HM Land Registry has opened a consultation on making more land-ownership information available without charge in England and Wales, while considering new protections for people whose safety or privacy could be put at risk. The proposals, published on 27 October, are open for responses until 22 December 2026.
The package would create a dataset covering owners of significant land holdings and widen access to information held on title registers. It is a consultation, not an announcement that these services have become free. Final arrangements, safeguards and any necessary changes to legislation would follow further decisions.
HMLR published the access consultation jointly with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. A related consultation examines simplifying registration fees. The information-access proposals should not be read as an immediate change to charges for property transactions.
The consultation describes the current charge for online inspection of a title document as £7. That is a fee for consulting an individual record, not a subscription to an ownership database. HMLR says its information charges help fund services and data digitisation, so wider free access would need to be balanced against its funding model.
A wider dataset, but not a list of every homeowner
The proposed ownership dataset would focus on substantial freehold holdings, with the intention of excluding almost all home ownership. HMLR is considering an area threshold for each title, potentially combined with address data to filter out residential properties. No final threshold has been selected.
That distinction matters because the registry says it does not have a unique identifier for every landowner. It therefore cannot set the proposed threshold by adding together all properties belonging to one person. The consultation instead examines the size of individual titles and asks whether those containing a single residential address should face a higher threshold.
HMLR envisages a format similar to its existing company-ownership datasets, potentially available free under licence, updated monthly and requiring a login to download. It says wider coverage could help people researching development sites or community land projects. These are intended uses of the proposal, not guaranteed outcomes.
Free inspection would not mean free legal copies
Public-sector organisations would be offered controlled, cost-free access to information on all title registers, including residential properties. They would still have to demonstrate that the use was lawful and connected to their public functions. The proposal does not offer unrestricted access to everyone employed in the public sector.
For the wider public, free access would cover title information linked to properties in the existing UK and overseas company datasets and the proposed significant-holdings dataset. HMLR draws a distinction between reading a register for information and obtaining an Official Copy for a legal transaction. Fees for those formal copies would not be removed by these access proposals.
Researchers and other applicants with a specific public-interest purpose could also seek special access, potentially including limited access to residential records. Applications would be assessed individually rather than creating an automatic entitlement. The proposed framework would address secure storage, authentication and review, with controls intended to prevent misuse or speculative bulk access.
Privacy safeguards and unregistered land
The consultation acknowledges that making information easier to find and combine can create risks even when it is already available for a fee. HMLR proposes proportionate usage limits and says automated extraction and republication of title-register data would not be permitted under its normal terms. A data-protection impact assessment would help shape the final safeguards.
It is separately asking whether access should be restricted in limited cases where there is evidence of serious harm, including personal-safety or national-security risks. Suppressing access to certain titles would require legislative change. Safeguards for other publications could instead involve authentication, monitoring or limits on bulk access. Neither approach has been adopted through this consultation.
Another proposal explores accelerating registration of land that remains outside the register, potentially by linking eligibility for public land-use payments to registration. HMLR says around 10% of land in England and Wales remains unregistered. It also says any model should avoid penalising tenant farmers because their landlord has not registered land or because registration is delayed.
For context, Dalimss News has separately covered England's nature-recovery payment principles and the separate guide to reporting contractual control over land. Those are distinct policy developments, not provisions of this consultation. HMLR will publish the government's response on its website after considering submissions.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
