The problem
You can find out, for free, which companies own land in England and Wales. You can also download, for free, 8,220,990 land parcel boundaries under an open licence. What you cannot do is connect the two.
The ownership data is keyed on title numbers. The free boundaries are keyed on a different spatial identifier. The crosswalk between them is a paid product. Free data on both sides, paywall exactly in the middle.
The government has committed to changing this. The Land Use Framework, published March 2026, states it will work with the registry "this year" to provide "free, spatial land ownership data for larger properties covering the vast majority of England and Wales, excluding almost all homeowners."
Two things make that commitment worth watching rather than waiting on. No size threshold is defined. And the registry’s own business plan does not mention the commitment at all — it commits instead to adding identifiers to more free datasets and to "initial design work" on more clearly identifying the parties recorded on the register.
That last phrase is the entity spine problem, stated by the registry itself, and still at design stage. Roughly 10% of land in England remains unregistered despite compulsory registration since 1990.
And the register meant to reveal who owns property through offshore structures is barely enforced. Of roughly £23.5m in penalties ever issued for failing to register, £1.18m has been collected — about 5%. In one recent financial year the registrar levied no penalties at all; in the next it levied one, worth £70,000, while reversing nineteen. Civil sanction revenue has been negative for two consecutive years — more written off than levied.
Most telling of all: a written parliamentary answer confirms that no penalty has ever been issued for beneficial ownership non-compliance. Every one of the 445 penalties was for outright failure to register. Nothing for false, evasive or absent ownership statements — and independent analysis finds entities claiming to have no beneficial owner rose from 9% to 19%, with 181 of 201 registered professional trustees never having disclosed an individual owner at all.
The system
Freehold builds the resolution layer between land, boundaries and organisations — the join that free data on both sides currently cannot make.
On the spatial side it resolves parcels to properties and to the identifiers that other datasets use, so land can be joined to development, flood risk, contributions and everything else in the platform.
On the organisational side it resolves the parties named on ownership records to canonical organisations, connecting land to the corporate graph. That is what turns a list of owners into an answer to who actually controls what.
And it is positioned for the commitment landing. If free spatial ownership data is published during 2026, whoever already has a working resolution layer has a large head start. If it slips, the resolution layer is what makes the existing free data usable in the meantime — which is the stronger position either way.
Data foundation
Every dataset below is open, or its access constraint is stated
| Dataset | Publisher | What it provides |
|---|---|---|
| Title boundaries | HM Land Registry via MHCLG | 8,220,990 polygons under an open licence, refreshed regularly. Keyed on a spatial identifier, not a title number. |
| UK companies that own property | HM Land Registry | Free with registration. Keyed on title number. Terms are not open-data terms. |
| Overseas companies ownership data | HM Land Registry | Roughly 100,000 records, monthly, free with registration. |
| Price paid data | HM Land Registry | Free and open. Transaction history at address level. |
| Companies House | Companies House | The organisational side of the join, including ownership and control. |
| Land use and designation layers | Defra and MHCLG | Protected sites, green belt, agricultural classification and nutrient catchments, largely open. |
Capabilities
Benefits
For government
- Delivers the practical capability behind a published land use commitment that the delivery body has not yet planned for.
- Supports the registry’s own stated intention to identify parties on the register more clearly.
- Gives land use policy a spatial view of ownership concentration, which it currently commissions rather than holds.
- Provides the foundation for nature markets and biodiversity requirements, both of which need to know who controls land.
For the public
- Who owns land, and how much of it, becomes answerable without buying the answer.
- Communities can see the ownership behind development proposals in their area.
- The land held through offshore and corporate structures becomes visible spatially rather than only as a list.
Delivery
Phasing
Risks & mitigations
It is conditional on an impact assessment and absent from the delivery body’s plan. Freehold is designed to be useful without it and better with it.
The ownership datasets are free but gated, with terms that are not open-data terms. Redistribution rights must be established before anything derived is published.
Boundaries and ownership use different keys by design. Resolution is probabilistic at the margins and must publish confidence rather than assert certainty.
Sources
All sources checked in August 2026. Figures carry the reference period of their source, which may differ from publication date. Where a figure could not be verified against a primary source it is not used.