Certificate B: serving notice on a landowner

Certificate B is the ownership declaration you sign on a planning application when somebody other than you owns part of the land, and you have served formal notice on them. It sits in article 13 of the Development Management Procedure Order 2015 alongside Certificates A, C and D, and it is the certificate most self-builders need without realising it. A shared access strip, a ransom margin behind the rear fence, a verge belonging to the county council: any of these makes Certificate A wrong.

Signing the wrong certificate is not a paperwork slip. A certificate that is false or misleading in a material particular is a criminal offence under section 65(6) of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, and a permission granted on one can be challenged.

Why ownership certificates exist

Planning permission does not depend on owning the land. Anyone can apply for permission over anyone's property, which sounds alarming until you see the safeguard: the owner has to be told.

The certificate system is that safeguard. It makes the applicant declare who owns the application site and confirm that everyone else with an interest has been notified, so that owners can make representations before a decision is made. It also stops applications being determined in ignorance of a party who could block delivery entirely.

Permission granted over someone else's land gives you no right to enter it or build on it. It removes the planning objection and nothing else. That point is worth holding on to when a neighbour receives a notice and assumes the scheme is a done deal.

When Certificate A is not the right one

Certificate A applies where the applicant is the sole owner of the whole application site, and no part of it is or has been an agricultural holding within the relevant period.

"Owner" has a specific meaning here. It covers the freeholder, and anyone holding a lease with at least seven years unexpired. A monthly tenant is not an owner for this purpose. A leaseholder with nine years left is.

The usual traps on a small site:

• The red line crosses a shared driveway or a private road in separate ownership.
• The access crosses highway verge or a footway owned by the highway authority.
• A strip along the boundary was never included in the title, often where a hedge was moved decades ago.
• The land includes an unregistered parcel with no identifiable owner.
• A management company owns the estate roads and open space.
• A mortgage lender has an interest, which does not make it an owner but is worth checking.

Draw the red line before you decide the certificate, and pull official copies of the title from the Land Registry for the whole area inside it. A title plan comparison takes an afternoon and settles most questions.

Serving notice under Certificate B

Certificate B requires you to state a day, no earlier than 21 days before the date of the application, on which the other owners are identified, and to confirm that you have given each of them the prescribed notice. You name them on the certificate and give the date the notice was served.

The notice itself is a prescribed form. It tells the recipient that an application is being made, describes the proposal and the land, says where the application can be inspected, and explains that they may make representations to the authority within 21 days. Councils will not normally determine an application before that period has run.

Serve it in a way you can evidence. Recorded delivery to the address on the title, or personal service with a witness, beats an email you cannot prove arrived. Keep the proof with the application file, because if the ownership is disputed later the service record is what you will be asked for.

If you discover an additional owner after submitting, tell the case officer immediately, serve the notice and ask for the certificate to be corrected. Officers handle this regularly and the application can usually be put right. Leaving it is what causes problems.

Certificates C and D where owners are unknown

Certificate C covers the position where you have served notice on some owners but cannot trace all of them, having taken reasonable steps to do so. Certificate D covers the position where you cannot trace any of them.

Both require notice by advertisement in a local newspaper circulating in the area, and both require you to describe the steps taken to trace the missing owners. Reasonable steps means more than a quick title search: expect to record enquiries of neighbours and occupiers, searches of the Land Registry including the index map for unregistered land, checks of local records, and any correspondence attempted.

Unregistered land is more common than people expect on rural plots and older urban sites. Where the index map returns nothing, Certificate C or D is the route, and the newspaper notice cost is a modest addition to the application.

The agricultural holdings declaration

Every ownership certificate carries a second declaration about agricultural tenants. You must state whether any part of the land is, or was within the relevant period, part of an agricultural holding, and if so that notice has been served on every tenant.

This matters well beyond farms. A paddock let for grazing under a grazing licence, a field let on a farm business tenancy, or a smallholding that was part of a larger holding within the period all trigger it. Where a site is being sold off a farm for a single house, the agricultural tenant is frequently overlooked because the vendor thinks of themselves as the owner and the tenancy as an arrangement.

Where the land relates to best and most versatile agricultural land, the tenancy question tends to surface anyway during the soils work, but that is late in the process to be finding it.

Consequences of certifying wrongly

Three things follow from a defective certificate, in ascending order of unpleasantness.

The authority can decline to determine the application, or ask you to reissue the certificate and restart the publicity period. That costs weeks. Where the error surfaces after permission is granted, an aggrieved owner can seek judicial review, and courts have been willing to quash permissions where an affected owner was never notified. And section 65(6) of the 1990 Act makes it an offence to issue a certificate knowingly or recklessly containing a false or misleading statement, punishable by a fine.

Most errors are honest and most are fixable. Recklessness is the word to watch: signing Certificate A because checking would have been tedious is the behaviour the provision targets.

Practical steps for a site with several owners

1. Fix the red line, including everything you need for access, visibility splays, drainage and construction.
2. Order official copies and title plans for every parcel inside the line, plus an index map search for anything unregistered.
3. List the freeholders and any leaseholders with seven or more years remaining, and separately list agricultural tenants.
4. Choose the certificate that matches the facts, rather than the one that avoids a conversation.
5. Serve the prescribed notices with proof of service, and record the date on the certificate.
6. Diary the 21 day representation period, and factor it into the determination timetable alongside any extension of time agreement the council may later request.

Where the ownership picture is complicated, get the certificate position confirmed by a solicitor before submission. It is a small fee against the cost of restarting an application.

This is general guidance, not legal advice; check the position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it.

PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval. If you are pulling together a submission pack, browse the 66 report types by category to see what else the validation list may ask for.