Land Economist Stephen Hill sets the scene for the Edge’s Futurebuild session on the Government’s imminently forthcoming Land Use Framework consultation and a discussion on what should happen once it is finally published. Futurebuild, taking place from 4–6 March 2025 at London’s Excel, is the most impactful event for professionals passionate about shaping a better built environment. Through sessions like this, it serves as a critical platform for exploring bold ideas and practical solutions to address key industry challenges.

If you were on a pub quiz team, and the questions were about the government’s Land Use Framework, you would definitely need to know the answer to this question: “In the House of Lords, how many times has Baroness Young asked the government minister… ‘and when will the Land Use Framework be published?’ ” The National Food Strategy in 2022 committed the government to publish the Framework by various dates that have come and gone, but, did finally arrive, last week, in good time for Futurebuild! 

To answer this question, you should probably subscribe to TheyWorkForYou with “land use” as your alert keywords. As the Baroness rarely says anything in the House of Lords without mentioning the Framework and the need for a land commission to help implement it, the running total is now at least 50 times, and rising.

She with other peers from the House of Lords’ Land Use in England Committee in 2021/22 are a powerful voice urging the government to complete this task, and to highlight the implications of having a Framework for all areas of government policy making and action. Although the Framework is the responsibility of DEFRA, land use choices, by definition, will either determine or be affected by every area of human activity…and yet, there is no Minister for Land. There is no government-wide understanding of how every area of policy should aim to optimise the use of all land, public and private, for our collective economic, social and environmental wellbeing and survival.   

If you think I’m overstating the position and that the use of land, particularly that in private ownership, is not the business of government, then you definitely need to subscribe to TheyWorkForYou for another important reason. Since the General Election, there is now a steady flow of questions about land use issues: mostly from MPs whose constituents are concerned about significant changes to the character of the places in which they live, typically about food producing farmland being ‘lost’ to renewable energy: understandably an emotive subject. Similar questions are from MPs with no previous interest in land use but who have spotted an opportunity to nurture these concerning situations as ‘wedge issues’ to be exploited for electoral purposes. It is in the nature of culture war politics for choices to be expressed in simplistic binary terms as ‘once-and-for-all’ and ‘either-or’ decisions e.g. food v. energy, or housing v. nature. The reality is that all land use choices are complex (and messy), needing to be both constantly adaptive and capable of supporting many possible mixes of use that might vary over time.

The policy void in government thinking about land is exposed by questions challenging ministers to say whether there will still be enough land to meet, say, the government’s food security objectives as land switches from agriculture to housing, transport or energy uses. Apart from anything else, it is worrying that this data is not already the everyday currency of central and local government decision making, and readily available to other stakeholders and the general public. This evidence mostly already exists, but without ready access to reliable and consistent evidence from comprehensive and integrated data systems, we cannot have an informed debate or make the optimal choices.

The Framework has now emerged as a national programme of consultation; co-creation even. It describes comprehensively and correctly all the tasks and responsibilities that will fall to a uniquely joined up vision of many government departments working creatively together in real time…that is hard to imagine. Responses to the consultation will reasonably ask ‘how on earth will that come about’? then what? Apart from exploring what kind of Land Use Framework we need, the Edge’s session at Futurebuild will make the case that the Framework needs some body to facilitate the choices and actions that will be needed to realise the Framework’s objectives; a key finding of its Roundtable on this subject in July last year. This body needs to be independent, objective, and to own the data that enables it to be trusted by government, land owners, investors, professional advisers and communities. Whether it’s a land commission as in Scotland or a more instrumental and interventionist national land use management agency, we cannot afford land use to become trapped in the mire of ‘wedge issue’ politics.