Today the UK Government has announced plans to open up the Land Registry – which, if delivered, will finally reveal more about who owns land in England and Wales.
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Currently, it costs £7 to view a single land title register, and with 24m land titles registered, it would cost a member of the public £168m to find out who owns all of England and Wales. If the Government’s shift in policy towards the Land Registry is enacted, this should result in search fees dropping to zero – though it would require a Minister to table secondary legislation in Parliament to do so. Search fees comprise just 5.3% of the Land Registry’s income, with the vast majority of their revenues coming from conveyancing costs from people buying homes.

Maps of who owns land in England are even harder to access currently. Since 2017, the Land Registry has published large datasets listing the land and property owned by UK and overseas companies, but hasn’t released accompanying maps. In future, if the datasets were published with unique geographical identifiers for each address, called INSPIRE IDs, it would allow campaigners to map them – thereby revealing, for example, if developers are land banking.