In March, then-environment secretary Emma Reynolds announced the government would partly lift the paywall on England and Wales's Land Registry, letting the public see who owns large plots of land. Campaigners had spent years arguing that opacity around land ownership shields polluters, blocks housing development, and makes environmental accountability impossible. The announcement sounded like a breakthrough. Five months later, nothing has happened. The Land Registry — technically an arm's-length body under the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, not Defra — says its plans are 'at a very early stage.' It cannot say what data will be released, who will be allowed to access it, in what format, or when. A further public consultation may be required before any firm decisions are made, on top of the consultation that preceded the land use framework itself. The structural problem is jurisdictional fragmentation. Defra made the commitment. The Land Registry sits under a different ministry. Neither department appears to have authority to force a timeline on the other. The result is a policy announcement with no delivery mechanism — a press release posing as reform. Guy Shrubsole, author of Who Owns England?, frames the stakes bluntly: councils cannot plan housing, communities cannot identify river polluters, and nature restoration efforts are flying blind because ownership data remains opaque. In a country where roughly half of England is owned by less than 1% of the population, the information asymmetry is not incidental. It is structural. New prime minister Andy Burnham has made localism a signature theme. Shrubsole argues that land ownership transparency is foundational to any 'place-first politics' — you cannot govern locally if you do not know who owns the land. The test of Burnham's localism agenda may be whether he can compel an arm's-length body to act on a commitment made by a predecessor's department. Defra's latest statement is a masterclass in circular language: the government is 'taking forward this commitment and will share further details as this work continues.' No dates, no milestones, no accountability mechanism. The paywall remains intact. The pattern is familiar in British governance: announce a transparency reform, allow institutional inertia to absorb it, and rely on the public losing interest before delivery is required. The question is whether Burnham's localism rhetoric has enough institutional force behind it to break that cycle, or whether land ownership in England remains a 21st-century state secret.
