Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what recent assessment he has made of the extent of offshore ownership of UK freeholds.

In March 2016, HM Land Registry published, for free, information on registered land in England and Wales that was owned by overseas companies. Updates to this data set have been available at a charge and the datasets (both free and chargeable) are accessible at https://www.gov.uk/guidance/hm-land-registry-overseas-companies-data.

As part of the government’s housing white paper, Fixing our broken housing market, HM Land Registry committed to become the world’s leading land registry for speed, simplicity and an open approach to data. This will include releasing later this year, free of charge, the updated overseas company ownership data set.

This open approach to data will better support development, ensure financial stability, collection of taxes, law enforcement and the protection of national security.