Today is a big day for ending centuries of secrecy about who owns our land. The Government has launched a consultation proposing bold measures to open up the Land Registry, the official body that registers who owns land in England and Wales. But these proposals could still be scuppered by big landowners – unless the public (that’s you!) get involved by submitting views and evidence.
Who owns land is a question that goes all the way back to the Domesday Book, and has always been entwined with wealth and power. The last time that the Westminster government gave the public a glimpse of who owns the land beneath our feet was 150 years ago, with the Victorian Return of Owners of Land – a ‘new Domesday’ that revealed staggering inequality in who owned land, and was swiftly buried. For over ten years, I’ve tried to uncover who owns England: writing a book, working with many other campaigners and data-geeks, and building on the work of inspirational investigators like Marion Shoard, Kevin Cahill and (in Scotland) Andy Wightman.
I’m excited to say that the Westminster government now seems as committed to uncovering these secrets as I am. Ministers started down this path last year, with Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook setting out his clear intent to see land ownership information made public and free. Then this spring, revealing who owns England became government policy, with DEFRA’s Land Use Framework pledging to “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.”
Today sees the launch of a government consultation setting out detailed proposals to open up land ownership data, and inviting the public to respond. Below, I go through what’s being proposed, say what I think is most important, and suggest how you can help submit supportive evidence.
And if you care about uncovering who owns our land – you must respond. Because you can be sure that there will be some big landowners and their lobbyists who won’t want this information made public. The Land Registry has also dragged its feet, seemingly resisting ministerial pressure to become more transparent. Power in England and Wales has always been bound up with the ownership of land – and secrecy has always helped protect that power. So it’s up to us peasants to stage the most gentle of revolts – by submitting our views to this public consultation. I urge you, please, to get involved.
What the consultation says – and how you can respond
The consultation is being run jointly by HM Land Registry, MHCLG and DEFRA. The full consultation document can be found here. You can respond online here, or by sending your response by email to futureaccessconsultation@landregistry.gov.uk. You have 8 weeks from today – until 22nd December 2026 – to respond.
Questions 1 to 5 are ‘about you’.
Questions 6 to 10 are, in my view, the most important questions to respond to. They relate to the government’s central proposal: to create a “new dataset of owners of significant land holdings”.
Land in England and Wales is divided up into ‘land parcels’. There are around 24 million land parcels whose owners are registered with the Land Registry. Most of these land parcels are very, very small: some 22.3 million land parcels are smaller than half a hectare (roughly one acre). These comprise the overwhelming majority of all the homes and gardens that the public own and live in. Yet their total combined area is tiny: about 5.5% of all the registered land in England and Wales. Homeowners are not significant landowners. I’ve never had any interest in opening up data on what Joe Bloggs down the road owns, and nor does the government.
However, the vast majority of land in England and Wales is owned by a much smaller number of people, whose land is held in much larger land parcels. These range from large fields to huge swathes of moorland, vast woods and great expanses of downland. There are about 1.7 million land parcels over half a hectare in size, and yet by area these cover about 95% of the registered land in England and Wales.
The trouble is, if you want to find out who owns a single land parcel currently costs £7 in Land Registry fees – so to uncover who owns 95% of England and Wales would cost you around £11.9 million. Not many people can afford to do that!
The government is therefore proposing to release a free, public dataset of the owners of these significant land holdings, revealing who owns up to 95% of the registered land of England and Wales. This is huge, and would effectively answer the question I’ve been posing for a decade – who owns England? – and also answer what a sister project, Who owns Cymru?, has been asking in Wales.
Releasing a free, public dataset of significant landholdings would follow a tried-and-tested model first established in 2017 when the Land Registry started releasing public datasets of land and property owned by UK companies and Overseas companies (following investigations by Christian Eriksson and Anna Powell-Smith at Private Eye). The new dataset would extend coverage to a very small number of landowners who own the largest land parcels – like the vast estates of the dukes, earls and billionaires who I’ve investigated on this blog for many years.
It’s important to emphasise that all of this information is already held on a public register – the Land Registry – but is rendered far less useful by being behind a paywall. Publishing a free, public dataset essentially removes the paywall for this small subset of the largest land parcels.
The Government takes the privacy of homeowners seriously – as do I – so they are proposing screening out the vast majority of residential properties from this dataset by using an area threshold. They present a range of options for what this area threshold could be, from 0.5 hectares to 10 hectares. I think that an area threshold of 0.5 hectares is proportionate and sensible: as explained above, it would screen out over 22 million land parcels from being released, thereby excluding the overwhelming majority of residential properties, but allow the public to understand who owns around 95% of the registered land of England and Wales.
I’d suggest answering questions 6 to 11 along these lines; please use your own words and add your own examples as much as possible:
Q6: To what extent do you support the proposal for HMLR to publish a new open dataset of the owners of significant land holdings? Please explain your answer.
Strongly support. There is an overwhelming public interest in knowing who owns the vast majority of land in England and Wales. The Land Registry’s existing open datasets for UK and Overseas owners of land and property are very popular. Recent years have seen numerous high-profile investigations into major landowners generating considerable public interest (e.g. Channel 4 Dispatches investigation into the Duchy of Cornwall, Tax Policy Associates’ investigation into offshore owners, Guardian investigation into large estates exempt from inheritance tax). Currently, public access to this information is limited by prohibitively expensive Land Registry fees. Creating a free, public dataset of the owners of significant land holdings would unlock this information whilst safeguarding the privacy of homeowners. There would be virtually no impact on Land Registry revenues, as search fees comprise only a fraction of HMLR income and this dataset would be only a small subset of all land parcels.
Q7. What benefits might come from publishing a new public dataset of owners of significant land holdings on the register? Please give examples of how you or others could use this data.
My note: This is where it’s really useful if you can add your own examples – draw on your personal experience; think how you could use this data, either personally or with friends, neighbours and groups that you are part of:
There are huge benefits that would come from publishing a new free, public dataset of the owners of significant landholdings. For example:
- Local authorities and community housing groups could use this dataset to help identify suitable land for affordable social housing and ease the process of land assembly, which is often made more difficult by not knowing the owners of multiple contiguous land parcels;
- Community groups seeking to exercise the recently-introduced Community Right to Buy could use this new dataset to understand who owns land in their area, put in nominations for Assets of Community Value, and negotiate buyouts with owners;
- Swimming and kayaking groups could use this dataset to identify the owners of stretches of river banks and seek to negotiate permissive access with landowners, whilst hiking groups could use this data to identify the owners of land where public rights of way have been blocked or require upkeep, and help resolve these obstacles;
- Farmers and landowners could themselves make use of this dataset to identify who owns land in their area and more easily collaborate on creating wildlife corridors, put together Landscape Recovery bids, or apply for private funding to restore nature.
Q8. What risks might come from publishing this data? How could these be mitigated?
I take personal privacy seriously and welcome this consultation’s proposals for how the government will mitigate risks to this. I think that the proposal to screen out virtually all residential properties from this dataset by using an area threshold for land parcels is a sensible and proportionate way to mitigate such risks.
9. What minimum area threshold would be the most appropriate to adopt to balance the usefulness of the data against privacy and data protection impacts? To help get a sense of scale, a football pitch is 0.7 hectares. Please explain your answer.
0.5 hectares. As the consultation document sets out, only 6.5% of all land titles registered are above this threshold, yet cover almost 95% of the area of all registered land. There is an overwhelming public interest in unlocking this information. Meanwhile, by screening out all land parcels below 0.5 hectares – over 22 million titles out of a total of around 24m registered land titles – this threshold excludes the vast majority of residential properties. I consider this to be a sensible and proportionate way to balance the utility of this data with potential privacy impacts.
10. Should titles containing a single residential address be subject to a higher minimum threshold than other titles? If yes, what should that higher threshold be? Please explain your answer.
No, the same threshold should apply. Table 1 in the consultation document shows that only 1.6% of titles containing a single home would fall above the 0.5ha threshold; in other words, 98.4% of titles containing a single home would be screened out from this dataset. (Some of these homes would also be owned by landlords rather than their occupiers, so would be registered in the name of the landlord; others would be second homes.) I consider this to be a reasonable and proportionate way to balance the utility of this data with potential privacy impacts. Raising the threshold reduces the utility of the data by excluding more land parcels, even though these land parcels are large and comprise a small subset of all land parcels.
I would leave Q11 blank, as I don’t think there are credible alternatives that could achieve these same policy objectives.
Questions 12 to 15 relate to giving other public sector bodies (like central government and councils) free access to Land Registry data. It’s astonishing – and frankly bananas – that other parts of government currently have to pay the Land Registry to see this data! I strongly support these proposals. However, if you don’t work for a government body, I’d suggest skipping these questions – other public sector organisations will hopefully respond positively to them!
Questions 16 to 20 relate to an excellent proposal to give the public cost-free access to other information held on land title registers that are owned by companies, and / or significant land holdings. Land title registers don’t just reveal who owns a piece of land – they also give details of leases, restrictive covenants, easements and other information about a land parcel. These can be very useful to anyone investigating a land holding, such as if you’re looking into a planning proposal and want to see whether there are covenants restricting how the land can be developed. Currently, you can only get this information by paying £7 for every land title register. This proposal would make it free to access land title registers that are (a) owned by UK or overseas companies (regardless of the size of land parcel), and (b) large land parcels that fall into the ‘significant land holdings’ dataset proposed earlier.
I would suggest answering strongly support to questions 16 and 17, and add examples of any benefits you would see coming from making this data cost-free.
Questions 21 to 24 relate to a proposal to ease data access for some users who are operating in the public interest, such as researchers and regulators. This is a very welcome proposal that builds on and goes further than what has been proposed above, but it would apply only to those who applied for and were granted special access. If you are an academic, investigative journalist or regulator, I would urge you to respond positively to these questions, but otherwise I would suggest skipping these.
Questions 25 to 29 relate to completing the Land Register. Despite the Land Registry having existed since 1862, it still hasn’t actually completed its one job of registering who owns all the land in England and Wales. Around 10% of the land across these two nations remains ‘unregistered’ – that is, it’s still owned by someone, but we don’t know who, because they haven’t registered it officially. Often, this is because the land has been owned in the same family for centuries and hasn’t come onto the market, which would have led to it being registered.
To be fair, the Land Registry has been trying its best in recent years to speed up registration, but lacks the tools to finish the job. So the government is here proposing an additional ‘legal trigger’ to coax hidden landowners into registering their land. It proposes that if you receive public farm subsidies, you should register your land. This is eminently reasonable: landowners and farmers are receiving over £2bn in taxpayer-funded farm payments each year – the least they can do is to register the land they own. Introducing a legal obligation to do this would effectively complete the register – at long last, after a mere century and a half of trying.
I would suggest answering Strongly support to questions 25 and 26, and giving some examples of benefits of completing the Land Register in this way in answer to question 27.
The remaining questions, 30 to 35, relate to safeguards on disclosing data.
I would suggest saying in answer to Q30:
Protecting privacy and reducing fraud risk are important and it is right for the government to consult on this. I support safeguards in limited circumstances where publication could create a significant risk of harm to vulnerable individuals. This could be akin to existing provisions for limiting disclosure of personal information for exposed individuals on Companies House, and apply similar evidence thresholds. It is important that this does not become a general opt-out, so that the openness and reliability of the register is preserved. It is also important to acknowledge that the design proposed for the public dataset of significant land holdings already mitigates against negative impacts on privacy, by screening out the vast majority of residential properties (see Table 1 and answers to questions 8-10 above).
Huge thanks to everyone who takes the time to send in your evidence and views to this consultation – it’s hugely helpful and takes us another step closer to finally uncovering who owns England!
