The Rule They Will Not Apply

There is a rule in British law that says land should be valued as what it is, not as what public need makes it worth.

It is not obscure. It has been in force since 2017, it has been tested in more than a thousand court cases, and ministers have defended it throughout. It applies to the patch of ground under a mobile phone mast.

It does not apply to the field next to it.

The rule already exists

When a telecoms operator puts a mast on someone's land, the rent is set under the Electronic Communications Code. Since the 2017 reforms, that rent is assessed on a "no-network" basis: what the site is worth to the landowner, with its value to the network deliberately ignored.

The logic is plain. A mast site is valuable because the public needs mobile coverage, not because of anything the landowner has done. So the landowner does not get that value.

Landowners hated it. Rents fell sharply at renewal. Lord Cromwell, writing in September 2026, counts more than 1,000 Code disputes in the courts since 2017, against 33 in the previous thirty years. A third of site providers surveyed are thinking of walking away altogether.

The state held its line regardless. It believed the principle was right.

It was. The problem is where it stops.

Ninety times the price

Take the field next to the mast and give it planning permission for housing. Government figures cited by the Commons Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee put agricultural land at around £21,000 a hectare, and the same land with residential consent at around £1.95 million. That is a rise of roughly ninety times, created by a single decision of a planning committee acting for the public.

The farmer did nothing to earn it. The farmer did not decide the town needed more homes, and did not pay for the roads, schools and sewers that make the site worth building on. Yet the uplift is paid to the farmer in the purchase price. The developer pays it; the farmer banks it.

The state takes a slice back through Section 106 agreements, the Community Infrastructure Levy and capital gains tax. It is a slice. Evidence to the same committee estimated that landowners keep around three-quarters of the uplift.

Apply the mast rule here and the farmer would be paid what the land is worth as a farm. Nobody in government proposes it.

Paid to stay farmland

The farmer's claim is weaker still, because the public has been paying for that land to stay farmland all along.

Farm support in England runs at about £2.5 billion a year through the Sustainable Farming Incentive, delinked payments and grants. Agricultural land and buildings pay no business rates. Farmers kept rebated red diesel when most other industries lost it in 2022. Until April 2026, agricultural property passed on death free of inheritance tax without limit; it is still fully relieved up to £2.5 million, and half-relieved above that.

Look at how that inheritance tax relief is worked out. It applies only to the land's agricultural value: what it would be worth if it could never be used for anything but farming. When it is handing out relief, the tax system already values farmland as farmland. It forgets the principle the moment the land is sold.

So the public pays the farmer to keep the land in farming. Then it pays again, through the price of every new house, when the land stops being farmed.

Paid for a decision only the state can make

Compulsory purchase tells the same story. Since the Town and Country Planning Act 1959 and the Land Compensation Act 1961, a landowner whose land is taken has been paid open market value, including "hope value": the chance that planning permission might one day be granted.

Consider what that means. Planning permission is something only the state can give. Hope value is the market's bet that the state will give it. When the state then buys the land, it pays the farmer for the prospect of a decision the state itself controls.

Only since 2023 has Parliament begun to let authorities leave hope value out, and then only for a narrow list of schemes such as affordable housing, schools and hospitals. The general rule still stands.

Britain tried the opposite once. The Town and Country Planning Act 1947 nationalised development rights and taxed the planning uplift at 100 per cent. Landowners sat on their land, sales dried up, and the development charge was scrapped within six years. That failure has been quoted ever since as proof that nothing can be done.

It proves only that a 100 per cent charge, imposed overnight, does not work. The mast rule shows that valuing land at its existing use can be enforced when the state has the will.

Why the line stops at the farm gate

The difference is not principle. It is weight.

Mast hosts are not a constituency. They are churches, councils, businesses and individual farmers, scattered and unorganised, and nobody marched on Whitehall when their rents were cut. Owners of development land are the opposite: well represented, well advised and well connected, with decades of practice at presenting a planning windfall as a property right.

It is not a property right. It is a transfer from the public, and it is paid by the people who buy the houses.

Value land as what it is

The fix needs no new theory. It needs the rule Parliament already accepts to be applied consistently.

One rule, three occasions. A mast in a field earns field rent. A mast on an office roof earns commercial rent. The uplift created by a planning decision or a public network belongs to the public that created it.

That is not confiscation. The farmer keeps everything the land was worth as a farm, which is everything the public has spent years paying to protect.

What the farmer does not keep is ninety times that for a decision somebody else made.