Budget includes radical Lib Dem policy: Community Land Auctions
As ALTER President Chris Huhne hinted two weeks earlier at ALTER's AGM, George Osborne's second Coalition Government Budget on 23rd March included a surprise policy that the Lib Dem Party Conference had approved three years earlier: a pilot scheme for Community Land Auctions, to transfer most of the unearned land value uplift that goes with award of planning permission from the landowner to the community.
More details of how the policy should work are contained in a CentreForum pamphlet of 2007 titled "In My Back Yard" - see http://www.centreforum.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=82:in-my-back-yard-unlocking-the-planning-system&catid=38:publications&Itemid=56
ALTER gave author Dr Tim Leunig (lecturer at the Lodon School of Economics) a platform to explain how his ideas fitted with Lib Dem policy of Land Value Taxation at the time he was writing the booklet.