A Land Interest Questionnaire, or LIQ, is a form sent to owners, tenants and other people with a legal interest in land that a proposed infrastructure project might affect. It’s issued under section 52 of the Planning Act 2008, during the pre-application stage of a Development Consent Order (DCO), so the project team can identify everyone who needs to go in the Book of Reference before the application is submitted.
If you’ve been sent one, or you’re running the process that sends thousands of them, the practical questions are the same: what is it actually for, what happens if people don’t respond, and how do you keep track of who has, across a scheme that might affect hundreds or thousands of properties.
What is a Land Interest Questionnaire and why is it sent?
An LIQ asks a landowner, tenant, leaseholder or anyone else with an interest in a plot to confirm who they are and what their legal interest is: ownership, tenancy, a mortgage, an easement, or an entitlement to compensation under the Compulsory Purchase Act 1965, the Land Compensation Act 1973 or the Planning Act 2008 itself. The project team uses HM Land Registry data and its own research to determine who’s likely to be affected first, then sends the questionnaire to confirm and fill in the gaps, including interests that don’t appear in the Land Registry at all, such as some tenancies.
The answers feed the Book of Reference, the statutory document listing everyone with an interest in land affected by a Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project (NSIP), submitted to the Planning Inspectorate alongside the DCO application. Guidance from the Planning Inspectorate sets out how applicants should use section 52 of the Planning Act 2008 to gather this information during the pre-application stage. It’s the same mechanism whether the promoter is a rail scheme, a road scheme or an energy project: East West Rail’s land referencing programme, National Highways road schemes and offshore interconnector projects all run recognisably the same LIQ process.
What happens if you don’t respond to an LIQ?
Responding is voluntary in the first instance. Not completing an LIQ doesn’t stop you taking part in the DCO process later, and it doesn’t affect your entitlement to compensation if your land is compulsorily acquired or affected. Promoters generally encourage a response because it keeps the record accurate and means you hear about DCO milestones directly, rather than finding out some other way.
There’s a harder edge to it, though. If a promoter believes someone is unreasonably refusing to provide the information, it can apply to the Planning Inspectorate for authorisation to serve a land interests notice, a formal, legally enforceable request under the same part of the Planning Act 2008. That’s the exception rather than the norm, but it’s why an LIQ round on a live scheme is treated as part of the statutory process, not an optional survey.
Why an LIQ round is a bigger coordination problem than it looks
On paper, an LIQ round is a mail-out and a spreadsheet of responses. In practice, a major scheme can generate thousands of LIQs, sent in batches as the land referencing work progresses, chased over months, and updated every time a property changes hands or a new interest comes to light.
The people running it are usually a land referencing consultant or in-house team working from Land Registry extracts, GIS mapping and site walkovers, not from a single system of record. Responses come back by post, by email, through a project portal, or not at all. Somebody has to know, at any point, who’s been sent one, who’s replied, who’s been chased, and who’s now a “land interests notice” case. That’s before the Book of Reference itself has to be compiled and kept current for the examination.
This is the same coordination problem that shows up across DCO stakeholder engagement more broadly: several teams, often from several organisations, touching the same list of people, with no shared record of who did what.
Where a stakeholder management platform fits, and where it doesn’t
It’s worth being precise about this, because the two jobs get conflated. Title research and the legal compensation case itself sit with specialist land referencing expertise: working out who has an interest, valuing it, negotiating compulsory acquisition or compensation. That’s a land law and surveying job, not a software job, and it isn’t what Tractivity, the UK stakeholder relationship management platform, does.
What Tractivity is built for is the parallel record that an LIQ round still needs: who was sent a questionnaire, when, through which channel, whether they’ve replied, what was chased and when, and how that person then moves into the wider consultation programme, as an exhibition attendee, a survey respondent, or a named party at examination.
In practice that looks like:
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Every LIQ sent, logged against the recipient’s stakeholder record, alongside any other engagement they’ve had with the scheme, so a landowner who also attended a public exhibition isn’t tracked in two disconnected places.
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Mail synchronisation and mailshot tracking, so replies and non-replies are visible without someone manually reconciling a mailbox against a distribution list.
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A date-stamped, exportable audit trail of the whole exchange, ready if the Planning Inspectorate, an examining authority or an FOI request asks who was contacted and when.
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One record across every contractor and team working the same list, so the land referencing consultant, the in-house engagement team and the wider project team aren’t each keeping their own version.
EDF Energy runs its Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C consultation programmes this way, with around 30,000 issues logged and tagged and a 100% response rate maintained across 650+ events. National Grid, with 400+ users across its UK and US teams, and Anglian Water, coordinating the Cambridge Wastewater Treatment Plant Relocation, an NSIP, alongside more than 13,000 other stakeholders, both run the same principle: one record, however many teams are touching it.
Keeping the record straight as the scheme moves on
An LIQ round doesn’t end when the last response comes in. Interests change hands, new consultees emerge as the scheme design develops, and the same people reappear at examination and, later, during construction. What happens after a consultation closes is largely a question of whether the record from the LIQ stage was ever folded into the main engagement record, or left behind as its own spreadsheet. Projects that treat land referencing and stakeholder engagement as one continuous record, rather than two separate exercises run by two separate teams, are the ones that can still answer “who did we tell, and when” years later.
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Frequently asked questions
No, not at the point it’s sent. Responding is voluntary, and not responding doesn’t remove your right to take part in the DCO process or to compensation if your land is affected. Promoters can, in cases of unreasonable refusal, ask the Planning Inspectorate to authorise a formal land interests notice, which is legally enforceable.
Section 52 of the Planning Act 2008, which lets an applicant for a Development Consent Order seek information about interests in land during the pre-application stage, so it can compile an accurate Book of Reference.
No. Title research, valuation and compensation negotiation stay a specialist land law and surveying job. Software’s role is keeping the communications and audit trail, who was contacted, when, and what happened next, in one place across every team working the scheme.
An LIQ is narrowly about identifying legal interests in specific land for the Book of Reference. Wider stakeholder consultation, exhibitions, surveys, ongoing community engagement, covers everyone with an interest in the scheme, not only those with a legal interest in the land itself. The two lists overlap heavily, which is the argument for keeping them in one system rather than two.
It’s reflected in the Book of Reference submitted to the Planning Inspectorate, and used to keep affected parties updated on DCO milestones. As the scheme progresses to examination and construction, the same contacts typically continue to be engaged under the DCO’s requirements.
