Checking title and ownership before you submit

A land registry check before a planning application takes twenty minutes and prevents the two most common validation failures: a red line that excludes land needed for access, and an ownership certificate signed on the wrong assumption. Both are avoidable with official copies of the register and the title plan, and neither is something a client's recollection can be relied on to settle.

Signing a certificate that is knowingly or recklessly false is an offence under section 65 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, so this is one of the few parts of an application where the agent carries a personal risk.

Ordering the official copies

HM Land Registry sells official copies of the register and the title plan through its online property search service, for a published fee per document. You need both: the register tells you who owns the land and what burdens sit on it, the plan tells you the extent.

Order them for the application site and for anything adjoining that the scheme touches: the verge, the access track, the shared drive, the land under a proposed visibility splay. A title that looks tidy from the street frequently turns out to stop at the back of the footway.

Check the date on the official copy. An office copy from a purchase three years ago may predate a transfer, a lease or a new charge, and an out of date document is no defence if the certificate turns out to be wrong.

Comparing the title plan with your red line

Print both at the same scale and overlay them. Look for three things.

Whether every part of the red line falls within the title, including the access from the public highway, which the application site must include. Whether the title extends further than you assumed, which can be useful for drainage, parking or biodiversity gain. And whether the boundary features on the ground match the plan, because they often do not.

Remember that registered title plans show general boundaries only. Under the Land Registration Act 2002 the line on the plan does not fix the exact boundary, so a dispute about half a metre cannot be resolved from it. For planning purposes that rarely matters, since the red line is about control of land for the development rather than about precise legal boundaries, but it matters a great deal if the scheme is built to the line.

Bring the result into the constraints work at the same time as the designations and the levels, as set out in building a constraints plan before the design starts.

Verges, retained strips and the access

The strip between a property and the carriageway is the single most common cause of a wrong certificate. Where a road is adopted, the highway authority holds the surface and the subsoil may belong to the frontager, but the land needed to form or improve an access sits within the highway and is not the applicant's to grant.

The answer is not to exclude the access from the red line, because the application must include the land needed to reach the public highway. The answer is to include it and to serve notice on the highway authority as an owner under certificate B.

Retained strips are the other trap. A developer who sold plots in the 1980s may have kept a metre of land along a boundary precisely so that any future access has to be bought. Those strips appear as separate titles with a different proprietor, and they are worth finding before a client buys the land rather than after. A retained strip does not stop a planning permission being granted. It stops the permission being implemented, which is a different problem and usually a more expensive one.

Leases long enough to make a tenant an owner

For certificate purposes, an owner is the freeholder or a person with a leasehold interest with at least seven years left to run. That definition catches situations people overlook: a commercial tenant on a fifteen year lease, a telecoms operator with a mast lease, an agricultural tenant, a long leaseholder of a flat within the building.

Each of those has to be served with notice, on the prescribed form, before the application is made. The notice must be served within the period the rules allow before the date of the application, so serving notice months in advance does not work and neither does serving it afterwards.

Where the land is or was part of an agricultural holding, the separate agricultural holdings certificate applies and any tenant must be served as well.

Keep a schedule: name, interest, address for service, date served, method, and the evidence.

Unregistered land

A minority of land in England and Wales remains unregistered, typically land that has not changed hands since compulsory registration came in for that area. There is no register to order and no title plan to overlay.

Apply to Land Registry for a search of the index map, which confirms whether the land is registered or affected by a caution. If it is unregistered, ownership is proved by the title deeds, and the client's solicitor should hold an epitome of title.

Where ownership cannot be established after reasonable enquiry, certificates C and D exist for that situation, requiring notice to be published in a local newspaper as well as served on anyone who is known. Use them properly rather than signing certificate A because the enquiry was difficult.

Covenants and rights the plan does not show

The charges register lists restrictive covenants, easements and rights of way affecting the title. Planning permission does not override any of them: a covenant restricting the land to use as a single dwelling survives a permission for two, and the beneficiary can enforce it.

Read the register for covenants restricting building lines, the number of dwellings, business use and the erection of structures. Look for rights of drainage, access and services in favour of neighbours, which constrain where you can build. Note any rentcharges and any restrictions requiring a third party's consent to a disposition.

Public rights of way are a separate matter and are not always shown on the title at all, which is why the definitive map has to be checked independently, as covered in checking public rights of way before fixing a layout.

None of this belongs in the planning application. All of it belongs in the advice to the client, because a scheme that cannot be built is worth nothing however well it is consented.

Keeping the evidence behind the certificate

Save the official copies, the overlay drawing, the schedule of interests, copies of every notice served and proof of posting into the project file, and keep them for the life of the permission.

Two reasons. A neighbour who claims they were never notified is answered by a dated copy and a certificate of posting. And where an application is later challenged, the paperwork behind the certificate is the first thing anyone asks for.

An illustrative example. A practice prepares a new dwelling on a garden plot. The title plan shows the boundary at the back edge of the footway, with the visibility splay falling across a verge registered to the county council. The certificate changes from A to B, notice goes to the county as landowner, and the application is validated first time. The alternative, which happens weekly somewhere, is a certificate A, a validation query three weeks later, and a re-served notice that resets the clock.

Enter your postcode on PlanScope to see which of the 66 report types your site is likely to need, then run the title check before the drawings are issued.

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.