Labour and the Land: The Making of the Community Land Act, 1976.

Angered by an unprecedented rise in house and land prices and by the depredations of property developers such as Harry Hyams, who built Centre Point, the Labour Party unanimously embraced land nationalization at the 1972 and 1973 conferences. In the event, the Labour government that came to power in 1974 did not nationalize the land, but it did pass the Community Land Act empowering local authorities to acquire at ‘use value’ land that could be used for development. This was the third and, as it turned out, last time since 1945 that the Labour Party enacted legislation to limit the free market in land and property. This article examines why Labour in spite of its previous failures tried again to secure a permanent change in land ownership and why this last attempt also failed because of a combination of external economic pressures and the inherent limitations of Labour's reform effort. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]