Contractual control rights: new disclosure risk for development pipelines

Developers are used to treating options, conditional contracts, pre-emption rights and promotion agreements as private commercial tools. That is about to change. A new statutory regime will require prescribed information about certain contractual control rights over registered land in England and Wales to be submitted to HM Land Registry and, in due course, included in a public dataset.

Contractual control rights granted now are already within the transitional reporting regime and, if they are caught, information about them must be submitted by 6 October 2027.

Why this is more than an administrative change

The regime is intended to make visible the arrangements that sit behind many development pipelines. A developer may not own a site, but an option, conditional contract or promotion agreement will give it a meaningful degree of control over whether, when and how that land comes forward for development.

The date that matters

The Provision of Information (Contractual Control) (Registered Land) Regulations were made on 8 June 2026 and come into force on 6 April 2027. That gap is important. A relevant contractual control right granted during the transitional period, from and including 8 June 2026 up to and including 5 April 2027, must be reported by 6 October 2027.

This means that agreements being signed now should be treated as subject to the new reporting regime. The system may not yet be live, but the information needed for the later submission should be collected before completion. Trying to extract the required details from counterparties in 2027 will undoubtedly be time-consuming and difficult.

A quick test for new agreements

Not every land agreement will be caught. Developers should ask five questions when entering into a new arrangement:

1. Does the agreement give a party a right to acquire land or direct a disposal to someone else?
2. Is the land registered freehold land in England or Wales, or a registered leasehold estate with at least 15 years remaining when the right is granted?
3. Is the right held for business or charitable purposes or the exercise of functions of a public nature?
4. Does the right relate to future development involving one or more dwellings or a building with new floorspace of 100 square metres or more?
5. Does the period of control last 18 months or longer, including potential extensions?

If the answer to all those questions is yes, the agreement must be added to the register unless an exclusion applies. 

Arrangements most likely to be caught

In a development context, the agreements most likely to require registration are option agreements, conditional contracts, pre-emption rights and promotion agreements where the promoter can require or direct a relevant disposal. Retailers and occupiers watch out: an agreement for lease with development obligations could also be within scope.

When the regime does not bite

Some arrangements are excluded from the regime, including rights granted purely as loan security or to secure overage, rights held exclusively for non-development purposes, section 106 planning rights relating exclusively to infrastructure, amenities or services and national security or defence contracts. Restrictive covenants are also outside the scope of the regulations.

Responsibility sits with the beneficiary

The duty to submit information sits with the person entitled to enforce the contractual control right. In most development transactions, that means the developer, promoter or acquisition entity. The submission must be made digitally through a solicitor.

From 6 April 2027, relevant new rights must be submitted within 60 calendar days. Further submissions will also be required where a registered right is assigned or varied, or where it expires, is exercised or otherwise comes to an end.

Required information

The submission obligation is not just a yes-or-no exercise. The required information is detailed and will include information about the parties, including the date and place of birth of any individual grantor, the type of right, the date and description of the agreement, when the right can be exercised and its conditions, the period of control, title numbers and the extent of land affected. The person registering will therefore need to secure the co-operation of the grantor to obtain some of the information.

Significant penalties for non-compliance

If the regime applies and the required information has not been provided, HM Land Registry will not register a notice or restriction to protect the relevant contractual control document. That could create practical difficulties where protection on the title is important to the commercial value of the right.

There are also criminal offence provisions under the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023 for failure to comply without reasonable excuse and for knowingly or recklessly providing false or misleading information.

When will the data be published?

The dataset is expected to be made available to the public in April 2028 after the regime has been operating for a year. Some personal information will be withheld, but the register is designed to make site control more visible.

Consider how the register may affect your commercial strategy

For developers, this may have consequences beyond compliance. In future, competitors, landowners, authorities and communities will have earlier visibility of development pipelines and - importantly - how long land is controlled. This reduced confidentiality could influence land assembly strategy and whether to use contractual control rights or proceed directly to an acquisition.

The new regime should therefore be treated as a trigger for reviewing development strategy, and not simply as an administrative requirement.