I arranged to keep some freehold land - 6 little plots with strip houses in Birmingham - for my pension (am I greedy, should I have sold them ... and to who .... 30 years ago they were worth almost nothing, OR keep them and put my odd savings somewhere else and yes I worked in a place like Brookes Uni. so not well paid then but I digress...) - now I find that they are to be stolen from me for only a third of their value under the leasehold reform act.

So I have sold a couple previously to sitting leaseholders for a song! - fair doos the families had been living there for decades BUT recentlyI am being forced to sell at a third of their value a) one plot to the beneficeries of a dead man who never wanted to buy the land anyway and b) two more plots to a farmer who lives 90 miles away BUT only after he had sold them both at public action and waited 26 days to serve a notice to buy - which he cannot as he has sold them already but thats the law! ( the ethnicity of the purchaser of the two and his background opens a whole new can of worms ... which I suspect the readers of this blog would not support).

SO where did the money come well not from not thieving barons but my great aunt who married a hard-working dispensing chemist and for a 'hobby' or was it a pension or perhaps heaven-help-us a conviction, she paid a few pounds for some land to encourage new houses to be built, so now the 96 years of the 99 year leases are due, some b....d serves a notice forcing me to sell at one third their value - as far as I am concerned 'a deal is a deal' so they break a deal with government help, and you all deserve what you get! Even if the leaseholds have
been bought and sold by the 'landed' they always new that the deal was to return the land with (or without) the
house.

Since most of the landowners who seem to want to preserve some future interest in these esoteric ways are the remnants of those who just stole it, conquered it or were given it out from underneath the feet of those who worked it, I don't have a lot of sympathy with them.

Yes, I suppose, in a free market, one should be able to dispose of exactly what parts one wants to dispose of. But this was he main reason for me making the point - one of the commonest objections to LVT is that his land is mine, I paid for it" whereas the history of landholding in the UK has always been that they are a "bundle" of rights of which you don't necessarily own or trade the whole bundle, but parts of it.

Indeed at one point the "deed" was a bundle of sticks passed from one "owner" (from the same Anglo-Saxon root as "owe" incidentally, as in feu duty to the crown) to the next.

I just think the whole thing is barking mad. It is designed simply to line the pockets of lawyers into the future so far as i can see. Of course if there was an LVT, the need or desire of someone to hold onto development gains after they sold would be negated by the tax."