intended to kickstart it – as well as the missed opportunity of 1909 – its progress remained glacial. Registration of land upon point of sale finally became compulsory after 1925, leading to an increase in activity. All information on who owned land, however, remained tightly guarded.
Incredibly, not even the police were allowed to access Land Registry records without the landowner’s permission, thanks to Section 112 of the 1925 Land Registration Act. This clearly hindered efforts to investigate corruption and money laundering. In the 1970s, the Director of Public Prosecutions wrote to the Land Registry pleading for greater transparency. In a document deposited at the National Archives, dated 18 November 1975, an anonymous official refers to the correspondence, and admits: ‘the Deputy Chief Land Registrar has told me that the Registry is embarrassed by the extreme restriction imposed by Section 112 and would welcome an amendment’. But he adds: ‘On the other hand he did not think a greater liberalisation than that was called for – there was no reason why information about a person’s mortgages should be freely available.’
This neurotic secrecy was of a piece with Whitehall’s general paranoia during the Cold War. But by the 1970s, a less deferential public and a more inquisitorial press were starting to demand answers from government. The decade also saw a revival of interest in land ownership, prompted by a rise in land and house prices, concerns about financial speculators buying up farmland, and disquiet over wealthy sheikhs snapping up London properties in the wake of the oil crisis.
In 1973, on the centenary of the Return of Owners of Land, a Sunday Times journalist, Michael Pye, decided to write a feature story about land ownership for the paper’s colour supplement. He wrote to the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF), ‘We plan to contrast the top ten land holdings in 1873 with the largest ten today. I would be very grateful if you could help me in this exercise by letting me have access to a map of your land holdings … with perhaps an approximate figure for the total acreage involved.’
It was an anodyne and courteous request, but even this caused ructions at the department. An internal memo from a civil servant dealing with the request advised his superior: ‘The problem is to provide the information requested without evoking further questions about politically sensitive matters … I trust you are satisfied that this presentation will prove acceptable … and will avoid as far as possible any embarrassing enquiries.’
A trade union researcher who dared to enquire about MAFF landholdings the following year got similarly short shrift. ‘Are we required to provide this? – It doesn’t seem much of their business!’ exclaimed one mandarin in a handwritten note; to which another civil servant responded: ‘I suggest a polite reply regretting that the information cannot be obtained without undue effort – provided that is true of course.’ It wasn’t; the information proved easy to compile.
When the Spectator journalist Stephen Glover tried to write a piece on who owned the country in 1977, he found the only way to get the necessary information was to contact the landowners themselves. ‘This was usually done on the telephone and naturally entailed difficulties,’ he recounted. ‘Often, the landowner was out shooting; once he unfortunately turned out to be dead; and once he was drunk. One landowner could not decide whether he owned 10,000 acres or 100,000 acres: “I do find it so difficult to remember what an acre looks like when I drive across the estate.”’
MPs had begun asking questions, too. The Labour government that took power in 1974 soon set up two inquiries that aimed to probe the concentration of land ownership. The first of these, the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth, tried to investigate who owned England, but was forced to conclude: ‘The paucity of comprehensive up-to-date information on land ownership is remarkable. In the absence of a survey yielding data on the lines of the 1873 survey it is difficult to carry our analysis any further.’
The second, the Northfield Inquiry into the Acquisition and Occupancy of Agricultural Land, got some way further. But although its 1979 report forms a valuable record of the agricultural land then owned by the public sector, financial institutions, and the then small number of overseas buyers, it strangely didn’t seek to investigate the large private landowners who own the great majority of land. Then Margaret Thatcher swept into office, and once again the moment for land reform was lost.
By now, however, many NGOs and investigative journalists were determined to break open the ‘secret state’ regardless of which party was in government. The Campaign for Freedom of Information was set up in 1984, perhaps an appropriate year for founding an organisation dedicated to the rights of the citizen against the overmighty state. It aimed to dismantle the culture of secrecy that pervaded Whitehall, and give people new tools by which to hold government to account. For fifteen years, under the direction of Maurice ‘Freedom’ Frankel, it campaigned tirelessly for a Freedom of Information (FOI) Act to give citizens the right to know what information was being held by public bodies.
The FOI Act finally came into force in 2005. Now, anyone can request information from any public body, simply by emailing them; the public authority is obliged to respond, and there’s a presumption in favour of disclosing information unless it’s covered by a specific exemption. Anthony Barnett, whose organisation Charter 88 campaigned for an FOI Act as part of a wider set of constitutional reforms, has written about its ‘crippling impact on the old regime’. Certainly, those in government came to regret making such a powerful concession. In his memoirs, Tony Blair castigates himself for being a ‘naïve, foolish, irresponsible nincompoop’ for introducing FOI, and considers it one of his greatest mistakes; although he may have been forgetting about something.
Freedom of Information requests are one weapon among a small arsenal of tools and data sources that have proven invaluable for uncovering more about who owns England. I’ll be referring to these investigative tools throughout this book. Some of them were conceded by the government as the intense secrecy of the Cold War dissipated; others have come about through our membership of the EU, or with the development of digital technology; all have been fought for tirelessly by activists, journalists and citizens.
I’ve made extensive use of FOIs in asking public sector bodies to release maps of land and properties they own. Also useful are the Environmental Information Regulations 2004 (EIRs), an EU-derived piece of legislation that gives citizens the right to access specifically environmental information. EIR requests are harder for public bodies to refuse than FOIs, and since 2015 they have also applied to the private water companies, thanks to some great campaigning by an environmental law firm called Fish Legal. I’ve been able to use EIR requests to prise open what land is owned by certain water utilities – though some of them have claimed, bizarrely, that ‘land’ does not count as ‘environmental information’.
It remains harder to find out about private sector land ownership, but here too there has been change for the better. For years, you could only access company accounts at Companies House by paying a fee, making serious investigations prohibitively costly. Then, in 2015, Companies House opened up all its data for free. Its success in providing this excellent resource presents a clear business model for what an open Land Registry should look like.
More recently, Companies House has also started registering ‘Persons of Significant Control’ – the ultimate owners or beneficiaries of registered companies. This is incredibly helpful for investigating complex corporate networks, and disentangling the inevitable knot of subsidiary businesses, shell companies and investments that the parent firms have set up or taken a stake in. For example, the
