history in England as successive governments have sought a solution to the issue of how, and how much, development value should be redistributed and why. As such, land value capture is intimately connected with deeply political questions concerning the ownership of land, what constitutes land value, whether and how land value should be distributed, the role of the state in achieving just distribution – to name a few. Therefore, while contemporary mainstream policy discussion concerning land value capture tends to be overwhelmingly technocratic and occupied with utilitarian questions concerning how land value capture tools can be used to support the provision of public infrastructure without disincentivising development, this kind of framing obfuscates the deep and contestable politics of this policy area. Via an analysis of key policy debates in England between 1947 and the present day, the paper exposes the deep politics and ideologies of development value. It achieves this by adapting Michael Freeden’s morphological method for the analysis of political ideologies. The central contention is that contested concepts which are core to political theory are constitutive of the contested concepts which are central to public policy relating to development and land values. Via systematic analysis of over 90 parliamentary debates and policy documents, the paper reveals the conceptual morphology of land value capture and its inherent instability as politicians and policymakers articulate competing arguments for its policy design and objectives. At the core of the morphology are the concepts of value, property, community, the commodity status of land and the role of the state. The paper shows how the meanings and relations between these concepts can be articulated in various ideological arrangements to legitimise or delegitimise various programmes for the redistribution of development value. However, these contestations do not take place in a purely ideational realm. Fundamental to the ideologies of development value are the real material conditions of land - its characteristics of spatial fixity and inelasticity of supply as well as its embeddedness in social and environmental communities. Connected to this is the influence of the structural characteristics of, and movements in, socially and politically constructed land and housing markets that have the power to create pressure for politicians. The aim of the paper is to systematically unearth the settled assumptions and deeply contestable ideological articulations that underpin the land value capture policy area, using the English experience as an exemplar. In doing so, the paper seeks to examine some of the reasons this policy area has been so unstable in the past, and why it is that it has become increasingly politicised in recent decades.