An interview with environmental campaigner and author Guy Shrubsole

‍JGF: Your new book – The Lie of the Land: Who Really Cares for the Countryside? – continues to question the inequalities of land ownership, which follows on from 2019’s Who Owns England? revealing the devastating statistic that “less than 1% of the population own roughly half of the land in the UK.”‍

‍Over time, and under pressure to justify such high levels of private ownership in the UK, landowners have presented themselves as ‘custodians’ and ‘guardians’ who can be trusted to act as ‘good stewards’ without the need to introduce any regulations or interfere with ownership. Can you retrace the historical narrative of ‘stewardship’ back to its roots and explain its current – if fading – power?‍

GS: A lot of people will hear the word ‘stewardship’ or ‘custodianship’ and think that it sounds like a good idea – to not own something outright, but look after it on behalf of someone else. The etymology of ‘steward’ goes back to the Old English stīweard, meaning the ward or guardian of the household or animals – stig gives us the word (pig) ‘sty’ – on behalf of the lord of the manor. What that essentially conveys is that it’s someone looking after something on behalf of someone else, so it has that sense of only being here temporarily – trying to care for the land, to pass it on in a good state. I do think this is a noble ideal but it's also become the vogue as a narrative frame used by landowners, lobbyists, and business groups as a way of essentially defending the status quo and shielding bad environmental practices from too much scrutiny, and evading government regulations. 

In the book, I trace this history back to its origins, but what I also found fascinating was uncovering how the language of stewardship was deliberately revived in the 1970s by groups like the Country Land and Business Association (CLA) and the National Farmers Union (NFU), and how successive NFU presidents have used the phrase ‘custodians of the countryside’ from the 1970s through to today. It's basically a right of passage for NFU presidents to keep parroting this phrase. And it's a phrase that's been picked up by politicians as well. Every time they go to the Oxford Farming Conference, the NFU conference, or CLA conference, they make some reference to landowners being the ‘stewards of the land’, and farmers the ‘custodians of the countryside’. And often, at least under the Conservatives, it was accompanied by a promise not to add to the regulatory burdens of farmers or landowners, but to carry on providing billions of pounds of public money in farm subsidies each year. So essentially, it's a way of deflecting attention away from the degree to which landowners and farmers have control over what they're doing, and hold considerable sway over what they do on the land. And too often it’s prioritising profit, personal gain, and private property rights over protection. Ultimately, the reason for it is to say, 'We want to have our private property rights unaffected by wider public, social and environmental issues’. I’m of the view that private property rights have always been to a certain extent compromised; there has to be a trade-off between the rights of private property owners and the wider common good. But obviously the lobby groups and the big landowners will push forcefully for those constraints to be minimised.

People reading my book may think, ‘I know a nature-friendly farmer’, or ‘I know a landowner who is as good a steward as they can be’. And I cite examples of people like that in the book as well – such as James Rebanks in Cumbria, and Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree rewilding the Knepp estate in Sussex. But again it comes back to the idea that individual actors are going to save us, and that we can put our faith in those heroes, rather than in systemic change. In some ways this has been encouraged by the rewilding movement because the way it's been brought into practice in England at least has very much focused on individual landowners doing heroic things on their own land. In Scotland it’s obviously quite a different narrative, with a challenge to ‘green lairds’, for example, and there has been a big debate about land reform, what land is for, and community land ownership in Scotland, over the last 20 years or so.

This is the first in a series of conversations between Stir to Action and representatives from philanthropic foundations about their role in democratising wealth in the UK. Stir to Action’s Daniel Stanley speaks to Emma Shaw, who works with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Emerging Futures team.

In September 2023, Birmingham City Council, the largest local authority in Europe, found itself unable to balance its budget. It issued a Section 114 notice, used when a council cannot meet its spending commitments from its income, thus effectively declaring itself bankrupt. These notices mean that a council cannot commit to any new spending, other than for essential services required by law.

Birmingham City Council is not alone: other councils that issued Section 114 notices in 2023 included Nottingham City and Woking Borough, with a further one in five council leaders expecting to declare bankruptcy within the next 15 months. It is expected that demand for local government services, particularly adults’ and children’s social care, will continue to increase throughout the 2020s. This means increased financial pressures on local authorities are set to continue, with many others on the verge of effective bankruptcy. Meanwhile, financial support from central government has been steadily reducing over the last ten to 15 years, particularly during the coalition years of 2010 to 2015. The National Audit Office estimated in 2018 that English local authorities’ spending power fell by 29% in real terms between 2010/11 and 2017/18. Using similar methodology, the House of Commons Library estimates that it remains 10% below its 2010/11 level in 2024/25.

Beyond the national picture, however, Birmingham City Council have claimed that their poor financial position came as a result of significant costs to put right an IT system that was not fit for purpose, alongside potential liabilities for equal pay claims. But the £760m equal pay figure has been challenged by some in recent months, including the Audit Reform Lab, who argue that the original figure used is speculative. The report claims that the primary driver of the council’s financial problems is the cost of the disastrous implementation of a new ‘Oracle Cloud Fusion’ IT system, and therefore that the current capitalisation direction should be redrawn and extended to April 2028, capitalising against the costs of the Oracle IT system. One year on from the Section 114 notice, the council's drastic programme of cuts is being thrown into question, with the Save Birmingham campaign asking for an immediate pause to the process.

How golf courses can be repurposed to meet the needs of people and planet

Back in April 2020, shortly after the UK had gone into lockdown for the first time, Guy Shrubsole, the campaigner and author of Who Owns England (2019), set out to map and investigate London’s golf courses. While a natural continuation of his wider work on land ownership, it was also given particular urgency in the moment – not least for those living in densely populated cities – as the nation began to ask questions about use of, and access to, green space.

The results of this research produced some surprising findings. For example, although a considerable number of golf courses in Greater London are held in private ownership, the figure is less than half, at 45%. This turns out to be only slightly larger than the number owned by councils (42%). After several decades in which councils, schools, and other public institutions have been forced to sell off green space – including school playing fields and county farms – it seems pertinent to ask why so many golf courses have remained untouched.

Happily, there are signs of progress. In Cheshire, the Woodland Trust recently purchased a former golf course, and have been busy planting trees. The vision is for the site to “develop as native broadleaf woodland” and to link with other woodland sites as part of the larger Northern Forest, providing green space and fighting climate change.

And further east, on the Lincolnshire coast, the National Trust is busy converting a disused golf course – Sandilands – to “create new habitats for a variety of wildlife, especially migrating birds like black-tailed godwit, spotted redshank and spoonbills, along with breeding birds such as snipe, lapwings and oystercatchers.” This environmental mission is coupled with the social objective of providing “a space where everyone can enjoy the benefits of being in nature.”

More controversially, perhaps, the London-based architecture firm RCKa has developed a proposal to build housing on an existing golf course in Enfield, at the northern end of the city. Understandably, not everyone agrees with this vision, arguing that green space, once built upon, is lost forever. However, faced with an acute and growing housing crisis, it may be useful to ask whether some compromise solutions might begin to develop at the edges.

What the above examples demonstrate is a growing interest in the potential for repurposing golf courses, for reasons ranging from climate change mitigation and biodiversity benefits, to providing space for housing and food growing.

Which brings us to Glasgow, where the Glasgow Community Food Network (GCFN) are leading on a proposal to transform a disused golf course into a food growing space, with much of the land restored as a richly biodiverse space where wildlife can thrive.