Press Release
on the award of the contract. This confirms Vickers' role as Researcher and sets out Kingston's approach to the study.

Over 450 local planning authority chiefs in England will shortly receive an invitation to complete an online questionnaire. Project Director Professor Sarah Sayce, who has been Vickers' PhD Director of Studies, has said that she believes one reason Kingston's tender bid was successful was his current active involvement in local planning, as an elected councillor who deals everyday with land use information and planning policy decisions locally.

Vickers is also a Director (non-executive) of the Association for Geographic Information, which wishes to actively support the study. The great majority of AGI members will be affected by developments in NLUD. AGI's current Chair and Director of the GeoInformation Group - a leading supplier of land use related imagery and other data to local authorities - is a consultant to the Kingston Study Team.

The rather dry formal title of the project has been replaced by one that will be used in publicity:
Brownfield Data: can we do better?

In his book Location Matters: Recycling Britain's Wealth, out now from Shepheard-Walwyn (specialist publishers on ethical economics) Vickers alludes to the need for better land information and the fact that this year's EU INSPIRE Directive....

may provide the regulatory stimulus for us to obtain all the information needed to derive land value....

http://www.agi.org.uk

The NLUD Study will shortly have its own website hosted by Kingston. Key stakeholders in NLUD are Local Planning Authorities from which EP obtains data on Previously Developed Land (PDL). Tony Vickers is himself a local councillor in West Berkshire and Chair of the AGI's Local Government Special Interest Group.

Continue reading "English Land Use Database under review"

http://www.earthrights.net/
to develop an on-line "how to do Land Value Taxation" facility by August 2007.

Tony Vickers is one of a team of LVT Advisers managed by the Director of Earth Rights, Alanna Hartzok, who is also the UN representative of the International Union for Land Value Taxation and Free Trade (known also as the Georgist Union). Tony will be assisting with the definition of a set of "infrastructure requirements" - such as land information data sets - for governments considering LVT.

The contract asserts that "LVT is the appropriate instrument for the urgent fight against global inequity and poverty" and can be downloaded here