Chapter 7 is the planning arm of The Land Is Ours, which campaigns to provide access to land and its resources for all citizens.
We take our name from Chapter 7 of Agenda 21 (the 1992 Earth Summit Declaration) which states that countries should strive for “access to land for all households... through environmentally sound planning”.
The English planning system is structured (probably deliberately) so as to create scarcities of farmhouses and building land, which mean that low-income people are squeezed out of the countryside.
A large part of our work involves providing planning information and support for the considerable numbers of low-income people in the countryside who are dwelling in breach of planning regulations, and often in fear of enforcement or eviction -- smallholders, caravan dwellers, shack dwellers, and low impact builders.
We lobby government to change planning policy to provide for low impact builders and low-income smallholders. We rejoice when we manage to get a comma moved.
We also publish The Land, an occasional magazine about land rights. This covers everything from Third World land struggles, to the hassles encountered by skateboarders. If golfers were an oppressed minority, we would support them too.