Getting Your Land Ready to Sell: Wayleaves, Farm Schemes, Services and Paperwork

A buyer of land, whether it buys today or under an option once planning is secured, needs to know three things the title register often does not show. First, who else has a right to be on or under the land: the electricity network operator with a pole line, the gas or water company with a main, the phone operator with a mast. Second, what the land is committed to: a farm scheme agreement that runs for years, a licence to take water. Third, its history: past planning applications, past uses, how the water drains off it.

Some parts of the preparation have their own guides, and each is worth reading if it applies to you. To be sure of your boundaries and title plan, start with how to check exactly what land you own; if the land has never been registered, read what to do when your land is not registered. A tenant or grazier on the land is covered in the guide to tenancies and vacant possession, and a loan secured on the land in selling land with a mortgage. Rights of way and old covenants in the deeds are dealt with separately, and if a path crosses the land, the guide to a public footpath across your field is the one to read.

If an electricity line crosses your field, the right to keep it there is usually either a wayleave or an easement. The difference matters more than any other point in this guide, because it decides what happens to the line when the land changes hands.

A wayleave is a personal agreement between the landowner or occupier and the network operator, often paid as a yearly sum. The government's guidance on necessary wayleaves describes it as an agreement that can only be enforced against a particular owner or occupier of the land, and says that voluntary wayleaves normally contain a clause requiring six or twelve months' notice of termination. An easement is different: it is a right granted by deed that attaches to the land itself, so it passes with the land to the next owner. Because an easement belongs to the land, it is the kind of right your title register may record; a wayleave, being personal, lives in your own files and the operator's.

• Poles and overhead lines. Match each line to a payment letter or agreement, which will name the operator.
• Pylons. Note which towers stand on your land and which lines merely pass over it, since both can carry rights.
• Underground cables. These are the ones most easily forgotten, because nothing shows on the surface apart from an occasional marker post.
• Gas mains, water mains and sewers. These may have no paperwork in your own files at all, so the title register and the utility's own records matter as much as anything you hold.

Match each pole, marker post, inspection cover and valve box you find on the land to a payment or a document. Anything you cannot match is something to record, not to worry about: it is exactly the sort of gap a solicitor is used to filling.

Schedule 4 to the Electricity Act 1989 sets out the rules. The government's guidance states that a voluntary wayleave ceases to be binding following a change in ownership or occupancy of the land, and that the new owner or occupier can then serve a notice to remove the line at any time. That does not mean the line simply comes down. The process runs like this:

1. Notice to remove. The owner or occupier serves notice on the network operator requiring it to remove the line, once the wayleave has ended, been terminated under its own terms, or stopped binding after a change of owner.
2. Three months for the operator. Under paragraph 8 of the Schedule, if the operator neither applies for a necessary wayleave nor obtains a compulsory purchase order within three months, it must comply with the notice at the end of that period.
3. An application for a necessary wayleave. If the operator does apply within the three months, it does not have to remove the line while the Secretary of State decides.
4. The decision. The Secretary of State may grant a necessary wayleave on terms he thinks fit, for the period it states. If it is refused, the operator must remove the line within one month or any longer time allowed.
5. Compensation. Paragraph 7 lets the occupier and owner recover compensation for the grant, for damage and for disturbance, as a lump sum, periodic payments or both. If it cannot be agreed, the Upper Tribunal (Lands Chamber) settles it.

For new lines, the guidance sets one firm limit worth knowing: the Secretary of State cannot grant a necessary wayleave where a dwelling covers the land or where planning permission exists for a house to be built, unless the line is to be placed underground. The guidance adds that this limit does not apply to lines already in place.

One detail of the guidance matters to anyone who has just inherited or bought land with a line on it. A new owner who carries on accepting wayleave payments may be treated as having agreed to a fresh, implied wayleave. The guidance says a single payment made after a notice to remove is unlikely to have that effect, but continued acceptance over a sustained period could, and the full two-step process of notice to terminate and then notice to remove would then apply.

In practice, a line across a field is handled in the design of a scheme, either by laying out the homes and open space around it, or by arranging with the operator to divert it or put it underground. It is one of the constraints any assessment of the land takes into account, alongside access, drainage and the council's position.

Ask the people who own them, and use the free service that brings most of them together. Your own records come first, because the payment letters for a wayleave usually name the operator and give a reference. After that, the utilities' own records fill the gaps.

LinesearchbeforeUdig, usually shortened to LSBUD, is a free online safe digging service. It describes itself as covering over 160 member asset owners, with more than 2 million kilometres of pipes and cables, including electricity, gas, high pressure fuel and oil, water and fibre optic networks. You enter the area, the service checks it against its members' assets, and it puts you in touch with the owners of anything nearby. It covers its members only, which it puts at over 60% of Great Britain's utility infrastructure, so the local electricity network operator, the gas distribution company and the water company are worth asking directly as well.

• Your wayleave payment letters, which name the operator and the wayleave reference.
• An LSBUD enquiry drawn around the whole of the land you might sell, not just one field.
• The electricity network operator's records for the lines and cables it owns in your area.
• The water company's plans of its mains and sewers.
• The gas distribution network's plans, which also show any high pressure main.
• Your title register, for any easement granted by a deed and registered against the land.

The Electronic Communications Code, set out in Schedule 3A to the Communications Act 2003, gives phone and broadband operators rights to keep apparatus on land under a code agreement with the landowner, whom the Code calls the site provider. A mast on a hill, a cabinet by a gateway or a fibre cable along a headland may all be covered.

The key point for anyone selling is that ending a code agreement takes a formal notice under the Code itself. Under paragraph 31 of the Code, the site provider has to give a notice ending the agreement on a date after the end of the period of 18 months beginning with the day the notice is given, and must state one of the grounds the Code allows. The date also cannot fall before the agreement would have ended, or could have been ended by the site provider, under its own terms, so a long fixed term still runs its course first. One of those grounds is that the site provider intends to redevelop all or part of the land, or neighbouring land, and could not reasonably do so unless the agreement ends. The others are substantial breaches by the operator, persistent delays in paying, and the operator not being entitled to the agreement under the Code's own test.

So a mast is something to mention early. In a corner any scheme would leave alone, it changes little. Where homes would go, the notice the Code requires becomes part of the planning timetable, so it is better known at the start.

Environmental land management agreements pay you for actions on named fields over a set period, and the current schemes require you to keep control of that land throughout. The schemes call this management control. Selling, letting or otherwise handing over a field means losing management control of it, and the agreement's rules then decide what follows.

The Sustainable Farming Incentive

The SFI26 terms are direct about transfers. Clause 8 says that where you sell, lease or otherwise transfer land so that you lose management control, the Rural Payments Agency will not usually allow you to transfer your Agreement to the new holder, and agrees only at its absolute discretion and in limited circumstances. Under clause 3.3, losing control of part of the land removes that land from the agreement, losing all of it ends the agreement, and in either case you may have to repay some or all of the grant already received. Clause 7 requires you to report the change in writing as soon as reasonably practicable.

The terms contain no clause about planning permission or development as such. What they turn on is control of the land and doing the actions. A planning application on a field does not, by itself, change either; the date that matters is the date the land actually leaves your hands.

Countryside Stewardship and Higher Level Stewardship

Countryside Stewardship and Environmental Stewardship are more flexible about a new owner. The Countryside Stewardship Higher Tier guide says you can ask to transfer all or part of an agreement, emailing or writing to the Rural Payments Agency within 90 days, provided the new party agrees to complete the actions, and that you may have to repay some or all of the payments received during that agreement year. If the new party will not take the agreement on and the Agency ends it, the guide says your obligations would cease and you would not be expected to repay the grant received for the actions. It also says capital items must be maintained for five years from the agreement start date, and that you may need to repay the grant for capital items if the land is sold or transferred during that durability period. A new hedge or fence paid for by a grant is therefore one to record with its date. Environmental Stewardship, the scheme that includes Higher Level Stewardship, lets land stay in the agreement when sold if the new owner agrees to continue it, and warns that if the new owner does not, the agreement may be reclaimed and payments recovered.

How a Scheme Fits With Putting Land Forward

Under an option agreement with us, you keep owning and using the land, farming it and receiving the income, right up to completion. Your management control does not change when the agreement is signed, so a scheme agreement on the field is usually a matter of timing, not a problem. The agreement sets out the gap between the option being exercised and completion, so you can plan the last season on the land, and the date it leaves the scheme, with your land agent. Entering a new long-term environmental or woodland scheme on the site is one of the things to talk to us about first.

One related payment needs only a line: the Basic Payment Scheme's replacement, delinked payments, no longer depends on holding land, and our guide to retiring from farming explains when they end.

Three more kinds of record sit outside the title. Each affects what can be done with the land or what has to be passed on.

• Environmental designations. If any part of the land is a Site of Special Scientific Interest or holds a scheduled monument, works on it need separate consent, and the SFI26 terms themselves remind agreement holders that such consents are needed. Any notification letter from Natural England or Historic England belongs in the pack.
• Nitrate vulnerable zones. These are areas designated as at risk from agricultural nitrate pollution, and GOV.UK's collection on them puts them at about 55% of land in England. If your land is in one, you must follow rules on using nitrogen fertiliser and storing organic manure. For a buyer of building land this is mainly background, but your records of manure stores and spreading show how the land has been farmed.
• Water abstraction licences. A borehole, a spring or a river pump used for irrigation or livestock may be covered by an Environment Agency licence. A licence is held by a named person, not by the land, so a change of owner needs a formal step. The Agency treats transferring a whole licence from one person to another as an administrative variation, made on form WR165, with no charge. Splitting a licence between two or more people, for example where one field with a borehole is sold and the rest of the farm still needs the water, is called apportioning and is a minor variation on form WR166, for which a charge applies.

Abstraction licences carry one deadline worth knowing in a family. The Environment Agency's guidance says that when a licence holder dies, the personal representative must notify the Agency within 15 months, and if they do not, the licence becomes invalid and no one can abstract under it. Where land is being sorted out after a death, the water licence is easy to overlook and hard to replace.

Many fields have under-drainage, buried pipes that carry water to a ditch. They do not appear on the title register, so the best source is usually the family: an old drainage plan in a drawer, a contractor's invoice, or simply knowing where the outfalls run into the ditch. If a field you might sell drains across land you keep, or the other way round, a buyer's engineer will want to know, because a scheme has to keep that water moving.

Ditches and streams bring legal duties of their own. GOV.UK's guidance on owning a watercourse explains that you normally own a watercourse that runs on or under your land, and one on your boundary up to its centre; this is called riparian ownership. Ditches count as watercourses, and so do culverts, the pipes that carry water under a track or gateway. As a riparian owner you must let water flow naturally and may need to clear blockages that cause flooding to others. Works in or near a watercourse may need permission first: on a main river, an environmental permit from the Environment Agency; on any other watercourse, a Land Drainage Act consent from the lead local flood authority or the internal drainage board.

Two practical points follow. A ditch on a boundary is shared, so its upkeep, and any culvert in it, can involve a neighbour. And any record of standing water, flooding or a blocked culvert is worth writing down with the year, because whoever assesses the land will want to know how it behaves in a wet winter.

• Where the field drains run, if known, and where they outfall into a ditch.
• Which ditches are on your boundaries, and which run through the middle of a field.
• Any culverts under tracks or gateways, and who put them in.
• Any land drainage consent or internal drainage board correspondence.
• Any times the land has flooded or held water, with the year and roughly where.
• Where water for troughs and buildings comes from: the mains, a private supply or a borehole, and where the pipes run.

For land and commercial property, the standard set is the Commercial Property Standard Enquiries, known as CPSE. The general form is CPSE.1, which describes itself as general pre-contract enquiries for all commercial property transactions. Its copyright is held jointly by the member firms of the LPSLG and Thomson Reuters, and the form points to Thomson Reuters' Practical Law property service; version 4.0 is the one still in use in 2026. Your solicitor answers the enquiries on your behalf, but the facts come from you.

A copy of CPSE.1 completed by Lancashire County Council in August 2026, for the sale of part of a former school site in Leyland, is published on its website and shows the full list of headings. For a field, these are the ones that matter most:

None of these questions is a trap. They are there so that the buyer knows what it is buying, and an honest "not known" with an explanation is a perfectly good answer to some of them. What slows a deal down is the same question asked three times because the papers were never found.

Planning applications made on your land, and the decisions on them, are kept on a public record. Article 40 of the Town and Country Planning (Development Management Procedure) (England) Order 2015 requires each council to keep, in two parts, a register of planning applications: Part 1 for applications not yet decided, with the plans and any planning obligation, and Part 2 for every application, including the decision, the details of any conditions and the reference, date and effect of any appeal decision. The Order lets a council put the register on its website, and where it does, you can usually search it by address or on a map.

Searching it for your land and the fields around it shows whether anyone has applied before and with what result, whether any permission carries conditions that still apply, such as a limit on how a building may be used, and what has been decided nearby. Council letters about any of these belong in the pack, with any call for sites form the family once filled in.

• Applications on your own land, including small ones for a barn, a track or a change of use.
• Lawful development certificates, which confirm that an existing use or building is lawful.
• Enforcement letters, even old ones, and how they were resolved.
• Prior notifications for farm buildings and tracks, with the council's replies.

Past uses matter in a different way. A field that has only ever grown crops or grazed stock has a simple story. A yard, a former pit, a tipped area or an old fuel store has a longer one, and our guide to old yards and barns used for housing explains how contamination is investigated and dealt with. Write down what you know, with rough dates. Your memory of the land is evidence no search can supply.

• Every wayleave and easement document, with the most recent payment letter for each.
• A sketch of the land marking each pole, pylon, pipeline marker, inspection cover and mast.
• Replies from LSBUD and from the electricity, gas and water companies.
• Any phone mast or telecoms agreement, with its rent and dates.
• Each farm scheme agreement document, with its end date and any capital items and their dates.
• Any water abstraction licence, with its number and holder.
• Drainage plans, consents and your notes on drains, ditches and wet spots.
• Any notice or letter about a designation such as a Site of Special Scientific Interest.
• A list of past planning applications on the land, with the decision letters you hold.
• A short written note of past uses of each field, with rough dates.

1. Start with what you already hold. Go through the drawers and files and put every land document in one place, sorted by field rather than by date.
2. Walk the land. Mark on a plan everything above or below ground that belongs to someone else, and every gate, track and water point.
3. Send the enquiries. Make an LSBUD enquiry and ask the utilities for their plans. Replies take time, so this is worth doing early.
4. Check the scheme agreements. Log in to your Rural Payments account, download each agreement document, and note its end date and any capital items.
5. Search the planning register. Look up your land and the land around it, and print or save each decision notice.
6. Write the history down. A page of notes on how each field has been used, drained and reached is often the most useful document in the pack.
7. Hand it to your solicitor and land agent. They will turn it into answers to the formal enquiries when the time comes.

None of this has to be done before a first conversation, and we can start without it. Our initial review is a desktop exercise using publicly available information, and we do not contact the council, your neighbours or anyone else about your land without your agreement. If the land suits us and you choose to go ahead, we contribute to the reasonable cost of your own solicitor and land agent, so it costs you nothing to get it done properly, and they will work through the pack with you. For a straight answer on your own land before any of this, ask for a free desktop review of your land.