ABSTRACT
This book introduces the historical controversy over the problem of compensation and betterment in England as one of the major unresolved issues of land reform during the twentieth century. It focuses on the period from 1942 to 1979 but provides the historical background up to the Second World War and brings the subject up to 2017. It reviews the way the question of the rights of private landowners has become a controversial issue of contemporary concern as a result of the way in which housing and land has increasingly been used since the 1980s as an investment within a globalised financial market and the extent to which it now underpins the performance of the economy as a whole. It describes the way the policy of taxation of land values developed over the course of the twentieth century and compares it to other policies such as land nationalisation, town and country planning, green belt, compulsory purchase and access to the countryside. It identifies how the issue has been a neglected feature of English historiography.
