Everyone says communities have had a right to save local buildings since 2011. How well has that actually worked?

what wasLOCAL

What the rules say

Expired - Formerly Listed

legislation.gov.uk — Assets of Community Value complete list - London Borough of Camden open data, not dated by its publisher; read 22 September 2026

The page quoted here is not watched yet, so this page cannot say whether it has changed.

Less well than it sounds, and one council publishes enough data to show it. Camden have listed assets of community value since 2013 and publish the whole register - 105 nominations, with the decision, the group that made it, and what happened next. Ninety-one were successfully listed. Sixty-one of those have since dropped off the list: a listing under the current law lasts five years and then expires. Fifty-four of the nominations were pubs, and thirty-four of those pubs are no longer protected. And the right itself - the moratorium that gives a community group time to raise money when an owner decides to sell - has been triggered six times in fourteen years. THIS IS ONE LONDON BOROUGH and it may not look like yours. It is the only borough in this build whose register is published in a form anybody can check, which is a finding in itself.

ONE COUNCIL. Scoped LOCAL deliberately: this answer describes the London Borough of Camden and is offered as an illustration of how the current law behaves, not as a national statistic. Fifteen councils of roughly three hundred publish this data at all.

What to do

1. Ask your own council for its register and its expiry dates. Camden is one borough; your area's numbers will differ.
2. If your building was listed more than five years ago, check whether the listing is still live. It may have expired without anybody telling you.
3. Re-nominate if it has expired. There is no limit on how often a building can be listed.
4. If you are nominating for the first time, plan for the moratorium rather than the listing. The listing is the easy part; the money is what decides it.