How do we identify land ownership?

The core data in our land ownership layer is the INSPIRE Index polygons data set. This is a set of geospatial polygon data identifying the locations of freehold registered properties in England and Wales. This data was made public under European directives and continues to be an open access database licensed under the OpenGov license. We link these polygons to data from the public Land Registry datasets UK Companies that own property in England and Wales and Overseas Companies that own property in England and Wales.

We then link the title number with the INSPIRE data. Some of this data is linked via Land Registry Polygon Service, which enables accurate matching between property boundary polygons, title numbers and registered company ownership. We are working to link as many properties as we can in ways that do not depend on this dataset. Sometimes we can geocode the address to match it to a polygon. Sometimes we manually link the business to a property based on information available from other sources. We are continually refining our process.

LandExplorer has an evaluation license to use the Land Registry National Polygon Service. As such LandExplorer land ownership search is to be used for evaluation purposes, in which we hope to evaluate the public benefit of making this data accessible. We cannot guarantee the accuracy of LandExplorer property data but hope to provide a useful approximation that might support land rights movements and organising. To be 100% confident of title and land ownership information please use the Land Registry service directly on their website.

To demonstrate the public benefit of making this data accessible we aim to collect as many stories as we can of ways that this data has had community benefit. To share your story of how you are using LandExplorer, please leave Feedback.