Land Acquisition Evidence Workspace

Large regeneration and infrastructure programmes must identify land interests, negotiate purchases, record engagement and mitigation, coordinate specialist advisers, and show that compulsory purchase steps were followed correctly. On fragmented sites, information may be split across consultancy systems, geographic information system (GIS) maps, spreadsheets, correspondence and property case-management tools. Changes in ownership, occupation or rights can then be hard to reconcile. Teams may duplicate work, produce inconsistent schedules, maps or evidence, and spend time rebuilding the history of negotiations, notices and unresolved interests. Programme leaders may also lack a current view of issues threatening acquisition milestones.

Potential customers are mayoral development corporations, combined authorities, local authorities, public development bodies, infrastructure promoters and programme teams coordinating several suppliers. Users include land and estates officers, land referencers, surveyors, lawyers and programme managers. Owners and occupiers are affected stakeholders, not data products. Qualified professionals would retain responsibility for legal judgements, valuations, compensation, formal documents and statutory approvals.

A supplier-neutral workspace, owned by the acquiring authority, could link every parcel and legal interest to its source, effective date, ownership or occupation changes, engagement, negotiations, mitigation commitments, adviser actions and statutory readiness. It would import existing adviser spreadsheets and system exports, link to GIS and title references, flag conflicts, track milestones and produce controlled evidence indexes. It should preserve change history, protect personal data and support human review rather than automate valuations, legal classifications, compensation decisions or statutory documents.

Authorities using several advisers may pay for continuity, independent control of records, less reconciliation work and earlier visibility of evidence gaps. Indicative pricing is £30,000–£90,000 per authority or major programme each year, plus £15,000–£50,000 for configuration, migration and integrations, but these are medium-confidence hypotheses. A proposed £20,000, 12-week pilot would cover one active programme, up to 250 parcels and at least two external adviser datasets. Existing specialist systems create strong competition.

The narrow gap requires validation: programmes below HS2 scale may already receive complete shared portals, access and exports from lead consultants. Interviews with 6–10 active or recent programmes should measure duplicate entry, reconciliation cycles and audit-pack preparation. A pilot should reduce monthly reconciliation and reporting time by at least 30%, reveal material conflicts earlier and leave the authority wanting an independent shared record. Stop if incumbent portals provide equivalent access and exports at no material extra cost, or if lower programme scale fails the value-for-money test.