‘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 scandal of ground rent properties – homes that have been sold to people on long leases, but which often contain escalating ‘ground rent’ charges hidden in the small print, sometimes making the properties impossible to sell. One of the biggest owners of ground rent properties in England is Wallace Estates. They are owned by the Wallace Partnership Group Ltd, who in turn are owned by Albanwise Ltd. But who owns Albanwise? Thanks to Companies House publishing Persons of Significant Control, we now know: a mysterious Italian billionaire called Count Padulli, who also owns a 4,500-acre estate in Norfolk. His country of residence, however, is stated to be the tax haven of Guernsey.
The increasing trend in recent decades to base companies overseas, and often in offshore tax havens, has presented a fresh challenge to obtaining information on who owns England. Offshore jurisdictions like Guernsey, the British Virgin Islands and Panama aren’t just attractive to companies for reasons of ‘tax efficiency’: they also provide a cloak of secrecy, with less transparent company registries than the UK. If you register a company in the British Virgin Islands, for instance, there is no obligation to reveal the Person of Significant Control who lies behind it.
Anti-corruption charities Global Witness
