Ownership certificates A, B, C and D on a planning form

A planning ownership certificate is the signed statement on the application form saying who owns the application site and confirming that anyone else with an interest has been told. It is required by section 65 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 and the Town and Country Planning (Development Management Procedure) (England) Order 2015, and getting it wrong has two consequences: the council will not validate the application, and a false statement is a criminal offence.

Self-builders trip over this most often when a site includes a strip of verge, a shared drive or a piece of land the vendor never registered.

Why the certificate exists

Planning permission runs with the land rather than with the applicant, and anybody can apply for permission on land they do not own. The certificate and notice regime is the safeguard: it means owners and agricultural tenants find out that somebody is seeking permission over their land in time to comment.

Two definitions do the work. An owner, for these purposes, is the freeholder or a person holding a lease with at least seven years unexpired at the date of the application. A tenant means a tenant of an agricultural holding, any part of which is comprised in the land.

Short leases do not count. A tenant on a two-year commercial lease is not an owner for certificate purposes, which surprises applicants who assume they must serve everybody in occupation.

The four certificates and when each applies

The certificate is a choice between four statements about the twenty-one days before the application.

Certificate A is the only one requiring no further step, which is why it is over-used. If any part of the red line is in someone else's ownership, however small, Certificate A is wrong.

The twenty-one day period is the trap in Certificate B. Notice must be given at least twenty-one days before the application is made, so the sequence is to serve notice first and submit later. Applications submitted the same day as the notice are invalid, and the council will ask for the certificate to be redone and the clock restarted.

Serving notice properly

Notice is given on the prescribed form, which sets out the proposal and tells the recipient how to comment. Send it to the owner's address, keep a copy of what was sent, and record the date.

What to keep on file:

• A copy of each notice as served, with the date written on it.
• Proof of posting or delivery, which for a contentious site is worth upgrading to recorded delivery.
• The Land Registry title information you relied on to identify the owner, downloaded and dated.
• A note of any address checks where the registered proprietor's address is out of date.

Where ownership changes between service and submission, serve again on the new owner. And where the red line is amended during determination to include additional land, the certificate has to be corrected and fresh notice served, which is a common cause of delay on schemes that gain a visibility splay late in the process.

Agricultural tenants and the separate declaration

The certificate deals with agricultural tenants separately from owners because the Agricultural Holdings Act regime gives those tenants security that a short commercial tenant does not have.

If any part of the application land is comprised in an agricultural holding, notice must be given to the tenant, and the certificate has to say so. This catches more urban applications than expected: a paddock behind a village site, a field let on a grazing agreement, or a strip of land let with a farm under an old tenancy.

The test is whether the land is comprised in an agricultural holding, not whether the applicant thinks the tenancy is important. Where there is any doubt, ask the vendor for the tenancy documents and get a solicitor's view before certifying.

Unknown owners and the newspaper route

Certificates C and D require reasonable steps to trace owners before falling back on publication, and councils do scrutinise what those steps were.

Steps that count as reasonable:

1. An official copy of the register and title plan from HM Land Registry for the site and adjoining land.
2. A search for unregistered land, including the index map, with the result recorded.
3. Local enquiries, including of the parish council, adjoining occupiers and any previous owner.
4. A search of probate records where an owner is believed to have died.
5. A notice on the land itself where it is accessible.

The newspaper notice then goes in a local newspaper circulating in the area, and the application cannot be determined until at least twenty-one days after publication. Keep the page, not just a receipt.

Unregistered strips are the usual reason for reaching this point. A verge between the site and the highway, a former railway boundary, or the far side of a boundary hedge frequently has no registered owner, and the ransom potential of such a strip is a separate commercial problem covered in our note on ransom strips and the share of uplift.

Getting it wrong, and what follows

Section 65(6) makes it an offence to issue a certificate that contains a statement the person knows to be false or misleading in a material particular, or to recklessly issue one that is. Conviction carries a fine.

Beyond the criminal exposure, two civil consequences matter more in practice. A permission granted on a defective certificate can be challenged, and while the courts will not quash a permission for every technical defect, a genuine failure to notify an owner who would have objected is the kind of defect that succeeds. And a lender or a buyer's solicitor reviewing the permission will raise the certificate, which stalls a sale or a funding drawdown until it is resolved.

Correcting an error is straightforward if caught early. Serve the notice, submit a revised certificate, and accept that the twenty-one days start again. Councils deal with this routinely and would rather fix it before determination than after.

Checking title before you complete the form

Do this before the drawings are finished, because the red line depends on it.

• Obtain the official copy of the register and the title plan, and compare the title plan against the proposed red line at the same scale.
• Check the access. A right of way over a private drive is not ownership, and if the red line needs to include the drive to show the access works, other owners must be served.
• Check for verges, service strips and the true position of the highway boundary, which is often behind the kerb rather than at the fence.
• Check for restrictive covenants and rights, which do not affect the certificate but will affect whether a permission can be implemented.
• Where the site is unregistered, ask for the deeds and take advice on who should be treated as owner.

A Planning Statement that records the ownership position, the notices served and the dates gives the case officer the audit trail and saves a validation query. To see which other documents your application will need, browse the planning report types by category.

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