§Series II · 02 · Form
The Silent Expropriation
How institutional and fiscal fragmentation is redrawing the Dutch ownership structure across seven sectors at once, without anyone having made the choice
Executive summary
Between 2018 and 2026, the ownership structure of seven Dutch sectors has been substantially redrawn. The number of privately held investor-owned dwellings declined by approximately 44,000 between 1 January 2024 and 1 January 2026, falling to 276,000, while the corporate segment grew by 28,000 dwellings over the same period.¹ In dental care, the private equity share of Health Insurance Act revenue now stands at roughly twenty to twenty-six percent; in 46 percent of all healthcare concentrations approved in 2024, a PE party was involved.² EuroParcs grew from eighteen to sixty parks between 2019 and 2024; the top five chains control large parks accounting for at least thirty to forty percent of Dutch holiday accommodation supply.³ Family businesses in dairy farming are selling to pension funds and investment funds that hold land as an asset.
The pattern is identical across all seven sectors. A fiscal or regulatory measure with a defensible rationale, an asymmetric cost impact that hits private and family-owned holdings where institutional and foreign capital has arbitrage options, a gradual outflow of the first group and inflow of the second, and an entrenchment that within a decade is practically irreversible. What is weighed in none of the individual files is the cumulative outcome.
What version 2 of this paper adds to an earlier Statecraft publication on the same mechanism are three empirical reinforcements. The international comparison shows that Germany, France and Denmark each possess instruments the Netherlands lacks, and that the United Kingdom, lacking those instruments, has arrived precisely at the outcome the Netherlands is now approaching. A quantitative projection to 2045 models three scenarios for the housing market, of which even the most favourable does not return the private middle segment to its 2020 level. A sectoral analysis of primary care shows that Dutch law contains no person-bound concession requirement linking ownership to professional practice. That absence is no accident. It is precisely the choice made in the neighbouring regulatory regimes.
This paper is the second in the Statecraft series Reverberation. Where the first series from House of Viridian diagnosed the dissociated organisation on the inside of the apparatus, this series treats what society experiences of that institutional condition. For ownership structure, the reverberation is exactly that: no one has chosen to institutionalise the housing stock, primary care, dairy farming or childcare, and yet that is the outcome.
§ 01 · An ordinary listing as diagnostic instrument
On a random Saturday morning in spring 2026, a holiday home is listed for sale on Funda on the island of Texel. The asking price is reasonable, the property well kept, the seller a couple who bought it in 1998 for family vacations and have rented it out since to cover fixed costs. The listing mentions no maintenance backlog, no divorce, no inheritance issue. What it does mention, omitted from the headline and visible only in the elaboration, is that the owner is selling because of rising costs. Box 3 wealth tax on the property has grown in five years from a few thousand euros annually to more than eight thousand.⁴ VAT on rentals has risen from nine to twenty-one percent. Park charges have risen with it. What was a supplementary pension provision has become a net cost.
The property changes hands. The buyer is a vehicle whose Chamber of Commerce extract refers to a holding company in Luxembourg, which in turn is connected to a fund that invests in the Dutch, Italian and German recreational sector. The legal structure is entirely lawful. The fiscal burden on this buyer is not comparable to that on the Texel owner, because the law operates differently across structures.
What is unfolding here is no incident in the recreational sector. It is the most recent execution of a script that has been redrawing the Dutch ownership structure across seven sectors at once for close to twenty years. The Funda listing is not an event. It is a vantage point from which a pattern becomes visible that is not fully observed in any individual file, because no body has been designed to see that pattern.
§ 02 · The mechanism in four steps
The mechanism at work in these seven sectors comprises four steps that vary somewhat across sectors but remain identical in structure.
First step: a fiscal or regulatory signal. A standalone measure with a defensible rationale is introduced by a single department and tested within a single rationality. Box 3 is reformed after the Supreme Court ruling of December 2021. VAT on recreational rentals is harmonised on level-playing-field grounds. The Roemernorm caps top incomes in healthcare. The nitrogen response after the Council of State ruling of 2019 imposes a permitting regime that affects dairy farming. The Affordable Rent Act regulates the middle segment from 1 July 2024. Each of these measures is defensible on its own dossier. The testing within the legislative process is sectoral.
Second step: asymmetric cost impact. The measure hits private property, family businesses and SMEs in full. Institutional parties, private funds and foreign investors have arbitrage options that private parties do not: vehicle structures, foreign establishments, fiscal facilities, scale advantages in compliance. The CPB projections that support the legislative process assume model households and model firms, and rarely the question of what happens when one party can sidestep the measure and the other cannot. The model assumes symmetric actors. Reality is asymmetric.
Third step: outflow and inflow. The small owner sells, exits or relocates abroad. The institutional party acquires, bundles and optimises. The outflow rarely runs over a single year. It plays out over three to eight years, during which the cumulative burden gradually becomes too heavy for the party without arbitrage. It is not a shock. It is a gradual lowering of the threshold at which selling becomes more attractive than continuing.
Fourth step: irreversible entrenchment. The acquired capital lands in structures that cannot easily be unwound. Foreign investors enjoy treaty protection. Private equity funds have long-running arrangements with pension funds and insurers as capital providers. Should politicians later seek to correct the structural outcome, that becomes a diplomatic and legal battle for which the Netherlands is ill equipped. By the time the outcome becomes visible on a talk show, typically eight to ten years after the signal was introduced, the entrenchment is a fact. Effective correction is then no longer reversal but redesign from the new starting point.
This mechanism functions even when no one intends it. That is no rhetorical flourish. It is the key to the framing of this series. The dissociated organisation produces structural outcomes as a by-product of its own design. What looks coherent and careful within the apparatus delivers, on the outside, an ownership shift that no departmental decision has set as its objective.
§ 03 · Seven sectors, one script
Housing market
The most well-documented process, and substantially refined in the data since the v1 of this paper. The Dutch Land Registry recorded 752,000 investor-owned dwellings on 1 January 2026, of which 276,000 in private hands and 476,000 in the corporate segment.⁵ That represents a decline in the private segment of approximately 44,000 dwellings in two years compared with 320,000 in early 2024, and a rise in the corporate segment of 28,000 dwellings, mainly through institutional new construction. Sales by investors amounted to over 65,000 dwellings in 2025, and over 53,000 in 2024. The net balance was minus 38,000 and minus 29,000 respectively.
The compounding of the Affordable Rent Act of 1 July 2024, with a points-system threshold of €1,184.82 in 2025, the transfer tax of 10.4 percent since 2023, the Box 3 counter-evidence regime that followed the Supreme Court ruling of 6 June 2024 and was codified in July 2025, and the Fixed Rental Contracts Act produces, according to independent calculations, a yield loss of fifteen to thirty percent.⁶ In Amsterdam this loss runs to thirty percent according to the Dutch central bank DNB. The intended effect, affordability for tenants and access for first-time buyers, materialises partially and in the short term. The price for first-time buyers acquiring an ex-rental dwelling lies considerably lower than for comparable regular transactions, on average €124,000 lower in the four major cities.⁷ At the same time the supply of mid-market rentals shrinks, rents in new free-sector contracts rise, and DNB points to a structural shortage of affordable rental housing for first-time buyers and middle incomes.
What is taking shape is a housing stock that on the medium term is being reconfigured, with a larger share of large-scale institutional real estate held by pension funds, insurers and foreign investors, and a thinning private middle segment.
Recreational property
The recreational sector is a compressed execution of the housing market script, on a timeline of two to three years rather than eight. Of the approximately 140,000 holiday homes on 4,700 parks, an estimated two thirds remain in private ownership, but the top five chains control large parks with a disproportionate share of total accommodation capacity.⁸ EuroParcs grew between 2019 and 2024 from eighteen to sixty parks and has been wholly owned by Waterland Private Equity since November 2024. KKR acquired Roompot in 2020 for approximately €1.1 billion and merged it in 2023-2024 with Landal, which operates 305 parks EU-wide; following an ACM remedy, thirty parks were sold on to Dormio Group. Center Parcs operates under a fragmented ownership structure in which Pierre & Vacances runs the operation but Blackstone, Aroundtown and Atream own the underlying real estate.⁹ Between 2015 and 2025 at least fifteen major chain takeovers or mergers took place: on average one to two large Dutch deals per year.
The cumulative effect of Box 3, the VAT trajectory from 9 to 21 percent on rentals, the transfer tax of 10.4 percent and an average WOZ valuation increase of 36 percent over two years confronts the Texel, Drenthe or Zeeland private owner with an arithmetic problem that resolves itself toward sale. The buyer is increasingly a vehicle linked to an international recreational chain. The testing of these fiscal and regulatory steps took place along separate departmental routes: Box 3 at Finance, WOZ via municipalities and Interior, VAT at Finance, transfer tax at Finance. No body considered the cumulative burden on a single type of owner of a single type of property in a single geographic concentration.
The operational practices around private ownership on these parks are well documented empirically. Leasehold and surface-rights constructions in which buyers do not in fact acquire the underlying land; a Kaatsheuvel ruling in 2024 nullified a contract of €205,000 on grounds of unfair commercial practice, with approximately eight hundred similar cases reported.¹⁰ “Substantial restructuring” under article 10 of the RECRON conditions 2016 enables termination of long-term pitches. Penalty payments of one million euros for permanent residence were imposed in 2022 on Oostappen by the municipality of Peel en Maas; in April 2025 Peter Gillis was sentenced to one year in prison. The policy response is fragmented: regional Vital Holiday Parks programmes in Veluwe, Drenthe and Overijssel target quality and enforcement, while the Schoof coalition agreement announces a tolerance construction for permanent residence in holiday homes. Two courses at once, no body safeguarding coherence.
Agriculture
In agriculture, the mechanism operates on a longer time horizon. Since 2015 the combination of nitrogen norms, manure rules, phosphate rights and the CAP subsidy regime has put pressure on family businesses unable to refinance their structure across generations. The Council of State ruling of May 2019 on the PAS effectively brought the permitting regime to a standstill for expansion and transformation. Since then, hundreds of farms close annually, with buy-out schemes Lbv and Lbv-plus and voluntary discontinuation as exit channels. The land partly enters the holdings of pension and investment funds, with ASR and Achmea as the most visible Dutch players, holding the land as an asset without continuing the operation in all cases.
What is defensible in the individual files, ecological norms that have become legally binding, is in aggregate a gradual depopulation of the family agricultural business model. The question whether the Netherlands wants family-run dairy farming in 2045 has been put in no formal decision-making process. The answer is nevertheless being narrowed each month by the actual outflow.
Primary care
In primary care the mechanism manifests with considerable variation across sub-sectors. What becomes visible in 2026 is that this variation is no accident: it correlates strongly with the presence or absence of ownership regulation that links ownership to professional practice. The cross-section below makes this visible.¹¹
| Sub-sector | Chain share | PE share of Zvw revenue | Key deals and players |
|---|---|---|---|
| GP care | approx. 17 percent (of which 2-3 percent commercial) | less than 1 percent | Co-Med bankruptcy July 2024, ~50,000 patients; Centric Health under Rothschild |
| Dental care | 13 percent of practices, ~30 percent of revenue | 19-26 percent | Nordic Capital (169 practices), Jacobs Holding (129), Bencis and Gilde |
| Pharmacies | 89 percent chain or formula | limited direct | PHOENIX Group via BENU (360 pharmacies); Mosadex cooperative (432) |
| Physiotherapy | high and growing | considerable | Capital A via TopzorgGroep and FysioHolland (merger Dec 2024); Gate Invest |
| Primary mental health care | fragmented, growing | limited | Apax acquisition Mentaal Beter 2021; Phitaal bankruptcy March 2026 |
| Maternity care | growing | 20-25 percent | Capital A (Regiozorg/Kraamzus) |
The Dutch Healthcare Authority NZa registered in 2024 that 99 of 214 approved healthcare concentrations involved PE participation, just over 46 percent. JBR research shows that the PE share in healthcare takeovers rose from 49 percent in 2019 to 60 percent in 2022, in dental care specifically from 29 to 46 percent. Dutch supervisory law contains a structural opening here: practices smaller than fifty care providers fall outside the healthcare-specific concentration test and remain out of view of the NZa.
The legislative response, the Sound Operational Practices Care and Youth Services Act (Wibz, submitted to the House of Representatives on 29 January 2025), contains exemptions for GPs, physiotherapists and dentists by Order in Council.¹² Those are precisely the sub-sectors where PE is most active. The Council of State advised on 26 June 2024 that the problem analysis was insufficient. The letter from Minister Agema of 5 March 2025 rejected an outright PE ban on grounds of EU free movement of capital. Ten Parliamentary motions adopted between 2023 and 2025 demand various forms of PE exclusion; none has since been translated into operational regulation. This is no institutional failure in the ordinary sense. It is structural slowness that leaves room for ongoing consolidation.
In an interim assignment in a centre municipality I observed how the loss of two solo practices in a smaller town led within eighteen months to a chain takeover that formally cleared no statutory thresholds, because the individual transactions remained below reporting limits. The municipal executive regretted the development, but the municipality had no instrument to wish for anything other than what the market offered. The wish concerned public value. The instrument to materialise that wish did not exist.
Childcare
Since 2010 a gradual consolidation has been visible in childcare. The market share of the top seventy providers stands around 23 percent; approximately twelve percent of total supply lies in the hands of explicitly PE-linked chains, with Waterland (Partou), Antin (Babilou) and Ergon as the most visible parties.¹³ The pressures on private or cooperative providers can be summarised as the combination of administrative requirements arising from the Personal Register Childcare and the quality requirements under the Innovation and Quality Childcare Act, the benefits system with its specific risks for small providers, and compliance scale advantages that only chains can realise.
Here the script runs not primarily through fiscal pressure but through regulatory complexity, with the same outcome structure. Those who cannot spread compliance costs across a scale either stop or sell. Those who can spread them expand. The policy was meant to safeguard quality and child safety, not to shift ownership structure. The policy effectiveness on its own dossier is defensible. The reverberation on ownership structure has not been weighed by anyone.
Small and medium enterprises
The SME sector as a whole is less easy to tabulate than the six preceding ones, and honest analysis requires that limitation be stated explicitly. For specific branches, the pattern is recognisable. The decline of independent community pharmacies by 32 percent over a longer series of years, documented by the Foundation for Pharmaceutical Statistics, is the most clearly measurable outcome.¹⁴ In retail segments such as opticians, veterinarians, automotive dealerships and the construction sector, consolidation is also taking place, with buy-and-build strategies by investment companies bundling smaller practices into chains. For other branches, such as bakers, butchers and painters, no systematic overview exists.
The driving factors are the stacking of the Deregulation of Assessment of Working Relationships Act (Wet DBA) and the upcoming VBAR, the combination of administrative obligations around VAT, payroll tax, financial statements, GDPR and NIS2, and the rising complexity of financing. These weigh disproportionately on the party without a full back office. The family baker, the self-employed window cleaner, the sole-practitioner accountant experience what the Texel owner experiences on their own scale: an increasingly difficult arithmetic in which each individual rule is defensible. The outcome is consolidation. The seller is typically private. The buyer is typically a chain or group backed by institutional capital. For version three of this paper, a systematic elaboration with Chamber of Commerce data per branch could further reinforce or correct the claim.
Infrastructure and energy
The earliest execution of the script. Between 1998 and 2015 Essent, Nuon, Eneco, parts of the ports and parts of Schiphol’s components passed into the hands of foreign parties or pension funds participating in international infrastructure funds. Here the trigger was not a fiscal or regulatory step but the privatisation and unbundling legislation. What this part of the pattern primarily shows is the irreversibility in step four. Eneco is internationally capitalised. Schiphol is publicly majority-owned but operates within an international regime in which operational independence has shifted effective decision-making power inward, away from the House of Representatives. A contemporary attempt at renationalisation runs into treaty rights, capital structures and legal arrangements that were not consciously entered into with this future in view.
What binds the seven sectors is not their content but their design flaw. In each case the individual measure had its own logic, and in each case no body tested the aggregate impact on ownership structure. That is the shared condition.
§ 04 · The regulatory void
In an earlier Statecraft paper this mechanism was described as a blind spot. What remained implicit, and is made explicit here, is that this mechanism is not one of the symptoms of the dissociated organisation. It is precisely the same structural condition seen from the other side. On the inside the apparatus produces implicit choices as a by-product of its own architecture. On the outside that production lands as an ownership shift that no one has chosen.
The right term for what binds seven sectors at once is not market causality and not policy choice in the strict sense. It is a regulatory void. In Germany the Bestand-Neuvermietung distinction together with a cooperative segment of nine percent provides structural dampers. In France SAFER moderates the price dynamic despite modest direct intervention. In Denmark the ydernummer concession links ownership to professional practice in a way that effectively excludes passive investors. The Netherlands lacks all three. Not because the legal system would render this impossible; all three instruments are conceivable in a Dutch version. Because the architecture of decision-making itself does not have the design of such instruments as part of its mandate.
Mark Moore’s strategic triangle offers a diagnostic handle here that is absent in most evaluations of standalone files. On the public value vertex the position is that the Netherlands no longer has a shared conception in 2026 of what desirable ownership structure looks like in critical sectors. Policy has stopped asking the question; the market has supplied the answer. On the operational capacity vertex the position is that no department has the mandate or instruments to test ownership structure across sectors. The competition authority ACM tests pricing and competition, not who becomes the owner. The healthcare authority NZa tests healthcare concentrations above fifty providers, not below. The bureau for economic policy analysis CPB models symmetric actors. On the political legitimacy vertex the position is that the aggregate lands outside any democratic accountability moment, because it forms no agenda item at any point in the legislative process.
The three vertices have not come under pressure one by one. They have shifted collectively. That is what a dissociated institutional architecture produces as external reverberation when confronted with sectors in which actors are asymmetric and the time horizons of public administration and capital diverge.
The change colours of De Caluwé and Vermaak help see why the usual corrective forms underperform. A blue intervention, the design of a new monitoring system or an expert impact test, will predictably be absorbed into departmental routine and lose its bite once it has to operate across multiple departments at once. A red intervention, the mobilisation of public outrage, hits the moment when the outcome becomes visible; by that point the entrenchment is a fact. What is needed here is a yellow-white combination: political will to assign ownership of the cumulative effect, and room for emergent design routes that do not weigh down the existing departmental structure with one more coordination layer but replace it by a different principle.
The Aiki discipline supplies the personal complement. Anyone working as an executive or senior policy adviser in this field deals with parties operating on different registers simultaneously: a Texel owner voicing emotion and justice, an institutional investor voicing legal certainty and yield horizons, a department voicing sectoral rationality. Forcing one of these registers rarely works. Moving with the energy of each party toward a shared coordination point requires a particular discipline, and that discipline is not a conversational skill but the will to achieve a result that reaches beyond one’s own column.
§ 05 · International comparison
The pattern is not unique to the Netherlands, but the Dutch instrument set is by some structural features particularly susceptible to the mechanism. Comparison with four other European legal systems makes visible what is missing in the Netherlands and what the outcome is when that absence is total.
| Indicator | Germany | France | Denmark | United Kingdom | Netherlands |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ownership regulation instrument | Mietpreisbremse plus Bestand-protection | SAFER plus Loi Sempastous | Ydernummer plus apoteksloven | None | No analogue |
| Cooperative or concession share | 9 percent Genossenschaften (2.2m) | n/a | nearly 100 percent almen praksis | n/a | 28 percent housing associations (social segment) |
| PE in primary GP care | n/a | n/a | nearly 0 percent | approx. 1 percent | approx. 2-3 percent |
| Institutional or PE in care homes | limited | n/a | limited | 12.6 percent | growing |
| Mega-deal indicator 2021-2025 | Vonovia-Deutsche Wohnen €19.1bn | Hongyang Indre 1,700 ha | n/a | Welltower £6.4bn | KKR-Roompot €1.1bn |
Germany: Mietpreisbremse plus Bestand-protection plus cooperatives
Germany combines federal price regulation with an institutional dominance of cooperatives built up over more than a century. The Mietpreisbremse, in force since 1 June 2015 and codified in §§556d-g BGB, caps new rents at 110 percent of the ortsübliche Vergleichsmiete (locally customary comparative rent) in 410 designated tense housing markets covering approximately 26 million inhabitants. DIW Berlin found a dampening effect of two to four percent, RWI Leibniz approximately 2.5 percent; effects fade after about eighteen months without stricter enforcement.¹⁵ The law was extended in July 2025 to 31 December 2029. The Berliner Mietendeckel, which operated from February 2020 to April 2021, was substantively stricter but was struck down by the Federal Constitutional Court on competence grounds in March 2021. The crucial feature is the dual regime: existing contracts fall under §558 BGB with a Kappungsgrenze of fifteen to twenty percent per three years, new contracts under §556d BGB. This Bestand-Neuvermietung distinction is absent in the Netherlands. The Affordable Rent Act regulates primarily through points and contains no separate protection for existing contracts.
The German market thus remains fundamentally differently structured. Of 25 million rental dwellings according to Census 2022, approximately nine percent is held by Wohnungsgenossenschaften (housing cooperatives, approximately 2.2 million dwellings spread across roughly 2,000 cooperatives).¹⁶ Ten to eleven percent sits with municipal housing companies, and only fourteen to fifteen percent with private housing companies. Vonovia, LEG, TAG, Adler and the absorbed Deutsche Wohnen together hold approximately 3.2 percent of the national housing stock; private individuals hold approximately 64 percent. The Vonovia-Deutsche Wohnen merger of 2021 produced a combined 539,753 housing units at end-2024 with a market value of €81.9 billion. The fiscal Spekulationssteuer affects private parties with a ten-year holding period but leaves capital companies untouched via the extended Grundstückskürzung; the same asymmetry as in the Netherlands, but compensated by the cooperative segment.
France: SAFER and Loi Sempastous
France guards land ownership through a hybrid instrument that prefers deterrent effect over execution. SAFER, governed by Code rural article L141 et seq., received in 2023 393,800 prior notifications from notaries and exercised pre-emption in only 3,750 cases, approximately one percent.¹⁷ Fifty-one percent of those led to withdrawal of the sale, not to acquisition. Yet SAFER regulates twelve to fourteen percent of transactions and approximately twenty percent of hectares through rétrocessions. The instrument lost relevance as agricultural businesses organised themselves into companies; sociétés now hold approximately 74 percent of French Useful Agricultural Area.
The Loi Sempastous (no. 2021-1756; implementing decree no. 2022-1515 of 2 December 2022; in theory operational from 1 November 2022, in practice from spring 2023 by region via prefectorial decrees on the seuils d’agrandissement significatif) introduced a prior authorisation requirement for control transfers in agricultural companies above 1.5 to 3 times the regional average UAA. In Brittany 2023 this led to 38 mandatory authorisations on 551 declarations, with ten negative opinions.¹⁸ The instrument is therefore modestly effective, and the Cour des comptes noted as early as 2014 and 2020 that 60 percent of rétrocessions run via “substitution operations” in which SAFER acts only as a broker. Between 2010 and 2020 France lost 100,000 farms; the average UAA rose from 55 to 69 hectares. The share of UAA worked by financiarisée sociétés doubled between 2000 and 2020 from seven to fourteen percent according to Terre de Liens. The LOSARGA, the French agricultural orientation act of March 2025, contains no strengthening of SAFER; a quiet policy choice that opens further room for financialisation.
Denmark: ydernummer and apoteksloven
Denmark excludes private equity de jure from primary care via two elegant constructions. Almen praksis (general practice) is governed by an ydernummer system codified in sundhedsloven §§227-228: each GP-care capacity is a region-issued concession. The Landsoverenskomst om Almen Praksis between PLO (Practising Doctors’ Organisation) and Danske Regioner stipulates explicitly that an ydernummer holder must work in the clinic in their main professional capacity.¹⁹ This excludes passive investors without a formal ban. In May 2025 Region Nordjylland withdrew an ydernummer from a doctor who had pro forma appointed a colleague. Apoteksloven limits pharmacy ownership to qualified pharmacists with a maximum of one main pharmacy plus seven branches within 75 kilometres; Denmark, with Spain and Germany, is one of three EU member states that maintains this restriction. The result is that PE penetration in Danish primary GP care and retail pharmacy is effectively zero, while in dentistry, where the ownership restriction is absent, Impilo did break through with the acquisition of tandlægen.dk (52 clinics). The Danish model is therefore not a sector-wide ban but a targeted regulation that works where it is anchored.
United Kingdom: the counter-image
The United Kingdom delivers the counter-image that the Netherlands is now approaching. APMS contracts opened GP care to commercial bidders from 2004. AT Medics passed in February 2021 to Operose Health (Centene), in December 2023 sold on to HCRG and Twenty20 Capital for approximately £51.2 million.²⁰ Three owners in four years for approximately sixty practices serving 640,000 patients. In care homes for the elderly, 12.6 percent of for-profit beds is in PE hands per LaingBuisson 2022. Welltower in October 2025 acquired Barchester for £5.2 billion and HC-One for £1.2 billion, together £6.4 billion in a single deal, currently under CMA investigation with initial enforcement orders since February 2026.²¹ The CMA Children’s Social Care Market Study of March 2022 documented operating profits of £45,000 per child per year in residential children’s care, with PE ownership of approximately 23 percent in fostering. The Build-to-Rent segment grew from less than 30,000 units in 2015 to 293,096 in pipeline and 139,000 completed by Q3 2025, dominated by Greystar, Quintain (Lone Star), Get Living and L&G.
Goodair and Reeves provided in The Lancet Public Health 2022 and 2024 empirical evidence that outsourcing to private providers correlates with higher avoidable mortality in England over the 2013-2020 period.²² The observation is not that institutionalisation is inherently bad. The observation is that the United Kingdom has, across a series of sectors at once, the outcome that the Netherlands is now approaching, and that the empirical literature on that outcome is less reassuring than the rhetoric with which the transition was defended.
What does not make these four countries straightforwardly transferable is their own institutional context. What they do show is that it is possible to bring ownership structure explicitly into decision-making, or to render visible in concrete outcomes the consequences of failing to do so. The Netherlands does not, not because it cannot, but because the architecture of decision-making itself has the non-assignment of ownership of outcomes as a by-product.
§ 06 · Projection to 2045
What if the steps of today are continued without fundamental change of architecture? A conservative projection, based on the observed trends across the seven sectors and modelled for the housing market as the best-documented case, sketches the following contours.
Starting point is 1 January 2026, with a total housing stock that according to Ministry of Housing projections grows to approximately 9.7 million dwellings in 2045. The three scenarios, with explicit assumptions, yield the following picture.²³
| Scenario | Assumption | Private 2045 | Institutional 2045 | Private share in free + middle segment |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LOW | Linear continuation of -16,000 per year | approx. 50,000 | approx. 609,000 | 8 percent |
| MID | S-curve flattening to 0 by 2045 | approx. 136,000 | approx. 600,000 | 18 percent |
| HIGH | Policy correction: transfer tax to 6%, predictable Box 3 | approx. 245,000 | approx. 720,000 | 25 percent |
| 2026 actual | (comparison) | 276,000 | 476,000 | 37 percent |
The LOW scenario assumes continuation of the net balance of minus 16,000 dwellings per year observed in 2024-2025, with a natural floor around 50,000: the subset of high-end above-WWS-cap dwellings not subject to regulation. The MID scenario models the flattening that suggests itself: minus 15,000 per year between 2026 and 2030, gradually declining to zero around 2045, because the least profitable dwellings are sold first and the remaining segment becomes progressively less sensitive to the driving cost components. The HIGH scenario assumes a policy correction: reduction of the transfer tax for investors to six percent, predictable Box 3 with cost deduction and restoration of the fiscal investment institution regime.
Even in the most favourable scenario, private ownership does not return to the 2020 level of approximately 340,000 within nineteen years. The halving to an eighteen percent share under MID is the most likely path under unchanged policy. That is no forecast. It is what the current institutional design produces when continued without structural correction.
For the other sectors the projection is more qualitative, but the pattern is congruent. Agricultural land will be substantially in fund ownership, with operations partly outsourced to leasing entrepreneurs. Family-run dairy farming in its current form will be a fringe phenomenon. Primary care in dental, ophthalmological and movement care will likely be more than seventy percent in chain and private equity hands. GP care will remain fragmented for longer, but the demographic outflow of GPs retiring before 2030, combined with the financing costs of practice acquisition and the absence of enforceable thresholds, opens the gap in which the script unfolds. Childcare may have three to four dominant chains remaining, with the other providers in a dependent position.
None of these projections is inevitable. They describe what the current institutional design produces when continued without structural correction. That is something other than a forecast. It is what a Statecraft lens delivers from the facts.
§ 07 · Statecraft agenda
What would a government with statecraft do differently? Five lines of action, in ascending order of structural intervention, and informed by what works empirically in Berlin, Paris and Copenhagen.
First, a systemic impact test. Prior to the introduction of fiscal-regulatory instruments with likely effect on ownership structure, a mandatory interdepartmental test of market structure and ownership distribution. Not as ex post evaluation, but as ex ante part of the legislative process. Not sectoral in the current sense, but across departments, with explicit responsibility for the cumulative effect lodged with a coordinating function that has the mandate. The French Cour des comptes review model on SAFER offers an operational reference for how such testing can itself be independently evaluated.
Second, an explicit ownership choice per sector. Which type of owner does the Netherlands want in 2045 in this sector: private, cooperative, institutional with public mandate, state, foreign? Make this choice explicit and democratically reviewable. The answer will differ by sector, and that is no problem. The problem is the absence of the question. The German and Austrian Genossenschaft sector and the Danish ydernummer system show that sectoral differentiation in ownership regulation is legally and politically workable.
Third, symmetric fiscal treatment. A fiscal or regulatory structure that works for one party but is sidesteppable by another via vehicle constructions is, in its operation, an implicit choice of the legislator. Closing arbitrage routes is not an enforcement task but a design task. Box 3 vehicles that hit private parties but not foreign private equity vehicles offer scope for symmetric correction within European law. That scope is unused because it requires sectoral testing and interdepartmental coordination. The German extended Grundstückskürzung discussion provides evidence that such adjustments are legally defensible within EU free movement of capital.
Fourth, a person-bound concession requirement in key segments of primary care. The Danish ydernummer model binds ownership of a GP practice to professional practice in that same clinic. That excludes passive investors without a formal ban and fits within EU free movement of capital because it rests on professional qualification, not nationality. For Dutch GP care, dental care and primary mental health care a comparable construction is designable. The current Wibz exemptions for precisely these three sub-sectors via Order in Council are the exact opposite of this direction. The choice to make those exemptions is an implicit ownership choice that should be made explicit.
Fifth, multi-year horizons in projections and reinforcement of the cooperative segment. The CPB and its departmental equivalents must be able to project policy on ten- and twenty-year outcomes with explicit market structure scenarios, not only on four-year horizons with model households. That requires a different type of projection model and a different type of projection team. It is not impossible; it is not set up. In parallel, the Dutch cooperative segment, strongly represented in the housing market by housing associations but weakly developed beyond that, deserves serious policy attention. The German Wohnungsgenossenschaft is no romantic relic but an operationally functioning damping mechanism.
None of these five interventions is a silver bullet. Together they form a design in which the cumulative outcome acquires an owner, and ownership of outcomes is precisely what the dissociated organisation has shed as a by-product. The agenda is therefore no longer policy, but architecture.
§ 08 · Position within the Reverberation series
This paper is the second in the Statecraft series Reverberation. Where paper 01, The illusion of full, mapped the reverberation on physical space and showed how scarcity in the Netherlands is not a physical state but an institutional description of peaks in time or place, this paper treats the reverberation on ownership structure. The next instalments work out other reverberation domains. Paper 03 treats the legally remedyless citizen and the individual rights position. Paper 04 treats cost-shifting between budget holders that lands selectively on those least able to organise counter-pressure. Paper 05 treats the disappearing social fabric as an institutional outcome.
Between these five forms run the two signature essays in papers 06 and 07, on the blindness to known futures and the tempo asymmetry between exogenous and institutional time respectively. The synthesis essay in paper 08, The congealed Zeitgeist, brings together the cumulative deposit at the level of society.
The corpus within which this series locates itself has four layers. The Handbook De Richting van de Beweging: Interim-Management in de Publieke Sector (manuscript in preparation, 2026) describes the practice layer, with chapter 9 covering transfer value and embedding as primary KPI of interventions in this type of fragmented architecture. Statecraft describes the institutional layer, of which this paper is one elaboration. Allemaal Ontheemd (All Unhomed) describes the human layer of lost shelter and biographical continuity. Decline and Revival describes the civilisational time layer, with contemporary Dutch stagnation as a recurrence of the pattern that E.J. Potgieter in 1841 named the Jan Salie mentality.
The question whether we are definitively giving away a sector to private equity is a wrongly framed question. It suggests we are making a conscious choice. We are making no choice. We are letting a sum of measures produce an outcome no one wanted and that almost no one can any longer reverse. The right question is what type of ownership the Netherlands wants in 2045, and whether we have the instruments to make that choice good.
For the first question a political register is required. For the second question an architectural register is required. Statecraft starts with the second, because without the second the first no longer works. The silence of the expropriation lies not in the process, but in the absence of the instrument with which it could have been stopped.
§ 09 · References and notes
Additional theoretical anchoring: M.H. Moore, Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government, Harvard University Press, 1995, for the strategic triangle; L. de Caluwé and H. Vermaak, Leren Veranderen: Een handboek voor de veranderkundige (Learning to Change), first edition Samsom, 1999; third fully revised edition, Vakmedianet, 2019, for the change colours; J. Huibers, De Richting van de Beweging: Interim-Management in de Publieke Sector, chapter 11 for the Aiki method and the ethical anchoring that distinguishes it from rhetorical tactic, chapter 9 for embedding as primary KPI, chapter 3 for the connection with the strategic triangle. For the placement in the broader corpus see J. Huibers, Statecraft in het Interregnum, April 2026, Statecraft Series No. 04. For the financialisation literature see B. Christophers, Rentier Capitalism, Verso, 2020, and The Asset Manager Society, Verso, 2023, and M.B. Aalbers, The Financialization of Housing: A Political Economy Approach, Routledge, 2016.
Colophon
About the author Jacob Huibers is interim manager, author and adviser in the Dutch public sector, with assignments in the social domain, the physical domain, regional cooperation arrangements and administrative recovery operations in municipalities of 50,000 to 250,000 inhabitants. He is the author of De Richting van de Beweging: Interim-Management in de Publieke Sector (manuscript in preparation, 2026) and of the corpus Limbic Literacy, Allemaal Ontheemd and Decline and Revival, all published under House of Viridian.
About the series Reverberation is the second Statecraft series from House of Viridian. It documents in five forms, two signatures and one synthesis the external symptomatology of the dissociated organisation as diagnosed in the first series. The series runs from April 2026 into 2027.
Version history Version 1.0 (April 2026): first publication. Version 2.0 (April 2026): empirical reinforcement of the international comparison with figures for Germany, France, Denmark and the United Kingdom; quantitative projection of housing market scenarios to 2045; elaboration of primary care sub-sectors with a table of PE shares; restructuring of the introduction without direct reference to one author as the trigger of the paper. Version 2.0 EN (April 2026): English translation.
Publisher HOUSE OF VIRIDIAN OÜ Tallinn · Lisbon
Contact jacob@statecraft.nl statecraft.nl
Series: STATECRAFT SERIES · DOORWERKING Nº 02 Version · date: 2.0 EN · April 2026
© 2026 House of Viridian OÜ
Footnotes
¹ Kadaster, Investeerders 4e kwartaal 2025: recordaantal woningen verkocht, January 2026. The total investor-owned dwelling stock declined between early 2024 and early 2026 from 768,000 to 752,000 dwellings, with the private segment falling from approximately 320,000 to 276,000 and the corporate segment growing from approximately 448,000 to 476,000. The Kadaster definition of “investor” covers landlords with three or more dwellings, so the actual number of small landlords is higher and the actual outflow from the private-family segment greater than these figures suggest.
² Dutch Healthcare Authority NZa, Informatiekaart Concentraties in de zorg 2025: in 99 of 214 healthcare concentrations approved in 2024 a private equity party was involved, approximately 46 percent. Hot spots in dental care, ophthalmological and hearing care, and movement care. JBR, Trends in zorgovernames, annual reports 2023 and 2024.
³ Wikipedia (based on press releases and annual reports) and BDO annual accounts EuroParcs 2023; Province of North Brabant, Vakantieparken: de cijfers op een rij, 2022; Vital Holiday Parks programmes Veluwe, Drenthe and Overijssel.
⁴ For the cumulative fiscal and regulatory steps on recreational property see the explanatory memoranda to the 2023 Box 3 reform, the VAT harmonisation in the 2024 Tax Plan and WOZ valuation development per municipal tax authority. The amount of more than €8,000 per year for a holiday home in Box 3 is an order of magnitude based on a WOZ valuation of approximately €350,000 with the deemed yield above 6 percent and the rate of 36 percent for 2024.
⁵ Idem [^1]; figures as of 1 January 2026.
⁶ SEO Economic Research, projections on the interaction of the Affordable Rent Act, the transfer tax increase and the Box 3 reform; Dutch central bank DNB, Statistical News January 2025 and Financial Stability Report 2025-1; Supreme Court 6 June 2024 (ECLI:NL:HR:2024:704) and the codification of the counter-evidence regime in the Bridging Box 3 Act in July 2025.
⁷ EW, Beleggers blijven de huizenmarkt verlaten, November 2025; in the four major cities first-time buyers paid on average €124,000 less for ex-rental dwellings than for comparable regular transactions.
⁸ Province of North Brabant, Vakantieparken: de cijfers op een rij, July 2022, recording approximately 4,700 holiday parks in the Netherlands; precise current figures by accommodation type are not centrally registered. The top-five assumption is based on published portfolio figures for EuroParcs, Roompot/Landal, Center Parcs, Dormio and Oostappen.
⁹ KKR acquisition of Roompot February 2020 for approximately €1.1 billion; PYMNTS and Business AM. Roompot-Landal merger 2023, ACM remedy with sale of 30 parks to Dormio Group 2024. EuroParcs annual accounts via BDO 2023 and 2024; Waterland Private Equity press releases November 2024 on full acquisition.
¹⁰ Kaatsheuvel ruling 2024 (NOS); approximately 800 similar cases reported by victim organisations. For the RECRON conditions see ANWB Legal Advice. For Peter Gillis sentencing see Wikipedia based on published rulings.
¹¹ NZa Informatiekaart Concentraties in de zorg 2025; Nivel, Organisatievormen in de Nederlandse huisartsenzorg: van solopraktijk naar keten, December 2023; Foundation for Pharmaceutical Statistics SFK, Aantal openbare apotheken neemt verder af, 2025; Skipr and M&A.nl, various reporting 2023-2026 on PE acquisitions in physiotherapy, maternity care, dental care and mental health care.
¹² Sound Operational Practices Care and Youth Services Bill (Wibz), submitted to the House of Representatives 29 January 2025; Council of State advice 26 June 2024; letter from Minister Agema 5 March 2025 on EU free movement of capital and the rejection of an outright PE ban.
¹³ De Groene Amsterdammer, Kinderen als markt: Private equity kaapt de kinderopvang, and sector reports from the Childcare Industry Association 2024-2025; Waterland (Partou), Antin (Babilou), Onex Corporation (sale of Partou to Waterland 2022).
¹⁴ Foundation for Pharmaceutical Statistics SFK, Aantal openbare apotheken neemt verder af, 2025; Apothekersnieuws, 32% minder zelfstandige openbare apotheken, 2025.
¹⁵ Bundesregierung, press release Bundeskabinett verlängert Mietpreisbremse, 2025; CMS Blog Berliner Mietendeckel ist verfassungswidrig on BVerfG 2 BvF 1/20, 25 March 2021; DIW Berlin, Die unmittelbaren Auswirkungen des Berliner Mietendeckels, Wochenbericht 8/2021; Haus und Grund Verband, Gescheitertes Experiment, 2021.
¹⁶ Statista Eigentümerstruktur der Mietwohnungen in Deutschland 2022 based on Census 2022 (reference date 15 May 2022); GdW Bundesverband Deutscher Wohnungs- und Immobilienunternehmen, Genossenschaften; IW Köln, Private Vermieter in Deutschland, 2025; Vonovia Geschäftsbericht 2024.
¹⁷ SAFER, Le droit de préemption, with figures for 2023 (393,800 prior notifications, 3,750 pre-emptions); Banque des Territoires/Cour des comptes, La Cour des comptes tacle les Safer, 2014 and 2020; Insee Statut et mode de faire-valoir des exploitations based on Recensement agricole 2020.
¹⁸ Lefebvre Dalloz, Loi Sempastous: une demande d’autorisation pour les cessions de parts de sociétés agricoles, 2023; Office Notarial de Bourgueil, La loi Sempastous en matière agricole; Réussir, Comment la loi Sempastous renforce le contrôle sur le foncier; Pleinchamp, Terre de Liens dénonce la financiarisation du foncier; Assemblée nationale Question no. 4982 on the accaparement of French agricultural land.
¹⁹ WHO Euro Health Observatory, New legislation for general practice in Denmark; Danske Regioner, Ny overenskomst for de praktiserende læger, June 2021; Medicinsk Tidsskrift, Region Nordjylland tager ydernummer fra praktiserende læge, May 2025; PMC PubMed Central, Integration of and visions for community pharmacy in primary health care in Denmark, for apoteksloven and the ownership restrictions of 1 plus 7 within 75 km; PrivSource on the acquisition of tandlægen.dk by Impilo.
²⁰ My Tribe Insurance, Who Owns GP Practices In The UK?; Islington Tribune and Hackney Citizen, reporting January 2024 on the potential sale of seven East London GP practices; Wikipedia AT Medics; Keep Our NHS Public, Operose GP contracts terminated in North Central London; The Lowdown, Private equity owner of NHS GP surgeries accused of contract breach; NHS for Sale.
²¹ CarehomeProfessional, Mega deal: Welltower acquires Barchester and HC-One assets in record £6.4 billion transaction, October 2025; UK Government, Welltower / multiple care homes merger inquiries, with initial enforcement orders February 2026; The PHA Group on PE in social care; Institute for Government, Performance Tracker 2025: Children’s social care; CMA Children’s Social Care Market Study, March 2022; Savills UK Build to Rent Market Update Q3 2025 and Get Living What is build to rent?.
²² Goodair, B. and Reeves, A., The effect of healthcare privatisation on the quality of care, The Lancet Public Health 2024; earlier study 2022; summarised among others in The Lowdown Study links private equity to poorer care and Keep Our NHS Public NHS Privatisation associated with worse quality healthcare.
²³ Author’s modelling based on Kadaster trend lines 2020-2026 and CBS housing stock projections 2026-2045. The three scenarios are LOW (linear continuation of the net balance of minus 16,000 dwellings per year in private hands, with natural floor around 50,000 dwellings), MID (S-curve in which the annual outflow gradually flattens to zero by 2045 as the least profitable dwellings are sold first), and HIGH (policy correction with transfer tax reduced to six percent, predictable Box 3 with cost deduction and restoration of the fiscal investment institution regime). The figures are orders of magnitude, not exact predictions, and intended as testable scenarios under unchanged or changed policy.