At first blush, you might think that landowners, NIMBYs and the Home-Owner-Ist coalition generally are more 'right wing', while the Greenies are 'left wing'.
I'll cheerfully bash both sides, not in the interests of any particular political neutrality (I'm not political) but because what underpins both camps is that they wave The Righteous Flag ('Protecting The Hallowed Green Belt') in order to mask the fact that they are actually rent-seekers and authoritarians - that is what galls me as a small government, free market liberal.
Worst of both worlds is a Greenie landowner of course. Charles Bazlinton alerted me to this article in The Times (which will require you going through a laborious registration process) concerning the activities of one such individual:
Michael Eavis [an agriculural landowner], who will host the 40th [Glastonbury] festival at Worthy [ooh, the irony] Farm next week, will become the first person to take advantage of the Government’s new, heavily subsidised scheme to create a large array of solar panels... Mr Eavis will sell the electricity to the National Grid at a premium rate, guaranteed by the Government for 25 years. He expects to earn about £45,000 a year from the feed-in tariff as well as reducing his own energy bills, meaning that the system will pay for itself in six years.
Mr Eavis told The Times: “I’ve been planning this for a long time but the Gulf of Mexico oil spill has brought home just how urgent it is that we move to renewable electricity..."
The Department of Energy and Climate Change estimates that the scheme will cost more than £8 billion to subsidise over the next 20 years, or £8.50 a year on the average household electricity bill.
So who pays? Average households occupying a couple of hundred square yards. And who benefits..?
Put On Your Big Boy Pants, Maybe?
3 hours ago
8 comments:
To be fair to Michael Eavis, almost anyone can take advantage of the previous gov't's absurd feed-in tariffs. All you need is a roof to put the photoelectric panels on and away you go.
B, sure, but you try earning £45,000 a year from a few panels on your roof. These things need a lot of physical space.
I quite like Eavis. He runs a music festival, makes a ton of money for charity, and doesn't suck at the public teat. It's proper old-school hippyism.
That said, you'd have to be nuts not to sign-up for a government-backed (and almost risk-free) scheme that pays for itself in 6 years. Even if you get a change of government after 5 years and they drop this, you'll still have the panels giving you income for another 15.
"These things need a lot of physical space."
Well, if you are feeling entrepreneurial, there has to be some space around that is practically worthless like the roof of a large warehouse/factory that's been empty for years and which can be rented for peanuts. You don't have to be a landowner. Hell, if I had the money, I'd be thinking of doing it - there's a very large empty agricultural building just across the road from me...
JT, quite clearly he does 'suck on the public teat', the article explains how.
B, OK, you see if you can go and rent such a space. Whoever owns it will suss out how you are planning to exploit these subsidies and then simply do the same exercise himself, or bump up the rent so that he can cream off the subsidies that you hoped to collect.
It is a simple observable fact that the minute there are any subsidies that relate to anything vaguely land-related, it just boosts land rents or selling prices.
For example, land remediation tax breaks. The original pollutor cannot claim them, but a subsequent purchaser can. So if you sell contaminated land, you can add on the value of the tax breaks to the selling price (I know this for a fact because this is what I have done in my day job, the purchaser says fair do's and is quite happy to pass on the bulk of the value of the tax break to the vendor).
"Whoever owns it will suss out how you are planning to exploit these subsidies and then simply do the same exercise himself, or bump up the rent so that he can cream off the subsidies that you hoped to collect."
Not if I don't tell him, he won't, at least not at first and I'd have to try and get some sort of fixed-rate deal. Sure, soon enough, if many people start doing it, the landowners will cotton on. However, supply in this case is likely to exceed demand, so price rises are unlikely. Just because the profit for the business comes from the government, doesn't automatically raise the rentable value of the space. I could be interested in renting the warehouse to keep things in. What I'm going to do with the warehouse makes no difference to its rentable value.
B: " if many people start doing it, the landowners will cotton on."
You'd be surprised at how quick people cotton on. In your example, the owner of the barn would impose certain conditions on what you can and cannot do - you'd have to ask for extra permission to completely rebuild the rood section and so that would alert him if nothing else.
Don't forget that any tenant's fittings become the legal property of the landlord, so at the next rent review he will start charging you extra rent to soak up the value of the subsidies you had been receiving (you'd be paying rent on your own investment).
But these lovely conservationists don't consider themselves to be land OWNWERS. They are just looking after it "for benefit of future generations... blah blah blah".
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