The Conservative party has proposed an ambitious plan to shake up the property industry by digitising the planning system, and creating "the largest repository of open land data in the world".

This would be the first time that an attempt was made by a Government to map exactly who owns the land in Britain; the Land Registry has said that 20pc of land in England and Wales is unaccounted for, partly because registration is only compulsory when land changes hands, and some has not been sold in decades.

The Tories said that they would use data from the Land Registry, Ordnance Survey, the Valuation Office Agency, the Hydrographic Office and Geological Survey in order to "release massive value from our land that currently is simply not realised".

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Campaigners believe opening up these data will help curb landbanking, when developers and owners sit on land without building on it, waiting for it to go up in value and blocking the potential construction of vital homes. It is not known exactly how much land most of the major house builders and other strategic land companies own, because there is no need to register land option agreements publicly.

Anne Baxendale from housing charity Shelter said: “Problems in the land market are right at the heart of our housing crisis, and the way we use land data is currently stuck in the dark ages. It’s so complex and costly for small housebuilders to get information on who owns and controls land that it creates an unnecessary barrier to building homes.

“Making data on land more accessible would be a small but very powerful change which could help the country build the homes we so desperately need."

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It comes less than a year after the plan to privatise the Land Registry was shelved after the Competition and Markets Authority said the move would "harm consumers".

Lucian Cook, head of residential research at Savills, said that this was a step forward to identify and open up land for development, "however a lot depends on the implementation and the willingness of local planning authorities to use it proactively."

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The Tories' manifesto added to the Government's current target of building one million new homes by 2020, promising 500,000 more by 2022, as well as indicating it would reform land value capture as a means of funding local infrastructure.

It also said that the move to create this bank of land data would "help people and developers build to virtual mapping of Britain for use in video games and virtual reality."