The State Land Office (SPÚ) will increase the number of land plots it manages by about a quarter from next year. The state will acquire about 95,000 agricultural plots with sufficiently unidentified owners. The amount of land managed by the office will increase by almost a fifth. Most of the land is arable land and permanent grassland, announced Petra Kazdová, spokeswoman for the office. Land with unidentified owners will be transferred to the state from 1 January 2024 on the basis of the Civil Code. The Land Office will demand payment from the users for the newly acquired land.
According to the Office for State Representation in Property Matters (OSPM), a property has an insufficiently identified owner if no name is registered in the cadastre or the registration does not allow sufficient identification. Most of such entries date back to the period before 1989, when the cadastre was not properly maintained and at some point was not even kept. The Land Registry Office will further transfer the land that becomes the property of the Sate to other state institutions. For example, forest land will be acquired by the state enterprise Lesy ČR (Forests of the Czech Republic). The Land Office will receive properties that form the agricultural land fund, which are arable land, vineyards, hop farms, gardens, orchards or permanent grassland.
“In total, it is about 95,000 plots with an area of almost 25,000 ha, or 20,000 ha if we take into account co-ownership shares,” said Kazdová. The authority will not take over about 800 plots of land located in national parks and small-area specially protected areas, which will be acquired by specialised state institutions. The largest share, roughly 64,000 plots, is arable land with an area of about 16,000 hectares. Another 21,000 plots of about 3,000 hectares are permanent grassland, the spokeswoman said.
The authority will demand payment for the use of agricultural land from 1 January 2024. Earlier, it also announced that it would increase the rent for renting state-owned farmland from August 1 this year. It will now be 5.8 per cent of the average price, up from 2.2 per cent since 2014. “In addition, the acquired land will be used mainly for the creation of a reserve of state land for the implementation of state development programmes, land improvements and solving problems of drought and water retention in the landscape, land swaps or the issuance of replacement land under the law on the regulation of property relations to land and other agricultural property,” Kazdová added. She said the matter would be time-consuming and staff-intensive for the authority.
For example, the land office for the Central Bohemian Region and Prague will administer 89 percent more land and its number will increase by more than half. It is about 20,700 properties with an area of about 6,000 hectares.
In the Zlín Region, the office will manage 49 per cent more land than at present and its area will increase by 52 per cent. There will also be a significant increase compared to the current situation in the South Moravian Region. With the transfer of property, the regional branch of the Land Office will manage 63 percent more land and its area will increase by 45 percent, by more than 4,000 hectares.
The Office for State Representation in Property Matters previously said that as of February 1 this year, there were 342,952 entries with insufficiently identified or unknown owners and 121,423 insufficiently identified persons in the land registry. The office points out that one property can be owned by multiple insufficiently identified owners and one owner can have multiple properties at the same time. The real number of properties is therefore 147,004, mainly arable land, meadows and forest land, and 3,555 buildings.
Source: SPÚ and CTK
