Land Registry publishes guidance on new development land reporting rules

HM Land Registry has published new guidance on how developers and land promoters should report agreements that give them control over development land. The new reporting requirements take effect next April.

Practice Guide 84, published on 26 October, covers reporting of so-called contractual control rights over registered land in England and Wales. The legal duty itself comes from the Provision of Information (Contractual Control) (Registered Land) Regulations 2026, made in June. The guide explains how to comply with them.

The rules are part of a wider push to improve transparency over who controls land earmarked for development.

Key dates

The digital reporting service opens on 6 April 2027. From then on, new grants, assignments and relevant written changes to qualifying rights will generally need to be reported within 60 calendar days.

The rules also apply backwards to some existing rights. Qualifying rights granted between 8 June 2026 and 5 April 2027 must be reported before 6 October 2027.

What is covered, and what isn't

The regime can apply to options, conditional purchase contracts, pre-emption rights, and rights to direct or request a sale or lease, including some found in land promotion agreements.

Not every agreement will qualify. Rights must meet the statutory conditions, including being held for the purposes of a business. Rights lasting less than 18 months are exempt, although any contractual extension options count when working out how long a right lasts.

Importantly for lenders, there is a specific exemption for rights that are necessary for, or incidental to, security for a loan or financial instrument. Standard bridging and development finance security should not automatically be caught.

Practical requirements

The duty to report falls on whoever holds the right, usually the developer or promoter. Submissions must be made digitally by an individually regulated conveyancer; working for a regulated firm is not enough on its own.

Reports must include the parties, the titles affected, and the duration and any extension terms. Where the landowner is an individual, their date and place of birth must also be collected, although these details will not be published.

Where a right affects only part of a title, the location must be provided in a machine-readable format such as Shapefile or GeoJSON. A scanned PDF plan will not be accepted for this.

Reporting will also be tied to protecting rights on the register. From April 2027, anyone applying for a notice or restriction to protect a qualifying right must have submitted the required information by the time they apply, even if the 60-day deadline has not yet passed. The Land Registry can refuse the entry if they have not.

The information will eventually form a public dataset, but publication is not required until as soon as possible after 6 April 2028.