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Government announces plan to open up Land Registry (whoownsengland.org)

submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

8 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.
[…]
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.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 hours ago

Interesting why this person is so interested about if developers are land banking? Yes of course they are. that's how it works.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Weird that we are only now just starting to be easily able to find out who owns our land. Might make an interesting layer on the [email protected].

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

owner:wikidata=* does exist, though I don't think anyone tends to map land ownership other than occasional estates.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Honestly any non military data collected by the gov. Should be open by default.

Even military should be required to proove the need for secretary every so often.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

There's a lot more than just military data that needs a caveat here. Health records, criminal records, and a number of other categories of data that the government holds to provide public services need restrictions on access.

Even land ownership being public has downsides. Maybe I don't want my (hypothetical) abusive ex to be able to find out where I live after I sold up and moved specifically to get away from them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Health yeah, or more to the point it should have ident left data removed.

But the actual group data should very much be open. And that likely should be applied to most things.

As for criminal records. That is already open as most court cases are public.

Closing it would be the first step in hiding prejudicial actions.so lets not change that.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago

Good.

[–] GrumpyDuckling 1 points 2 days ago

I can go online, look at an interactive map and see all the parcels, who owns them, how much they paid, the assessed value, how much they've paid in taxes over the years, if it's owner occupied, and more and it's free. This is a no brainer so you can see if anyone is playing games with property taxes or anything else.