Julian Pratt
Julian Pratt (1948 -2018) grew up in London, and, as a young doctor in 1975, he went to rural South Africa. It was here he questioned the factors contributing to the pattern of disease. He realised how the grossly unequal distribution of land for agriculture had a devastating effect on people’s health, causing poverty, malnutrition and the need for migrant labour. As a result, he became passionate about land reform and pursued this interest for the next 40 years. He researched, proposed and campaigned for a radical approach to the market economy, one which would replace private ownership of land with the system he described as stewardship.
Following his time in Africa, Julian became a GP in Sheffield, job-sharing with Rosemary, his wife, and working from new surgery premises, the UK’s first super-insulated non-residential building. Increasingly interested in systems of care, in 1993 Julian moved to the King’s Fund in London, a health policy think tank. He wrote a book, Practitioners and Practices: A Conflict of Values? (1995) and with colleagues developed a “whole systems” approach to improving healthcare which drew on complexity theory and viewed organisations as living systems.
After 2011, when he published the first edition of Stewardship Economy, he focused on researching and writing the detailed work that sits behind that book. He made presentations to meetings and organised conferences on the topic with special interest groups, in academic settings and to wider audiences, gathering questions raised to inform the writing of his subsequent books. He also worked on areas of policy development. For example, in 2018 he contributed to a Liberal Democrat policy paper, Replacing Business Rates: Taxing Land, not Investment, and a paper for an all-party parliamentary group on land value capture.
Read Julian’s Guardian Other Lives Obituary here.
Following Julian’s death in 2018, his wife Rosemary Field and daughter Eleanor Jubb, along with some of Julian’s friends and fellow Land Value Tax proponents at the Henry George Society of Devon worked to publish Julian’s writing on Stewardship.