This post is by Guy Shrubsole.

Yesterday, in their ambitious new Land Use Framework for England, the Government announced that they would be opening up the Land Registry. I’ve been campaigning for this for 10 years – and everyone who’s read or contributed to this blog, crunched data, geeked out with GIS maps, written to MPs and Ministers, or has worked inside government on these proposals, shares in this victory.

It’s far from over yet: the Government will have to set out more details of their plans and their impact assessment. There will almost certainly be further obstacles and battles to fight. We may yet need to mobilise to counter the likely opposition from landed interests. If that situation arises I’ll publish briefings and ways you can take action here on this blog.

For now, a moment of celebration and reflection. What follows is my commentary on some of the many excellent measures in the new Land Use Framework – not least what it says about revealing who owns land.

“Buy land, they’re not making it anymore.” Mark Twain’s famous quip encapsulates the finite nature of land, the most precious resource of any nation-state. How we use land – and who owns it – influences everything from the food we grow and whether our housing is affordable, to how resilient we are to climate shocks and ecological crises. Living on an island like Britain, the fixed supply of land seems obvious.

Yet successive governments have blithely ignored the matter. “What is needed is a comprehensive national plan of balanced land use,” declared the eminent geographer Sir Laurence Dudley Stamp at the close of the Second World War. Eighty years on, ministers have finally unveiled one.

The new Land Use Framework for England is a bold attempt to arbitrate between the many competing demands on land. Whilst it highlights win-wins – nature-friendly farming methods, for instance, which produce both food and wildlife – it also dares to confront trade-offs. The Framework’s calculation that a tenth of our least-productive farmland needs to be reprioritised for nature has inevitably led to scaremongering headlines in the right-wing press. But it is entirely correct.

Industrialised agriculture and overgrazing by sheep have wrecked England’s uplands, trashing natural carbon stores like peat bogs and leaving nature in our national parks hanging by a thread. We now urgently need to put it back. As the UK’s recent national security assessment of biodiversity loss found, ecosystem collapse poses a serious threat to our economy, food supply and ability to weather climate disasters. There’s no point trying to squeeze a few calories from our least-productive land if it leads to fertile fields downstream being flooded. The Framework finds that there is enough land to restore nature and build new housing without reducing domestic food production.

What’s more, upland farming is entirely dependent on taxpayer subsidies to continue. So let’s pay farmers in the uplands to restore nature, not destroy it – a change being championed by pioneering groups of farm tenants, like the Central Dartmoor Landscape Recovery project.

After months of rhetoric from Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves blaming newts and bats for supposedly blocking growth, it’s good to see the Land Use Framework recognises nature restoration is a priority, underpinning all our other uses of land. Senior civil servants in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs now view their ministry as a ‘department of land’, and regard implementing the Land Use Framework as their overriding mission. Farming Minister Angela Eagle is rumoured to be keenly interested in the inequality of land ownership, empowering small nature-friendly farmers whilst holding the largest estates to account.

Any plan for how we use land for the common good has to contend with vested interests. England is a country where landed power has ruled the roost for centuries: half the land is owned by less than 1% of the population, many of them aristocratic families who trace their lineage back to the Norman Conquest. Successive Tory prime ministers went grouse shooting with dukes and barons on their landed estates, and landowner lobbyists like the Country Land and Business Association (CLA) are used to calling the shots in Whitehall. But that may be about to change.

The Land Use Framework places great emphasis on large landowners bearing the most responsibility for fixing the nature crisis. For decades, the CLA and National Farmers’ Union have claimed their members are ‘custodians of the countryside’, whose careful stewardship of the land needs only generous subsidies, not state regulation or public scrutiny. The government is no longer accepting such claims uncritically. Last year, ministers convened the National Estate for Nature group, whose members own 10% of England – from the Forestry Commission to the privately-owned Clinton Devon Estate – and told them to publish plans for how they will restore nature on their landholdings by this April. Now, the government has signalled it may require a broader tranche of the nation’s largest landowners to report publicly on what they’re doing to adapt to climate impacts and, potentially, how they’re managing land for nature more broadly.

Successive governments have allowed huge private landowners to get away with murder – particularly when it comes to bloodsports. Vast swathes of England’s moorlands are devoted to driven grouse shooting, a Victorian invention that has seen aristocrats set the nation’s most important natural carbon store ablaze for the sole purpose of maximising the number of gamebirds they can shoot. Communities living downwind of grouse moors have had to suffer the choking smoke, like Sheffield did in 2023 when the Duke of Rutland set Moscar Moor alight. This anachronistic sport, which even the Spectator calls “screamingly elitist”, is underpinned by the illegal persecution of birds of prey on an industrial scale.

Lowland shooting estates, meanwhile, release a staggering 50 million invasive pheasants into the British countryside annually, with massive ecological ramifications for other species. Last year, the Labour government finally banned moorland burning in most circumstances, and yesterday it announced it will explore regulating grouse and pheasant shoots through a new licensing regime. Though I’d have preferred an outright ban on grouse shooting, licensing is a big step forwards, ending assumptions that the industry can self-regulate.

Perhaps the boldest part of the Land Use Framework, however, is its commitment to open up the Land Registry. At a stroke, this measure would bring to an end a thousand years of secrecy shrouding who owns England: a modern Domesday survey, free to the public to view. At present, such information lies behind the Land Registry’s prohibitively expensive paywall: at £7 per land title and with 24 million land titles registered, you’d have to shell out £168m to find out who owns our country. Making such information more readily available is common practice in Sweden, New Zealand and various US states. It would help farmers and landowners themselves, making it easier to collaborate and apply for Landscape Recovery funding. And it would also make it easier for the public to hold major landowners to account for whether they are being good stewards of nature – empowering groups like Wild Card, who campaign for big landholders like the Church of England and Duchy of Cornwall to rewild their estates.

Here is what the Land Use Framework says specifically about opening up the Land Registry (p.50):

“To improve transparency and accuracy of land ownership data, we will… Work with HM Land Registry this year to provide access to free, spatial land ownership data for larger properties covering the vast majority of England and Wales, excluding almost all homeowners.”

Let’s pick this apart: it’s a clear commitment to provide data this year; the data will be free; it will be spatial, in other words it’ll be ownership data linked to maps; it will exclude homeowners, which is of course entirely reasonable to safeguard privacy; but it will see the release of ownership data for larger properties covering the vast majority of England & Wales.

The Government will have to set out their proposals in more detail, and state clearly in a footnote that these proposals will be “Subject to impact assessment, including the rights and freedoms of citizens, commercial sensitivities or matters of national security”. That is only right and proper. I look forward to seeing the more detailed proposals. But I can envisage the Government taking an approach similar to what they have done already for releasing land ownership data for UK-registered and overseas companies – the publication of a free, searchable dataset – albeit one that would need to be linked to INSPIRE Index polygon IDs to allow the data to be mapped. To open up information on larger properties whilst excluding homeowners, the Government could perhaps set an area threshold for the data that gets released. Residential properties and gardens comprise tiny land parcels: these could be excluded from free release and remain subject to the existing Land Registry paywall. Data on the ownership of larger land parcels, however, should be made free and public. Given that homes and gardens take up only around 5% of England (source: UK Ecosystem Assessment 2011), we would still get to see who owns the vast majority of land in the country.

Land is finally back on the political agenda in England. The Land Use Framework opens a window onto a different future for nature in this country – one where our uplands cease to be overgrazed and bereft of trees, where aristocratic estates can no longer persecute wildlife with impunity, and where farmers are paid to restore nature, not destroy it. Such a sensible vision will doubtless be opposed by the right-wing press, shooting interests, and the likes of Nigel Farage, whose reactionary plans for the countryside involve reinstating fox hunting, unleashing fracking and ripping up nature protections. That’s all the more reason for progressive politicians to embrace the politics of land reform – and make England a greener, fairer, more pleasant land.