ABSTRACT
In the UK, there is a long history of using planning instruments to tax betterment and capture value that comes about as a result of changing the use of land (via planning policy or planning permission). Alterman (2012) refers to Britain as the ‘world’s former laboratory of betterment-capture instruments’. Indeed, the power to use such instruments was first introduced in 1932, since which time it has been evolving. This is particularly pertinent to the Swiss case of value capture, which was first mooted in 1974, but has not yet been implemented across the whole country (see Viallon). It is not an easy instrument to devise. Methods and regulations to capture value continue to be debated in many countries, with much experimentation with new approaches (Hobma et al. 2014). This is true of the UK, and current regulations employ a mixture of negotiation and a financial levy.
