4. Who Owns the Land?

Talk to Your Local Council

Ideally your community group will have good connections to the council. If not, identifying a champion within the council can really help in getting the information about land ownership. The Planning Department will be the department with this information. Alternatively you can find out who owns the land by searching the land registry. It can take a while to foster these relationships, so ask around, use twitter and search the internet.

Who owns the land

Search the Land Registry

If you have identified an area of land that you would like to turn into a community garden or growing space, but you don’t know who owns the land, Land Registry can help you for a small fee (£3-6) to discover who a registered property or piece of land and check whether a property is registered.

Visit Land Registry to use the online tool. You can search with the full address, which is easier, or if you know where it its on a map, but don’t have the address (which can be the case for disused land), search on the map without the address.

Title registers showing ownership details and title plans showing property extent are £3 each (as of 12/11/2013). Title registers will give you the owners name and address, as well as if the land is freehold or leasehold.

Title plans will show the outline of the boundary for any given plot as a map.

land_reg_example

This information is useful to verify in order to start making enquiries into accessing the land with a private owner or the council.

Once you know who owns the land you could get in touch with the local council if they own it or contact the land owner to negotiate an arrangement to grow on the land if the land is unused.

In New York, the 596 Acres project, puts on events and activities to help residents to identify vacant spaces (or lots) near them. They have an international network you can learn from, and include resources including providing (obviously do translate to the context for your country/ region!)

In some cases land might not be registered, registering land was made compulsory in 1990 but its estimated up to 20% land in England and Wales is unregistered because no transactions affecting it have led to it being compulsory registered.

If you want to claim what seems to be unregistered land, you have to show you have made an effort to trace the legal owner, usually by looking through National Archive records, library records, County record offices and the Land Charges Department.

There is also the option to submit a Public Request to Order Disposal Request (PROD) to the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government Right under the Community Right to Reclaim Land, which seeks to bring under-used or unused land or property back into a beneficial use. The form and more information can be found on the www.gov.uk website.

More widely, if you wanted to find out more about how things work within the council, for example to see who your ward’s councillor is, or what the council spend its money on, the Openly Local project provides extensive information for all UK councils and gauges how ‘open’ they are with their data. Have a look at the information they have for Trafford Council.