Ownership certificates on a planning application

 

Ownership certificates are the part of the application form where you tell the council who owns the land. They look like a formality and they are not. Get one wrong and the council should not entertain the application at all, and a permission granted on a false certificate can be unpicked long afterwards.

The duty comes from section 65 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. The detail sits in articles 13 and 14 of the Development Management Procedure Order 2015, SI 2015/595. Article 13 says who must be given notice of your application. Article 14 says you must certify that you have done it.

This page covers England. Section 65 extends to Wales as well, but Wales has its own procedure order and readers there should take local advice.

 

What ownership certificates are for

 

Planning permission runs with the land, not with the applicant. Anyone may apply for permission over land they do not own. The trade off is that the people with a real legal stake in that land are told about it, so they can have their say before the council decides. This is where an ownership certificate comes in.

Section 65(5) puts it bluntly: a local planning authority shall not entertain an application for planning permission unless the requirements imposed by virtue of that section have been satisfied. Article 11(2)(b) of the 2015 Order carries that through into validation, because the council only has to acknowledge an application once it has received the certificate required by article 14. Section 327A of the same Act adds a second bar in almost identical language, requiring an authority not to entertain an application that fails to comply with requirements as to its form or content.

One point that surprises people: the familiar Certificates A, B, C and D are not set out in the Order at all. Article 14 simply says you must certify, on a form published by the Secretary of State or one substantially to the same effect, that the relevant requirements of article 13 have been met. The lettering comes from the standard application form, which is why the wording is the same whichever council you apply to.

 

Who counts as an owner

 

Owner is defined in section 65(8) and it is narrower than most people expect. An owner is a person who:

• is the estate owner in respect of the fee simple, in plain terms the freeholder
• is entitled to a tenancy granted or extended for a term of years certain with not less than seven years unexpired
• on a minerals application, is entitled to an interest in a prescribed mineral, which article 13(8) defines as any mineral other than oil, gas, coal, gold or silver

That leaves a lot of people out. A tenant with a five year lease is not an owner. Nor is a licensee, a mortgage lender, or a neighbour whose garden backs onto the site. They may still object once the council publicises the application, but you do not have to serve them with notice.

The date that matters is fixed. Article 13(7) sets the prescribed date as the day 21 days before the date of the application. You are certifying about the people who were owners on that day, not on the day you press submit.

 

Which ownership certificate to sign

 

Four ownership certificates, and you sign one of them:

• Certificate A where you owned all of the application site on the prescribed date, nobody else did, and no part of it is an agricultural holding
• Certificate B where somebody else owned part or all of it, you know who they are, and you have served notice on every one of them
• Certificate C where you have served notice on the owners you could identify but, despite reasonable steps, you could not trace them all
• Certificate D where you could not identify any of the other owners at all

Ownership Certificates C and D carry an extra step. Article 13(1)(b) requires publication of the notice in a newspaper circulating in the locality, after the prescribed date, and only where you have taken reasonable steps to find the names and addresses and failed. Reasonable steps means a proper search, starting with the Land Registry title, not a glance at whatever deeds you happen to hold.

Ownership Certificate A is the one most often signed wrongly. If the land is registered to your limited company and the application is in your own name, those are two different legal persons and A is not correct. The other common slip is agricultural land, which is dealt with below.

 

Serving notice on owners and agricultural tenants

 

Article 13 requires requisite notice, meaning the form set out in Schedule 2 to the 2015 Order or a form substantially to the same effect. Three points catch people out:

• the notice cannot be served electronically; article 13(9) expressly excludes notice served using electronic communications, so an email to the freeholder does not discharge the duty
• Schedule 2 was replaced on 1st April 2026 by the Town and Country Planning (Appeals) (Written Representations Procedure) (England) (Amendment and Saving Provision) Regulations 2026, SI 2026/122, so an old template saved to your desktop may be the wrong form
• the deadline you write on the notice is not always 21 days; the form provides for 21 days beginning with the date of service, or 14 days beginning with the date of publication, whichever applies, so a newspaper notice under Certificate C or D runs on the shorter period

The 1st April 2026 form also carries a warning that was not there before, and it matters more than it looks. It tells owners and agricultural tenants that if permission is refused and the applicant appeals, and that appeal goes down the expedited written representations route, whatever they said to the council will simply be passed to the Secretary of State and there will be no chance to add anything. For anyone with an interest in the land, the deadline on that notice is realistically their only opportunity to be heard.

Agricultural tenants must be served whether or not they are owners. Section 65(8) defines an agricultural tenant as a tenant under a tenancy to which the Agricultural Holdings Act 1986 applies, or a tenant under a farm business tenancy within the meaning of the Agricultural Tenancies Act 1995. If any part of the site is an agricultural holding, the form asks you to say so, and the tenant gets notice. The notice has to explain why that matters, because it carries a statement of agricultural tenants’ rights: a grant of planning permission for non-agricultural development may affect a tenant’s security of tenure. It carries a matching statement of owners’ rights, confirming that a permission does not affect an owner’s right to keep or dispose of their property unless an agreement or a lease provides otherwise.

This changes which certificate you sign, and it is easily missed. Article 13(1) requires notice to any person who is an owner of the land or a tenant, and for article 13 a tenant means the tenant of an agricultural holding. So a sole freeholder who has let the land on an Agricultural Holdings Act tenancy or a farm business tenancy still has somebody to serve, and cannot sign Certificate A. Sole ownership plus an agricultural holding means Certificate B.

This duty is yours as the applicant. It is separate from the council’s own publicity duty under article 15, which is the site notice, the press notice and the letters to neighbours. Our page on publicity and neighbour consultation covers that side of it.

 

Getting ownership certificates wrong

 

There are three separate consequences, and they bite at different times.

The first is validation. A missing or obviously defective certificate means the council should not entertain the application, and in practice it comes straight back as invalid. That is a delay rather than a disaster, provided you catch it early.

The second is criminal. Under section 65(6) it is an offence to issue a certificate containing a statement you know to be false or misleading in a material particular, or to issue one recklessly. On summary conviction the penalty is a fine not exceeding level 5 on the standard scale, and since section 85 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 was commenced on 12th March 2015 a level 5 fine in England and Wales is unlimited. Section 65(9) is the sting in the tail: notwithstanding section 127 of the Magistrates’ Courts Act 1980, a magistrates’ court may try an information for the offence whenever it is laid. There is no six month clock. A false certificate signed years ago is still prosecutable. The two rules interact in a way worth knowing: the unlimited fine applies only to offences committed on or after 12th March 2015, so a certificate signed before that date can still be prosecuted with no time limit at all, but the fine remains capped at the old level 5 figure of £5,000.

The third is the permission itself. A grant made on a bad certificate is not automatically void. It stands unless and until a court quashes it, and the route to a court is judicial review. An owner who was never told about an application affecting their land is exactly the sort of claimant a court will listen to.

The modern illustration is R (Bishop) v Westminster City Council [2017] EWHC 3102 (Admin), which the judge opened by calling it a cautionary tale about how not to submit a planning application. A man held a 999 year lease of the top flat in a block. The freeholder’s agent applied to build a new flat above it, named somebody else as the applicant, and signed Certificate A. Because the works clipped a small part of the leaseholder’s own flat, he was an owner of part of the application site and should have been served. He was not, and he only discovered the permission when a structural engineer turned up at his door with days left to challenge it.

Two things from that case are worth carrying away. The court confirmed that even with the mandatory wording of sections 65(5) and 327A it keeps a discretion over whether to quash, a point running back to Main v Swansea City Council (1985) 49 P&CR 26. But it also held that the scales do not start level: the stringent language tilts them towards quashing, particularly where the permission has not been implemented, nobody has spent money in reliance on it, and the claimant has not delayed. The certificate had been issued recklessly within section 65(6)(b), showing the sort of cavalier disregard for a statutory certificate that Newman J had condemned in R (Pridmore) v Salisbury District Council [2004] EWHC 2511 (Admin), another case about a wrongly signed Certificate A, in which he held that the public interest lay in quashing where there had been a deliberate failure to comply with the mandatory requirements of the statutory scheme. The permission was quashed. Where a claimant owns no part of the site at all, the outcome is likely to be different.

 

Cost, refusal and appeals

 

There is no separate fee for an ownership certificate. It is part of the application form, and what you pay is the application fee itself, which is set nationally and depends on the type of development. Our planning application fees page carries the current figures. Certificates C and D do bring a real cost, because the newspaper notice is bought from the newspaper at its own advertising rates, and there is no statutory scale for it.

If the council refuses to validate the application over your certificate, there is no right of appeal against that refusal. The validation dispute procedure in article 12 is aimed at particulars or evidence required under a council’s local list, so it does not help with a national requirement like this one. Your options are to correct the certificate, or to argue the point and, if the council will not move, take it to the High Court.

If the application is validated and later refused, the ordinary right of appeal applies in the usual way. Take particular care with a non-determination appeal, because the Planning Inspectorate decides for itself whether the underlying application was valid, and a doubtful certificate is one of the things most likely to sink it.

 

When you do not need one

 

Article 14 bites where an application for planning permission is made. Some things that feel like applications are not:

• a non-material amendment under section 96A has its own regime; article 10(3) makes you notify owners and agricultural tenants, telling them what the application is for and that representations must reach the council within 14 days, but there is no certificate to sign
• a Crown development application referred back to the council by the Secretary of State under section 293D(7) is taken outside articles 13 and 14 by article 8A(3), provided the equivalent notice and certificate under the Crown Development Applications Order 2025 were dealt with when the application was first made

Two more sit outside it, both because the certificate has already been dealt with earlier in the same process:

• an application for approval of reserved matters is not an application for planning permission; ownership was certified at the outline stage, and the reserved matters application is only settling the details left over
• on permission in principle, the certificate belongs to the technical details consent stage rather than the permission in principle stage itself

An application under section 73 to vary a condition is a different matter. That is an application for planning permission, so a certificate is required there in the ordinary way.

 

Should you apply over land you do not own?

 

You are allowed to. Whether you should is a different question. Planning permission gives you no right at all to go onto anyone else’s land, so a permission over a neighbour’s strip is worth very little unless they later agree to sell it, or to grant access. Serving notice also tells them precisely what you are planning, which can harden a position that was previously soft.

Where the third party land is a few centimetres of eaves overhang or part of a shared drive, applying and serving notice is usually the right call. Where the scheme simply cannot be built without land you have no realistic prospect of acquiring, the honest answer is normally to redesign first and apply afterwards.

 

See also our guide to the types of planning application.

 

Relevant legislation

 

Legislation is amended often. When you follow these links, open the Changes to Legislation panel on each page to check whether anything is outstanding or not yet in force.

• Section 65, Town and Country Planning Act 1990
• Article 13, Development Management Procedure Order 2015
• Article 14, Development Management Procedure Order 2015
• Article 11, Development Management Procedure Order 2015
• SI 2026/122, which replaced Schedule 2 to the 2015 Order

Other Planning Application Sections

 

Ownership Certificates Page Updated: 30th July 2026