Ownership certificates and notices under section 65

Every planning application in England carries an ownership certificate, and getting the wrong one ticked is one of the few mistakes that can unpick a permission years after it was granted. Section 65 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 and Article 13 of the Development Management Procedure Order 2015 require the applicant to certify who owned the application land 21 days before the application was made, and to have served notice on anyone else who did.

For a landlord buying, converting and extending, this comes up constantly, because the land you are applying over is rarely all held on the same title.

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

What each certificate means

"Owner" has a specific statutory meaning here, and it is not the everyday one. An owner is a person with the freehold estate, or a tenant under a lease with at least seven years unexpired. A monthly tenant is not an owner for this purpose. A commercial tenant eight years into a fifteen year lease is.

Certificate B is the one most often required and most often skipped. If any part of the red line sits on land you do not own, including a strip of verge, a shared driveway, an access over a neighbour's land, or the airspace a balcony will project into, Certificate A is wrong.

Certificate C and D also require reasonable enquiries to have been made, and a council may ask what those enquiries were.

Serving notice on other owners

The notice is a prescribed form, and it has to be served not less than 21 days before the application is submitted. That timing matters more than the wording. An application submitted eighteen days after notice was given is defective even if the notice itself was perfect.

Serve by a method you can evidence. Recorded delivery to the address on the title register is the standard approach. Personal service works. Email is acceptable where the recipient has agreed to that method, which in practice means you need something in writing confirming it.

Where a company owns the land, serve at the registered office. Where the registered proprietor has died, serve the personal representatives if known, and treat the position as Certificate C if they cannot be traced after reasonable enquiry.

The notice is not a consultation and it does not give the recipient a veto. It tells them an application is being made over land they own so that they can comment. Owners sometimes respond as though consent were being sought, and it is worth saying plainly in a covering letter that it is not.

Agricultural tenants and the separate notice

The same section requires the applicant to state whether any of the land is, or is part of, an agricultural holding, and to serve notice on any agricultural tenant.

This catches urban applicants out on edge-of-settlement sites. A paddock let on a grazing agreement, a field let to a neighbouring farmer under a farm business tenancy, or land within an agricultural holding whose farmhouse is elsewhere all engage the requirement. The tenant may hold no interest that makes them an owner under the seven year test and still be entitled to notice.

Ask the vendor or the landowner directly, in writing, whether any part of the land is subject to an agricultural tenancy or licence. Title documents will not always show it.

Land you do not own but need

The commonest reason a landlord ends up on Certificate B is that the red line has to include something beyond the demise.

• A visibility splay across a highway verge, where the highway authority is the owner.
• A shared access or private drive in multiple ownership.
• A sewer connection crossing a neighbour's land.
• Scaffolding or oversailing where the application drawings show it.
• A bin or cycle store positioned on common parts of a block.
• Airspace above a flat roof already demised to another leaseholder.

Including land you do not own does not make the application invalid. Failing to certify it properly does. And the planning permission does not confer any right to carry out works on third party land, which is a separate matter of property law and needs a separate agreement.

Where the application involves several titles, mark them on the site plan and keep a schedule of who owns which, because that schedule becomes the evidence of what you did.

Getting it wrong and the consequences

Knowingly or recklessly issuing a certificate that is false or misleading in a material particular is an offence under section 65, punishable by a fine. That is the sharp end and it is rare.

The more likely outcomes sit between inconvenience and disaster:

1. The authority declines to validate the application, and the clock restarts once the certificate is corrected and notice is properly served.
2. The error is spotted during determination, and the application is held while notice is served and the 21 days runs.
3. The permission is granted, and an owner who was never notified later challenges it. The court has a discretion, and a permission can be quashed where a person with an interest was deprived of the chance to comment.
4. A purchaser's solicitor finds the defect on a sale, and the transaction stalls while indemnity insurance or a fresh application is arranged.

Point four is the one landlords meet most often. An unresolved certificate issue sits on the file indefinitely and surfaces at the worst moment.

Correcting an error during determination is usually straightforward. The authority will ask for a corrected certificate and evidence of service, and the determination period is effectively extended. Correcting it after the decision is far harder, and a fresh application is often the cleanest answer. If the description of development also needs adjusting at the same time, the note on amending the description of development after submission covers the mechanics.

Evidence of service to keep

Build a small bundle at the time, not when someone asks for it two years later:

• A dated copy of each notice as served.
• Proof of posting or the recorded delivery receipt, with the tracking reference.
• The Land Registry official copy of each title, with the date it was downloaded printed on it.
• A note of the enquiries made where an owner could not be traced.
• The newspaper page where publication was used, with the masthead and date visible.
• The schedule of titles against the red line plan.

Scan the bundle and store it with the decision notice. Conveyancing enquiries about planning history routinely ask about notices, and producing the evidence in an afternoon is worth the small effort it took to assemble.

Checking ownership before applying

Start with an official copy of the register and the title plan for the application site, then compare the title extent against your proposed red line. Where the red line goes beyond the title, obtain the adjoining titles.

Where land appears unregistered, an index map search at HM Land Registry tells you whether any part is registered and gives title numbers for neighbouring land. Unregistered land needs enquiry of the occupier, the local authority's own records and, for highway land, the highway authority.

Two habits make this reliable. Date-stamp every title download, because ownership changes and a certificate is a statement about a specific date. And run the check again shortly before submission on any site where a sale may have completed in the interim.

The planning case itself sits in the Planning Statement, but the certificate is part of the validation pack rather than the planning argument, and it belongs on the checklist alongside everything else that must be submitted before work starts on site and the fee schedule and how it is applied.

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