Overseas entities that own UK land

Reading the Register of Overseas Entities

For decades a building in Britain could be owned by a company registered somewhere that published nothing about who owned it, and the question of who really owned the building had no answer available to the public. The Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Act 2022 closed that: an overseas entity holding UK land has to register here and name its beneficial owners, and one that does not cannot sell, mortgage, or grant a long lease over what it holds.

The register therefore produces two figures rather than one. How many entities are on it is a measure of how much UK land is held from abroad. How many are on it and have named nobody is a measure of how well the Act is working — and it is the harder figure to find, because it needs two registers read at once: the entities themselves, and the people with significant control filed against each of them.

Treat an absence as a question rather than an answer. An entity can legitimately have no registrable beneficial owner and file its managing officers instead; a filing made since the last snapshot will not be here yet. What an empty entry is worth is a look at the entity’s own filing history, which its page links to.

What this cannot tell you is which property an entity owns. Titles are held by HM Land Registry, Registers of Scotland and Land and Property Services, and licensed separately from company data. This answers the other half: who stands behind the name on the title.