Dubbed as the ‘Glastonbury of the built environment’ the UK Real Estate and Infrastructure Forum (UKREiiF) hosted 16,000 delegates in Leeds last week – including KOR’s Senior Public Affairs Consultant, Grace Gladding.

It is essential that landowners and developers, with a vital part to play in meeting those challenges, build and maintain good relationships with all stakeholders, including local authorities and their elected members. 

For landowners, the proposed Land Use Framework offers both a challenge and an opportunity. A challenge because it may impose restrictions on how Estates and farmers can manage their land.

Large parts of rural Britain are feeling deeply unloved by the Government after the publication of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill promised a cut in the value of compulsorily purchased development land and the Sustainable Farming Incentive was summarily scrapped.

The perennial concern of landowners across the country is that so much of the good work they do goes unrecognised - but if they undertake a project considered in the least bit controversial complaints come flying in.

There has been a flurry of announcements from the Government since its July election victory on the subject of solving the housing crisis.

How do organisations and individuals communicate with neighbours, stakeholders and the wider public in a media environment that is fast-changing and, in many cases, fracturing?

Environment Secretary Steve Reed has accepted he owes landowners an explanation for The Labour Government’s decision to scrap 100% to agricultural inheritance tax relief after promising a year ago there would be ‘no change.’

How things are and how things look can be two radically different things.

But managing the way things look to people is a critical skill for a government engaged in bringing about change.

And the optics following the introduction of a 20% inheritance tax on agricultural assets worth over £1m, introduced in last month’s Budget, are terrible.

It doesn’t matter how many Treasury number-crunchers line up to tell the rural community that the change will affect just a small number of farming families, the message could not be any clearer to those affected.