Urbanism
Environment
Design

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Nicholas Falk of the URBED Trust had another letter featured in the Guardian on Wednesday 31st May. 

George Monbiot is right to argue for tackling the gross waste of natural resources from the way we use land. An obvious alternative is to share the uplift in land values from development, a principle that even our Treasury accepts. But even more important is to start raising more finance to local infrastructure from those who own most residential property. This would not only help secure a more equal and less wasteful society, but would also encourage those with underoccupied houses and over-large gardens to move to somewhere more manageable. A local infrastructure funding trust would provide a better mechanism than national taxation. It would make use of a long-overdue reassessment of our anachronistic property taxation system that enables landowners to increase the value of their assets without either risk or effort.

Dr Nicholas Falk
The Urbed Trust