Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, what estimate he has made of the number of UK expatriates living in South Africa that will be affected by the motion passed in the Parliament of South Africa on 1 March 2018 to confiscate land without compensation from white farmers.

The motion passed by the South African Parliament on 27 February 2018 committed to ‘make use of all mechanisms at the disposal of the state’ in pursuing a land reform programme, and tasked a committee with reviewing whether the Constitution needed to be amended for the State to expropriate land without compensation. It is not possible to make an assessment of the impact of a future land reform programme until it has been formulated, however, President Ramaphosa has provided clear examples of when a policy of expropriation could be used. These include: unused land, derelict buildings, purely speculative land holdings, or circumstances where occupiers have strong historical rights and title holders do not occupy or use their land, such as labour tenancy, informal settlements and abandoned inner-city buildings.