How we can pay to make the Nimbys go away

published 15 January 2014

Currently, if your life is ruined (and the value of your house destroyed) by the building of a new infrastructure project near you, there is little or no compensation available. It's just considered bad luck.

That, of course, is why we are such a nation of Nimbys.

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But there is an easy way to make Nimbyism go away: a negative land tax. Imagine if you were out there Nimbying about HS2, or a nasty new wind farm going up in clear sight of your hill-top cottage, or perhaps the way that fracking was about to ruin your sense of rural idyll. Would you complain so hard if you never had to pay council tax again, or got a cash lump sum? Or if the tax benefits (and lump sums) came attached to your house, so that should you prefer rural peace to money you could sell it at a pretty price and move on? My guess is that you would not.

Alice Thompson almost gets there in the Times today talking about how "the Norwegians have always understood that their citizens should benefit directly from energy production". The result is a five-trillion krone fund for the people, and a nation that sees its oil rigs as "part of its heritage". But a national fund isn't enough, given that it treats everyone equally. What we need is wads of cash for those directly affected.

More interesting is a piece in the Guardian (to which my attention was drawn by Paul Goodman of Conservative Home) which suggests that not only will local councils be able to keep the all the money raised from shale-related business rates but that "direct cash payments may be made to homeowners living near fracking sites". Friends of the Earth reckons this marks a "new low" in the government's attempts to "curry fracking favour". We reckon it could be the beginning of a very useful debate on who benefits from infrastructure change, and how.

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Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast - but still writes for Moneyweek monthly.

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.