Land activism UK

• The UK’s food system is broken. A green new deal for agriculture could be revolutionary, theconversation.com (Feb 28, 2025)
• Delivering better outcomes with a Multifunctional Land Use Framework, Sue Pritchard, ffcc.co.uk (Jan 28, 2025) — "Through our long-term trials we have seen how keen people are to engage in and work through the complex and messy problems. We’ve seen... communities working with planners to design places with attractive, affordable, sustainable homes where people want to live and work."
• Frome residents win five-year battle for community-led housing project, theguardian.com (Jan 23, 2025) — “What’s really exciting for me is that it’s not actually about the amount of commercial space or the affordable housing it will provide – it’s about the sense of confidence and agency and possibility that I think it will give us as a community.” Fiona Barrows, Frome town councillor

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Common land is collective land (sometimes only open to those whose nation governs the land) in which all persons have certain common rights, such as to allow their livestock to graze upon it, to collect wood, or to cut turf for fuel.

A person who has a right in, or over, common land jointly with another or others is usually called a commoner.

In Great Britain, common land or former common land is usually referred to as a common; for instance, Clapham Common and Mungrisdale Common. Due to enclosure, the extent of common land is now much reduced from the hundreds of square kilometres that existed until the 17th century, but a considerable amount of common land still exists, particularly in upland areas. There are over 8,000 registered commons in England alone.

The Landworkers' Alliance (LWA) is an organisation in the United Kingdom representing small farmers, growers, foresters and land-based workers established in 2012 under the name Via Campesina UK, and incorporated 2015. The organisation campaigns for better food and land-use systems.

The organisation works internationally on topics such as food sovereignty through membership of the international peasants advocacy organisation, Via Campesina, which represents over 200 million peasants, farmers and land-based workers through 182 member organisations. The LWA is one of two organisations in the UK affiliated to Via Campesina, the other being the Scottish Crofting Federation.

They launched a manifesto for tackling rural inequality at the Oxford Real Farming Conference in 2016, and are twinned to US based Farm Hack to bring their model of supporting new farmers to the UK.

The organisation has been critical of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), saying that Defra is preferential to Corporate farming and Agribusiness. On 17 April 2014, the LWA held a protest outside the headquarters of Defra. In June, the LWA welcomed the dismissal of Owen Paterson as Environment Secretary.

In February 2014, The Economist hosted a summit regarding food insecurity in Africa. Only one farmer was permitted to attend the event and representatives of LWA were excluded as none of them could afford the high entry fee.

The LWA supports land reform to hinder and regulate large estates. In July 2024, the LWA held a protest against Discovery Land Company's purchase of the 8,000-acre Taymouth Castle estate to turn it into a luxury resort, and advocate for stronger regulations on large estates. The LWA said the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill going though the Scottish Parliament was not enough to curb large estates and protect the interest of locals against the "super rich".

Advocates of land reform in Britain have included the 17th-century Diggers, John Stuart Mill, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Jesse Collings. Currently the Labour Land Campaign promotes the case for a land value tax, one of the results of which would be some land reform. The Green Party of England and Wales and the Scottish Green Party support land value tax. Currently aristocrats still own a third of England and Wales.

Land ownership in the United Kingdom is distributed in a Pareto-like distribution, with a relatively small number of organisations and estates, and to a lesser extent people, owning large amounts, whether by area or value, and much larger numbers owning small amounts or no land at all.