Government to lift paywall from large parts of the Land Registry | Environment

Finding out who owns land in England will become much simpler as a paywall is removed from much of the land register, the government is to announce.

A small number of landowners control the majority of land, but it is difficult to determine who owns what, even for ministries, due to the way the land registry works. Freeing up access will make it easier to determine ownership of key areas, such as river catchments, grouse moors and peatlands.

The change is part of a major reform in the way English land is managed. The government’s long-awaited land use framework – which will be unveiled by Emma Reynolds, the Environment Secretary, on Wednesday afternoon – marks the first time the government has attempted to assess how best to use agricultural land, nature reserves and areas of degraded land to help balance competing needs for land for food production, housing, energy and industry.

For the first time, ministers will set out how much land is needed to reach the UK’s net zero emissions target through growing forests and restoring peatlands as ‘carbon sinks’ and through energy production from solar and wind farms. According to the government’s new estimate, only around 1% of land will be needed for renewable energy production, and much of the land needed will still be used for food production, for example by grazing livestock around wind farms and under solar panels.

The new mapping will also make it easier to assess how restoring peatlands in mountain areas could reduce river flooding, which is expected to worsen as the climate crisis deepens.

Reynolds said: “It is more important than ever that we make the right decisions about our limited land, especially in the face of the dual threats of the climate and nature crises. The land use framework will integrate climate resilience and nature-based solutions into our decision-making to ensure we have secure homes for the future.”

Guy Shrubsole, author of Who Owns England?, said: “The bold promise to open the land register would finally end a thousand years of secrecy surrounding who owns England and allow greater scrutiny of what goes on behind the barbed wire that crisscrosses the countryside. Given that 1% of the population owns half of England, it is entirely reasonable that the biggest landowners should be held responsible for restoring nature to these islands devastated. The new land use framework is an ambitious step towards making England a greener, fairer and more liveable country.

However, the government does not go so far as to dictate how land should be used in any area. There will be no attempt to force landowners to relinquish their control, nor any national plan to force the conversion of land into carbon sinks. The framework will be used to “disincentivize” builders from building homes in flood plains, after concerns over the number of new homes at risk of flooding as the climate crisis worsens.

The target that everyone should be within 15 minutes of a green space or water point will also become easier to achieve under the new framework, as councils will have tools to identify where green space is lacking so they can invest accordingly. In England, around one in five people do not currently have such access, but the situation is worse among the most deprived communities.

Farmers fear that food production will be degraded in favor of nature protection or the use of land as a carbon sink, for example through the growth of forests. But activists believe that there is no contradiction between nature protection and agriculture.

“Wildlife in the UK is in crisis, so we need to give it space to recover,” said Brendan Costelloe, policy director at the Soil Association. “But for land that will remain agricultural land, it is essential that the government recognizes that food production must not stop to create space for nature. We can and must ensure that land that produces food does so in a nature-friendly way.”

The Soil Association wants more support for farmers to grow peas and beans, which naturally fix nitrogen in the soil, and for more trees to be planted for fodder, food and timber, as well as a move away from crops that require a high degree of soil disturbance on slopes and floodplains.