Ownership certificates A, B, C and D compared

Every application for planning permission has to carry one of four ownership certificates, and choosing the wrong one is a standard reason for an application to be returned as invalid. Certificate A says you own all the land. Certificate B says you do not, but you have told everyone who does. Certificates C and D deal with owners you cannot trace. The ownership certificate on a planning application is a statutory declaration under section 65 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, so the choice is a legal statement rather than an administrative box.

The rules sit in article 13 of the Town and Country Planning (Development Management Procedure) (England) Order 2015, with the notice wording set out in the Order's schedules.

What each certificate declares

An owner here means the freeholder, or a leaseholder with at least seven years of the term still to run at the date of the application. Tenants on shorter leases are not owners for this purpose, and neither are occupiers, mortgagees or people with the benefit of a covenant.

Certificate A is the one people over-use. The application land is everything inside the red line, and the red line has to include any land needed to carry out the development. Visibility splays across a verge, a new dropped kerb, a drainage connection running under a shared driveway, scaffolding oversail on a party boundary: each of those pulls someone else's title into the application and pushes you from A to B.

Who counts as an owner and the 21-day rule

The test looks backwards. You certify the position as it stood 21 days before the date of the application, so you identify owners at that earlier date and serve notice on them, then submit.

That ordering catches people out on sites bought during the design stage. If the land changed hands inside that window, the previous owner may still need notice. Order official copies of the registered title from HM Land Registry rather than relying on the seller's pack, and check for separate titles over accessways, verges and service strips. Highway land is usually vested in the highway authority, which means the council itself can be an owner you must notify.

Unregistered land still exists, mostly in older rural holdings and on strips of former railway or canal. Where a search turns up nothing, that absence is the start of the reasonable steps you will later have to describe.

Notices that follow each certificate

Certificate B requires notice to each owner in the prescribed form, giving the site address, a description of the development, where the application can be inspected and the period for representations. Keep the date each notice was served, because the certificate asks for it and the council will check the dates against the application date.

Certificates C and D require a notice published in a newspaper circulating in the area, and the publication date must fall inside the same 21-day window. Councils will ask for a copy of the page, not a receipt from the advertising desk.

Site notices are a separate matter. Publicity under article 15 of the 2015 Order is the council's duty, and it does not discharge your duty to serve owner notices. Applicants sometimes assume the council's site notice covers both. It does not.

Agricultural holdings and the separate declaration

The agricultural holdings declaration sits alongside the ownership certificate and is answered separately. You state either that none of the land forms part of an agricultural holding, or that it does and you have served notice on every agricultural tenant.

The trap is the grazing licence. Land let on an informal arrangement can still be a tenancy in substance, and the question turns on what the parties actually do rather than what the paperwork is called. Where a farmer has occupied a field for years under a rolling agreement, take advice before declaring that no agricultural holding exists. A Planning Statement that quietly describes the land as grazed by a neighbour while the certificate says otherwise is the sort of inconsistency an objector will find.

Unknown owners, reasonable steps and the newspaper route

Reasonable steps are not a formula, and the council will judge what you did against what a careful applicant could have done. A defensible record usually includes an official copy search of the registered title and index map, a check of the local land charges register, a letter to the last known address, enquiries of neighbouring occupiers, and a check of probate or company records where the last known owner was an estate or a dissolved company.

Write the steps down as you take them, with dates. Certificate C asks you to state them, and a one-line answer invites a request for further information that stops the clock on validation.

Where the search fails, the newspaper notice is the fallback rather than a shortcut. Publishing first and searching afterwards is the wrong order, and it shows.

What happens when a certificate is wrong

Two separate consequences follow, and they are often confused.

Knowingly or recklessly issuing a false or misleading certificate is a criminal offence under section 65 of the 1990 Act, punishable by a fine. That is rare in practice and reserved for deliberate cases.

But the commoner outcome is civil and expensive. A permission granted on a defective certificate is vulnerable to challenge, and an owner who was never notified has a real grievance to take to the council or the court. Councils faced with a live objection about notice will often invite a fresh certificate and re-consultation, which resets the determination period and can push a scheme past a funding deadline. Where the error is discovered after implementation, a purchaser's solicitor will raise it, and a title indemnity is not always available.

If you spot the mistake yourself, tell the case officer before anyone else does and serve the missing notices. That is a slow correction rather than a refusal.

An illustrative example. A self-builder submits a full application for a single dwelling on a garden plot, certifies A, and later finds that the access crosses a two-metre strip retained by the original estate developer. The council accepts a corrected Certificate B, the notice is served on the developer's successor, and the application is re-advertised. Eight weeks of programme are gone and the permission is sound. Had the point surfaced after a neighbour's judicial review pre-action letter, the outcome would have been worse.

Evidence worth keeping on file

Keep the official copies and title plans you relied on, a dated copy of every notice served with proof of posting, the newspaper page where one was published, a note of the reasonable steps with dates, and a red-line plan with a written explanation of why each parcel is inside or outside it.

That file is also what you hand to a solicitor when the site is sold or funded, and it settles the question in minutes rather than weeks. The same discipline applies whether you are submitting a householder application or choosing between outline and full planning permission on a larger site.

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

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