Privatising Land in England

By Prof Antonia Layard, Professor of Law (University of Bristol Law School)

While land law often hits the front pages of the Daily Mail (“Homeowners back from vacation encounter a motormouth squatter”), two recent books have taken the UK broadsheets by storm. The first is Brett Christophers’s The New Enclosures: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain, the second is Guy Shrubsole’s Who Owns England: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land. Both books are concerned with transparency (and the niceties of land registration) as well as why ownership matters.

Building on years of work by Kevin Cahill, Doreen Massey, Andy Wightman, Anna Powell-Smith and James Meek – along with Domesday Book, the 1873 Return of Owners of Land and Lloyd George’s 1910 Valuation Office Survey – Shrubsole is able to build a picture of property dominance by a few, estimating that half of England is owned by less than 1% of the population (at least 30% of whom are aristocracy and gentry). According to Shrubsole, the state now owns 8% of England’s land mass, although it used to be much more. In fact, Christophers estimates that approximately two million hectares, or ten percent of the Britain landmass, have left the public sector for private ownership between 1979 and 2018.

So why does land ownership matter? As all law students learn, land ownership brings with it rights and privileges (as well as obligations, in respect of taxation and occupiers liability). Unless there are specific exceptions, the land is mapped as right to roam access land, for instance, or as a highway, the landowner can ask any person to leave: refusal converts entry into a trespass. As owners, landlords can charge market rents to let out their houses, developers can – subject to planning – transform former libraries and convert them into flats. Land ownership brings prestige, power and the potential for profit. (more…)

‘Paid work’ or underpaid labour? The labour exploitation of detainees within immigration detention

By Dr Katie Bales, Lecturer in Law (University of Bristol Law School) and Dr Lucy Mayblin, Assistant Professor in Sociology (Department of Sociology, Warwick University).*

© Chloe Juyon

In June 2017, ten immigration detainees launched a judicial review action against the Home Office challenging the payment of ‘slave’ like wages for labour undertaken within immigration detention.

This practice, termed ‘paid work’ by the Government, is remunerated at a rate of £1.00 or £1.25 per hour and includes work as cleaners, cooks, hairdressers, gym orderlies and gardeners – roles that are essential to the running of the immigration removal centres. In 2014 this practice resulted in 44,832 hours’ worth of work.

In this blog, we argue that this work is exploitative and ‘unfree’. In recognition that many detainees wish to work however, we do not call for an end to this practice; rather we highlight the structural conditions that render detainees more likely to accept exploitative conditions of work (including but not restricted to low pay), and argue that, at the very least, detainees should be provided with the national minimum wage. (more…)

Keeping Procurement on the Rails: A Legal Perspective on UK Passenger Rail Franchising

By Dr Luke Butler, Lecturer in Law (University of Bristol Law School).

© Colin G. Maggs, Ex LMS 46100 'Royal Scot' rests in platform 13 at Bristol Temple Meads having arrived from the north in July 1961
© Colin G. Maggs, Ex LMS 46100 ‘Royal Scot’ rests in platform 13 at Bristol Temple Meads having arrived from the north in July 1961

Since privatisation, passenger rail has fallen victim to a complex web of institutional and contractual relations, a matrix of network owners, service providers, regulators and oversight bodies with ever-changing remits. At the risk of oversimplification, rail provision involves the formal separation of Network Rail’s management of the infrastructure (the track etc) from the operation by Train Operating Companies (“TOCs”) of rail services on that infrastructure. The Department for Transport (“DfT”) opens the operation of rail services up to competition through a procurement process and invites qualified TOCs to bid, although some rail franchises may be directly awarded without competition. In turn, TOCs pay to access the network and lease rolling stock. All involve multiple contracts sharing subsidies, premiums and risks.

Post-privatisation, it was predicated that the contractualisation of rail would lead to “government by lawyers”. Yet, I have always been surprised at the relatively limited engagement of legal research on UK rail since.[1] This blog seeks to renew conversation by arguing that there is a high degree of legal and practical uncertainty in the route to effective franchise procurement and which has not been significantly improved by recent reforms.[2] (more…)

Inside San Diego’s Otay Mesa Detention Centre

By Dr Diego Acosta Arcarazo, Senior Lecturer in Law (University of Bristol Law School).*

Otay Mesa Detention Centre, San Diego
Otay Mesa Detention Centre, San Diego

Although much of my research focuses on legal aspects of undocumented migration, I’d never visited a detention centre for irregular migrants. So when the opportunity arose in May this year to see inside the Otay Mesa detention facility near San Diego (where a Russian citizen had died just days before), I couldn’t pass it by.

The first thing that strikes the observer is how far the facility is located from downtown San Diego. Indeed, it’s very close to the Mexican border. Having finally arrived after more than an hour’s drive, and after going through a double electrified fence and registration, we are conducted into a room where we are given a presentation by CCA personnel. CCA — the Correction Corporation of America — is a private company making huge profits on running such centres ($227 million in 2015). With some notable exceptions, scholars have neglected the business aspects of the migration industry, perhaps due to the opaque nature of some of the arrangements between governments and companies working in the sector. Yet these aspects raise innumerable questions as to whether one can reconcile the profit-seeking interests of shareholders in such companies with human rights, as well as to what extent legislation might be influenced by powerful lobbies interested in perpetuating the detention cycle. (more…)