The Housing White Paper: Implications Beyond The Residential Market

The recently published Housing White Paper "Fixing our broken housing market" outlines the government's proposals to boost housing supply in England. While the focus is, unsurprisingly, on residential land use and many of the proposals relate to the planning system, there are a couple of points of potential significance for the wider property industry.

Making land ownership and interests more transparent

One of the key challenges to increasing housing supply is identifying land that is suitable for development. As part of the strategy for tackling this, the paper makes a number of proposals for increasing the availability of data relating to land and property including:

Aiming to achieve comprehensive land registration by 2030 At present roughly 83 per cent of the land mass in England and Wales is registered. While this is a significant figure, it does mean that there remain pockets of land which are unregistered and for which there will be little, if any, publicly available data. As part of the drive to achieve comprehensive land registration "all publicly held land in the areas of greatest housing need" is to be registered by 2020, with all remaining publicly owned land to follow by 2025. However, not all of the unregistered land in England will be publicly owned, suggesting that other measures (such as automatic compulsory registration1) will be required.

Consulting on improving the transparency of contractual arrangements used to control land The aim is to "better reflect wider interests in land with the intention of providing 'a clear line of sight' across a piece of land setting out who owns, controls or has an interest in it". The reference to contractual arrangements, however, is interesting as our current system of land registration is designed primarily to record interests in land and not mere contractual rights (there are some exceptions; for example, the use of restrictions on title to prevent breach of contract, a topic discussed in the Law Commission's recent paper on the Land Registration Act 2002).

Improving the availability of data about wider interests in land The paper suggests that this could be achieved by releasing more information for free and also by seeking to implement the Law Commission's proposals for the reform of restrictive covenants and other interests. The latter appears to be a reference to the consultation on easements, covenants and profits à prendre which concluded in 2011. The Law Commission at that...