The Scheme, and Effects on Value

In compulsory acquisition the compensable value of land is often measured not against the world as it is but against a world in which the project was never undertaken. That reference world is the scheme, and a difference between the two is a value effect. Neither is the appraiser's to choose: the governing law fixes the form of the counterfactual, a tribunal fixes its extent, and the arrangements differ by jurisdiction. This entry distinguishes four kinds of value effect -- enhancement, depreciation, effects on the remainder of a partial taking, and movements caused by something other than the scheme -- and shows why conflating them is the commonest error in the field. It sets out five instruments that treat them differently, from Ontario and Czechia, which exclude gains and losses alike, through Argentina, which excludes only the uplift, to Poland, which confers the uplift from the expropriation-purpose designation on the owner by statute. The entry's central claim is that the boundary of the scheme is not preliminary to the valuation but constitutive of it. Goldmate, in New South Wales, is worked through to show a rezoning uplift falling inside or outside the compensable measure according to whether the scheme was taken to be one motorway or a regional programme, and to what, within that frame, was found to have caused the rezoning -- a difference of $28.6 million, on land that did not change.