Who Owns England?. Guy Shrubsole
of people to make appointments to see the heirloom at Soames’s estate in Sussex. Eventually, the MP decided to simply pay the tax.
A similar resource exists where landowners have deposited estate maps with the local council to guard against future rights-of-way claims, using provisions in the Highways Act 1980 Section 31(6), as described in the previous chapter. Thousands of these maps lie buried on council websites; still more are likely gathering dust in council office filing cabinets. A few local authorities have had the good sense to fully digitise the maps and make the data available publicly, though many have not.
Many landowners are also the recipients of millions of pounds in taxpayer subsidies, in the form of various payment schemes for farming, tree-planting and environmental stewardship. These subsidies derive from the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), though the UK government shapes how they’re distributed. The data on farm subsidies can provide important clues as to the ultimate owner of a piece of farmland. Once again, however, this information hasn’t always been public. For years, ministers resisted its release, pressured by landowners’ lobby groups, who feared embarrassing stories would emerge about how much taxpayers’ money their members were receiving. But campaigners at the group FarmSubsidy.org persisted, and eventually the EU ruled that farm payments data had to become transparent. Some of the largest recipients of farm subsidies in recent years have turned out to be billionaire inventor-turned-landowner James Dyson, a Saudi prince who owns large horse-racing studs, and the Queen, for her private estate at Sandringham.
The data on overall farm subsidies now published by the government doesn’t come with maps. That makes it harder to use for locating landowners’ estates. But farm subsidies under the CAP regime come under two ‘pillars’. Pillar 1 payments are essentially a subsidy for owning land, with few other strings attached; they make up two-thirds of the money handed out annually. Pillar 2 payments, on the other hand, are allocated for environmental stewardship. Natural England, the government body that was until recently responsible for handing out Pillar 2 payments, publishes maps of where the schemes operate, together with the recipients. These maps can be very helpful in pinning down who owns the land – although in many cases the recipients are tenant farmers, rather than the ultimate landowners.
Similar maps still exist for a now-defunct payment scheme for woodland management administered by the Forestry Commission, called the English Woodland Grants Scheme. Since estates often maintain control of the forests and hedgerows on their estates even where they have leased the fields to tenant farmers, these maps can prove a surer guide to who really owns the area. With Brexit meaning that a huge shake-up of the UK’s farm subsidy system is now under way, it’s vital that we make future payments to landowners more transparent, rather than going backwards to the era of secret subsidies.
Perhaps the biggest underlying change of the past fifteen years that’s made exploring land ownership easier is the development of digital technologies. Until the 1990s, cartography was mostly still done on paper. Since then, the growth of GIS (Geographic Information System) mapping tools has transformed how maps can be made and shared. An EU directive called INSPIRE has forced the Land Registry and Ordnance Survey to publish digital maps showing the outlines of all land parcels in England and Wales – but not who owns them, and with licensing restrictions in place on reproducing the maps. Machine-readable datasets and open-source software have made it easier to analyse complex datasets detailing who owns land, while modern web mapping allows us to create powerful online maps.
The Open Data movement has also sought to shift culture, both within government and wider civil society, so that previously closed data is made open and easily accessible. As Internet pioneer Stewart Brand put it: ‘Information wants to be free.’
All these developments and work-arounds have increased our chances of finding out who owns England. But what of the present state of the Land Registry, set up over 150 years ago now, with the express purpose of gathering such information?
Here, the picture is not so rosy. The Land Registry remains incomplete: over 83 per cent of land in England and Wales has now been registered, but the ‘missing’ 17 per cent comprises millions of acres of land whose owner is unknown. That’s because the rules around registration remain too weak: land is mainly only registered when it changes hands on the open market, and there are of course many old estates which have remained in the hands of the same families for centuries. Worse, the information it does have remains enclosed behind a paywall. Unlike Companies House, the Land Registry still charges for access to most of its data. You can buy the details of a land title for £3 – but with 24 million land titles in its records, buying the answer to who owns all of England and Wales (or at least 83 per cent of it) would set you back a cool £72 million.
The Land Registry has also had to survive the recent near-death experience of attempted privatisation. In 2014, the then Chancellor George Osborne announced he was consulting on plans to sell off the Land Registry, as part of his austerity drive to cut public spending and monetise state assets. Coincidentally or not, Osborne had become a close personal friend of the Earl of Derby, descendant of the 15th Earl – the scourge of Victorian land reformers, whose idea for a Return of Owners of Land to quash the radicals had spectacularly backfired. It had been reported that Osborne had moved into a house on Lord Derby’s Crag Hall country estate in the Peak District, and was a guest at festivals and falconry events in the grounds.
Privatisation posed a mortal threat to ever finding out who owns England. Had the Land Registry been bought up by a private investor, its functions would have been directed entirely to extracting profits from its data, and all hope of opening it up freely to the public would have been lost. Fortunately, a coalition of groups, including the Public and Commercial Services trade union (PCS), 38 Degrees and the MP David Lammy, sparked a public outcry and forced the government into dropping its plans.
In the aftermath of the privatisation attempt, the Land Registry has finally begun to open up. I met with its CEO, Graham Farrant, a number of times in 2016, alongside other campaigners for housing charities and environmental groups. For some years, an alliance of data-geeks and senior civil servants, from the Open Data Institute to officials working on housing policy, had been working behind the scenes to crack open the Registry. Catharine Banks from homelessness charity Shelter argued that to do so would ‘be a massive step forward towards building the homes the country so desperately needs’.
To everyone’s surprise, Farrant agreed. He revealed that when he had worked previously in local government, he’d been appalled at the poor state of councils’ knowledge about even their own landholdings, and how many cash-strapped local authorities couldn’t afford access to the Land Registry’s data. With the threat of privatisation buried, he now wanted to chart a fresh course for the Land Registry; one that would see it both completed and opened up.
True to Farrant’s word, the 2017 Housing White Paper heralded a breakthrough for uncovering land ownership. It announced that the Land Registry would aim to finally complete its register by 2030; and that it would release free of charge its datasets showing the land owned by UK and overseas companies and corporate bodies – over three million land titles, covering a third of the land area of England and Wales. A source inside Number 10 has hinted that the impetus for this came from Theresa May herself. The Conservative Party manifesto for the snap general election that summer went further, announcing a commitment to merging the Land Registry, Ordnance Survey and Valuation Office to create ‘the largest repository of open land data in the world’. Labour’s manifesto promised for the first time to consider a land value tax, showing that the resurgence of interest in land spanned the political spectrum.
There is still a long way to go. Despite the government’s manifesto commitment, Ordnance Survey’s hold over mapping licences makes it very hard to properly map land ownership in England. To Anna Powell-Smith, my collaborator on whoownsengland.org, OS remains ‘the