Veil of Secrecy over Land Ownership and Values

Overview

The veil of secrecy is a term used by Fred Harrison in The Power in the Land (1983) for the historical scarcity of reliable, public data on land ownership and land values, which he attributes in part to the interests of parties who benefit from land markets remaining opaque.[1] Harrison documents contemporary complaints from within the UK property industry itself: the Society of Investment Analysts in 1981 identified the property sector as "secretive" about its dealings, and a chairman of the property company Hammerson is quoted as preferring "no competition" in the market.[1] Harrison also notes early institutional attempts to create more transparent, integrated land markets — such as London's short-lived Estate Exchange (1857) and the San Francisco-based American Real Estate Exchange (founded 1969) — as evidence that the absence of a transparent market is not inevitable but has repeatedly had to be actively built against resistance.[1]

Later Georgist writing has extended the same theme to land ownership specifically: Kevin Cahill's Who Owns Britain (2001), cited within Harrison's later book Boom Bust, documented the secrecy historically surrounding UK land ownership statistics.[2] The concept connects directly to the practical case for land value tax: assessing land value at scale, and holding landowners publicly accountable for the value they hold, both depend on ownership and valuation data being available in the first place — the wiki's page on the objection that land cannot be assessed treats this as a solvable but real practical hurdle, and modern mass appraisal methods are in part a response to the historical data gap Harrison describes.

Since 2010 the UK picture has begun to shift. HM Land Registry now publishes open datasets — Price Paid Data (from 1995), transaction data (from 2011), and, since 2017–18, data on UK companies and overseas entities that own property — and Guy Shrubsole's Who Owns England? (2019) reconstructed and updated the ownership picture Kevin Cahill had assembled, reporting that roughly half of England is owned by less than 1% of the population.[3] In March 2025 the UK government announced plans to open up the Land Registry itself so that individual owners, not only corporate ones, can be identified — a step campaigners had sought for a decade, though they caution that full transparency has not yet been delivered.[4]

See Also

• Land Value Tax — the policy whose administration depends on land-ownership and valuation transparency
• Objection: Land value can't be assessed accurately — the related practical-assessment debate
• Mass Appraisal Methods — modern techniques that partly address the historical data gap
• Land Monopoly — the broader concept of concentrated land control this secrecy is argued to protect
• Harrison, The Power in the Land — the discovery source for this page

Sources

1. Fred Harrison, The Power in the Land: An Inquiry into Unemployment, the Profits Crisis and Land Speculation, Universe Books / Shepheard-Walwyn, 1983, Ch. 3, pp.33–38 — used for the "veil of secrecy" term, the Society of Investment Analysts and Hammerson quotations, and the Estate Exchange / American Real Estate Exchange references. See this wiki's summary: Harrison — The Power in the Land.
2. Kevin Cahill, Who Owns Britain, Canongate, 2001 — referenced (via Fred Harrison, Boom Bust, Shepheard-Walwyn, 2005, Ch. 8 §2) as a later documentation of secrecy around UK land ownership statistics. Cahill's findings are reviewed and updated in Shrubsole (source 3), which this page relies on for the substance of Cahill's account rather than the original text.
3. Guy Shrubsole, Who Owns England? How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back, William Collins, 2019 — used as the reviewed, updated successor to Cahill: it reconstructs English land ownership from HM Land Registry open data and other sources and reports that roughly half of England is owned by under 1% of the population. publisher
4. HM Land Registry Open Data (landregistry.data.gov.uk) and Guy Shrubsole, "Huge win! Government announces plan to open up Land Registry," Who Owns England?, 6 March 2025 (whoownsengland.org) — used as the current (post-2010) evidence that UK land-ownership transparency has partially improved via open datasets and the 2025 commitment to open the Land Registry, with the caveat that full transparency is not yet delivered.