GAINING GROUND III – Saga's end In the last two issues I’ve been recounting the saga of my attempts to get the Land Registry to amend the western boundary of my land. I claimed that what is now my garden should include a strip of land which was adjacent to the unregistered land that I had purchased as a building plot. The seller had told me that the strip of land was not owned by him and was not part of the plot, and so the plot was registered with the land excluded. But investigations later led me to believe that the strip should have been included. Initially the Land Registry would not accept my claim and I had to do a lot of work to convince them otherwise. I showed them historical aerial photos of the land, and got the Ordnance Survey to correct their inaccurate plan of the locality. Finally, in March 2002, the Land Registry did agree to rectify the boundary, and I thought, at the time, that I had cause to celebrate. (See the diagram showing the new boundary. I’ve marked the strip of land in yellow.) The disputed strip of land (New plot boundary in red; disputed land in yellow) The Land Registry told me to send them the charge certificate for the land so that it could be amended. The certificate was kept by my mortgage company, and since I wanted to also get the eastern boundary of my land rectified, I thought it better to delay sending the charge certificate until the matter of the eastern boundary had also been sorted out. But that was a mistake. The matter of sorting out the eastern boundary dragged on – not least because the firm of solicitors who had done the conveyancing for me couldn’t find their file! Anyway, in September 2003 I wanted to put a fence along the new boundary, and so sent letters by recorded delivery to the squatting neighbours. I required them to get their possessions off my land. The letter included a copy of the Land Registry’s plan showing the rectified boundary. My ‘bogus’ claim About three weeks later, I was surprised to receive a letter from a local solicitor. He represented my neighbours and the gist of his letter was that the registered boundary of my land was unchanged. He wrote to me: GAINING GROUND III – Saga's end. 1 JULY 2005. Your claim to have the disputed area of land registered in your title is entirely bogus. And he went on: It is most certainly the case that the land does not and has never formed part of your property. What had gone wrong? I checked the registered boundary by downloading the registered plan from the web (£2, details in the March issue of the magazine). The solicitor was right in one respect – the boundary was, indeed, unchanged. I phoned the Land Registry to find out why. They told me that because I hadn’t sent in the charge certificate, the change to the official plan had not been made – a connection that I had not been aware of. A new procedure It was now too late to send in the charge certificate. The Land Registration Act 2002 had just come into force, and amongst other things this act made charge certificates (and land certificates) irrelevant. And after obtaining the advice of one of their lawyers, the Land Registry told me that for the boundary to be rectified I would now have to follow the new procedure laid down in the new act – their previous agreement to rectify the boundary no longer held. Crucially, under the new procedure, the neighbours (and indeed anyone else) would be given the opportunity to object to any change. And object the neighbours did. In mid June, 2004, the Land Registry notified me of their objection, with a copy of their reasons as set out by their solicitor. My neighbours’ case The neighbours had dropped their assertion that the ownership of the strip of land was lost in the mist of time. They now claimed that it was owned by the village school, which a few years earlier had purchased the old orchard at the end of the strip. They were now saying that, as the school didn’t require the land for access, the school had abandoned it. I thought they made a mistake in putting forward this argument, since it was so easy to refute. I contacted the legal department of the local council, and they confirmed that they did own the old orchard on behalf of the school – but they didn’t own the strip of land nor have a right of way over it. (My neighbours’ original story of the ownership being lost in the mist of time would have been harder to disprove.) Cheekily, the solicitor also used a copy of the 1927 site plan that one of my neighbours had snatched away from me. He suggested to the Land Registry that they measure the distance on the ground to see which boundary conformed with the site measurement given on the plan. I heartily agreed with this suggestion, knowing that measurement would favour my case, not theirs. So I was not at all perturbed by my neighbours’ case. And I hoped their solicitor would be charging them fat fees for his work. I confirmed to the Land Registry that I wished to proceed with the application. Adjudication The Land Registry rightly tries to get people in dispute to come to some agreement amongst themselves, and so at this stage they sent me and the neighbours a form asking GAINING GROUND III – Saga's end. 2 JULY 2005. us if we wished to negotiate. At the beginning of this saga, I had offered to split the land 50:50 with the neighbours, but since then I had done so much work investigating the matter and I now found my own case so convincing that I was not willing to compromise. Interestingly, the other side said they were willing to negotiate. Were they coming to realise the weakness of their case? Anyway, in July 2004 the matter was referred to the Adjudicator to HM Land Registry. The Land Registry prepared the case summary and sent it off to the adjudicator in London. The adjudicator is independent of the Land Registry and is appointed by the Lord Chancellor. In September, the adjudicator wrote to me giving me 28 days to send to him a statement of my case, with a copy to be sent to the objectors (my neighbours). A guide to the procedures came with the letter. The statement of case had to be prepared in a methodical way. In particular, all the supporting documents had to be carefully listed – in my case, there were no witnesses that I intended to call upon. I sent off my statement of case and was expecting a wait of up to 28 days for the objectors to put forward their statement of case. Instead, the adjudicator sent me a letter saying that the neighbours had withdrawn their objection! I expect the fee that their solicitor would have charged them for preparing a statement of case, and the weakness of their case, had brought about my neighbours’ change of mind. Some four years after my first enquiries about the ownership of the land, and after filling three ring binders with correspondence and other documents, the saga had finally come to an end. And just to check, I downloaded once again the registered plan for my land – yes, the strip of land was now officially mine! Further steps in the adjudication procedure What would have happened if the case had proceeded? Usually there would be a hearing like an informal court of law, either in London or locally. But if the case were trivial, or if the participants requested it, the adjudicator could decide the case without a hearing, making the decision on the basis of the statements presented. On the other hand, if there were very important or difficult issues at stake, the adjudicator could order one of the parties to start court proceedings. (Or, indeed, either party could take the matter to court if they preferred that to adjudication.) Last words We’ve come almost to the end of this mini-series about land law. There’s just a couple of topics to cover that are outstanding from an earlier article. Ransom strips A ransom strip usually comes about when a landowner wants to retain control over some land that he is selling off, more control than he could get by putting a restrictive covenant on the land. The seller retains a strip of land between the land being sold and the highway. This strip may be only a yard wide, but it enables its owner to control access to the larger piece of land, and hence to control the use made of the land. When you are buying a building plot, always be wary about the possible existence of a ransom strip. If there is a ransom strip and the owner is willing to sell it to you, what is the strip worth? Basically, it is worth whatever the buyer and seller can agree on, but you can be sure that a ransom strip is valuable far beyond its size. There is a rule of thumb called the GAINING GROUND III – Saga's end. 3 JULY 2005. Stokes–Cambridge formula (named after the protagonists in a 1961 court case): the strip is valued at one third of the value of the plot with the two pieces of land combined.