Postcode matching against the corporate ownership release is too coarse to say who controls contested land. Of the 397 sites that matched a corporate title, 97 (24%) matched a council, trust, utility or institution by name, and postcode matching can mismatch parcels. No corporate owner was matched for 255 sites (39.1%). A parcel-level re-run is planned before any headline is drawn from this.

What we measured

With the live Land Registry service disabled (see entry 6), we resolved ownership from the bulk releases: corporate and overseas ownership records plus Price Paid data, about four million rows, matched to each site by postcode. 397 sites matched a corporate-owned title. For 255 (39.1%) no corporate owner was matched.

What it is and isn’t

The corporate ownership dataset lists corporate proprietors only. A site with no match may be privately owned, publicly owned or unregistered, and the data can’t tell which. Matches are postcode approximations, not parcel intersections. A matched site means a corporate title exists in the same postcode, not on the site; where a postcode holds several, the code keeps one of them. By name, 97 of the 397 matches (24%) are councils, trusts, utilities or other institutions, and many others are ordinary businesses, so the 397 are not a count of corporate control of contested land. This is also not a measure of unregistered land. An earlier comparison with a national registration baseline was withdrawn for that reason.

What we didn’t test

Option agreements and land banking are a second kind of opacity, but no public register exists, so the thesis names the mechanism and makes no claim about it. Having no corporate owner matched also doesn’t predict the permit decision (OR 0.75, 95% CI 0.44–1.28, p = 0.34, 619 decided sites).

Revised 12 November 2026: The 39% headline is withdrawn for now. Added that 97 of the 397 postcode matches are councils, trusts, utilities or institutions by name, and that postcode matching can mismatch parcels.