Partial takings: severance, injurious affection and the land left behind

Most acquisitions take part of a holding rather than all of it. The compensation practice that follows usually values the strip taken and stops there, which systematically under-compensates two real losses: what happens to the land left behind, and what the works do to it.

Severance

Severance is the loss in value to the retained land caused by separating it from the part taken. A holding cut in two by a road, with the water source on one side and the homestead on the other, has lost more than the acquired strip.

The classic cases are a parcel divided so that each remainder is too small to farm viably; a field separated from its access track; livestock separated from water; and a remnant left in a shape that cannot be worked with the equipment available.[1]

Injurious affection

Injurious affection is the loss in value to retained land caused by the use of the works rather than by the taking. Noise, dust, vibration, headlights, loss of privacy, loss of view where that carries value, drainage changes, and access that is worse after construction than before.

It is conceptually distinct from severance and the two are frequently confused in practice, which matters because a schedule that provides for one and not the other leaves a real head of claim unpaid.[2]

Two questions, not one. What is the strip worth, and what did taking it do to everything else this household owns?

The before-and-after method

The workable assessment values the whole holding before the acquisition, values the retained land after it in its post-scheme condition, and treats the difference as the compensation. The value of the strip falls out of that calculation rather than being the calculation.

This is more demanding than applying a rate per hectare and it is the only method that captures severance and injurious affection without inventing separate allowances for them. Where a rate-based approach is required by national practice, severance should be assessed as an explicit additional head with a stated basis.[3]

When to take the whole thing

Where a remainder is too small, too awkward or too affected to be viable, acquiring it entirely is usually cheaper than compensating the severance and then dealing with a household living beside the works on land that no longer supports them.

Many statutory frameworks give the holder a right to require total acquisition in defined circumstances. Whether or not that right exists, a project should have a stated policy on uneconomic remnants — a threshold, an assessment, and a decision-maker — rather than handling each case as an argument.

Betterment, and why it is usually the wrong argument

The counter-argument is that a road increases the value of the remaining land, and that any severance should be offset by that betterment. Sometimes it is true, and some frameworks permit the offset.

Applied to a smallholder losing half a hectare of the cassava that feeds their household, it is an argument that a theoretical increase in the paper value of land they will not sell offsets a real loss of production. It is worth stating explicitly where it will not be applied, so that it does not appear at the payment table.[4]

What to record at enumeration

• Total holding area, not only the area affected.
• The shape and access of the remainder after the take.
• Where water, homestead, market access and grazing sit relative to the line.
• Whether the remainder can still be worked, and by what.

None of this can be reconstructed after the works are built, and without it a severance claim raised at the grievance desk two years later cannot be assessed by anyone.