Land facts

I have just received a flyer offering me the opportunity to "invest" in land, with the chance of winning a plot of land if I complete the form and send it back. It offers an enticing prospect, pointing out that "re-zoned land can achieve tenfold uplifts in value."

I logged onto the website of the company, which is called Commercial Land

There is a nice picture of a green field, and a quote from the Barker Review of Housing, which says that "In 1992 land costs accounted for only 15% of the value of a new home, but by 2003 this proportion had risen to 34%"

The text points out that "Commercial Land and its associates have acquired a wealth of experience in the identification and acquisition of land and property.

"We are committed to making available to individual buyers the opportunity to buy strategic plots of land, all of which are freehold, contain no material covenants and have no demands for overage on them, i.e. no additional payments will be due to a previous owner on granting of planning consent.

"We search throughout England for sites of agricultural, open countryside or forestry land, both inside and outside the Green Belt. Only a small percentage of sites that we inspect will be suitable for acquisition by Commercial Land."

Things may not be quite so rosy. The Government promises something called the Planning Gain Supplement (PGS), which is a tax on the land value uplift realised by planning consents. The main effect of this will be to clog up the market, so Commercial Land's "investors" may have to wait a while for the PGS to fail and be repealed.

But the inability to prevent owners walking off with windfall gains from planning consents has bedevilled the planning system for the past sixty years. It is easy enough to deal with - all that is necessary, as was pointed out in 1947, is to put in place the right system of land value taxation - an annual tax on its rental value.