As part of decisive action to ensure greater transparency and
tackle corruption in the property sector, it will be made clearer
who owns land trusts.
The government has today, 27 December 2023, launched a
consultation setting out plans to improve the transparency of
trust information.
Land ownership through a trust means someone legally owns and
manages the land on behalf of the true owner and beneficiary.
Currently, the identity of the beneficiary is not always recorded
or publicly available, potentially leading to secrecy or
corruption in the sector.
The new plans will mean residents, the media and the public will
be able to find out more about who owns land and property, who
can control it and receives financial benefit from it.
Housing Secretary said:
It matters who really owns land and property. It matters for how
and where we build our homes, grow our food, and power our
country.
These proposals will lift the veil of secrecy currently afforded
to land-holding trusts.
Transparency about land ownership is crucial if we want to make
our housing and land markets fairer. In its absence, injustices,
corruption and crime can flourish.
Minister for Enterprise, Markets and Small Business said:
There’s no place for fraud and other illegal activity in our
society, so it’s fantastic so see the launch of this consultation
which fulfils a government commitment and ensures more is being
done to make the trust information held on the Register for
Overseas Entities more transparent.
The Register for Overseas Entities is imperative in ensuring we
weed out kleptocrats and oligarchs buying up British properties
under false names and has already helped identify absent
landlords so that they can be held to account.
The changes will make it as easy as possible for people to access
all land and property ownership data across the range of
different public registers, providing as much free and readily
available information as possible.
Greater transparency will help tackle illicit finance and
corruption in the system, with offshore trusts in the UK property
sector identified as posing a higher risk of money laundering*.
The consultation runs for eight weeks and seeks views on widening
access to trust information held on the Register of Overseas
Entities and on how ownership of land involving trusts can be
made more transparent.
This meets the commitment the government made during the passage
of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 to
launch a consultation on how we to improve the transparency of
trust information before the end of this year. The government
intends, subject to this consultation, to bring forward changes
as soon as possible thereafter.
Through this act the government strengthened the Register of
Overseas Entities - a list of the true owners of offshore
companies that own UK land, while the Trust Registration Service
in 2017 created the first register of beneficial ownership of
trusts with UK links, clamping down on money laundering and
terrorist financing.
This builds on new transparency powers announced in the
Levelling-up and Regeneration Act to demand more information on
land and property ownership and look behind the legal ownership
of property to find the true ultimate ownership.
Further information:
- To access the consultation visit Transparency of land
ownership involving trusts consultation
- Under the current system, His Majesty’s Land Registry (HMLR)
records on a public register the legal owners of land. It does
not, however, record the details of anyone behind the legal owner
who may be able to control, or derive economic benefit from, that
land. If the legal owner is a company or a trustee, there is no
way of knowing from the land registry who is behind it.
- Transactions made using offshore corporate structures or
offshore trusts in the UK property sector have been identified as
posing a higher risk of money laundering, according to the
National Risk Assessment of Money Laundering and Terrorist
Financing 2020.
