Property Boundaries (Resolution of Disputes) Bill [HL]

Earl of Erroll Excerpts

Friday 11th September 2015 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

My Lords, I want to say a couple of brief things in the gap. A dispute such as this happened to my family and it would be useful if a proposal such as this covered it, although I am not sure whether it does.

What happened was that there was a privately owned lane with a verge along it. The title deeds to it were probably lost in the mists of time. No one could find them and it did not really matter. However, the people who owned land along the lane sold off building plots. The trouble is that the chap at the end of the lane, where it joined the highway, then put in a claim for adverse possession over the verge, which the Land Registry accepted, even though there was no fence along the verge edge. The registry said that the applicant had mown it or whatever, and agreed to the application. The challenge is that the water meters for the entire lane are at the end of it. That is all right because an existing right can be proved, and the water for all the other properties down the lane runs under it. However, the owners of those properties have no right to dig up another person’s land—or apparently they do. We understand that there is probably a right to maintain the water pipe; therefore, although adverse possession over the land was granted, there is probably also a pre-existing right to use of the lane.

That may be fine, but no one is sure where the telephone lines, sewage or other things run. What is under there? And what happens when one wants to put in something new, such as broadband, when there is a need to run a fibre-optic cable under the lane? Can you do this? The answer is probably no because the owner has adverse possession, and I am not sure how fair that is. The challenge is that because the Land Registry has accepted the application and registered it, the situation cannot be disentangled. Should one be able to?

I merely describe the situation; these disputes get complicated and there needs to be a simple way in which to sort them out. Perhaps issues such as this could be incorporated within the scope of a Bill such as this. It may be too difficult; I do not know. However, unravelling such issues should be possible because it is easy to make mistakes, particularly when no one knows the precise position. This issue arose partly because there was no duty to inform the people who lived up the lane about the fact that adverse possession was being registered because there was no apparent interest in it. I leave noble Lords with that other difficult problem.