A Centenary of Land Registration

Rolling green hills are adorned with scattered trees and stone walls, creating a peaceful rural landscape. In the distance, soft hills rise under a clear, bright sky.

Anyone who practices property law will recall 1925 as the year in which a comprehensive redrafting of English property law statutes was undertaken.  The raft of legislation in that year included the first Land Registration Act which is therefore now coming up for its centenary.  The purpose of that act was to consolidate earlier legislation relating to land registration and to facilitate the comprehensive registration of all property in England and Wales.  Its centenary therefore provides a good opportunity to review the current state of registration.

Land registration had first been introduced for some London boroughs as early as 1899.  Initially it was not compulsory to register transfers of land but this was bought in according to local authority areas over the following century so that by 1990 all transactions for value triggered first registration of the title.  Take up of registration was therefore initially relatively slow and by 2004 only some 40% of land (by land area) had been registered.  However, a broadening of the requirement for registration (for example to cover gifts as well as transfers for value) led to an acceleration of the process and by 2018 the Land Registry was estimating that 85% of all land in England and Wales had been registered.  The latest estimate is that some 89% of land is now registered with around 26.5m Land Registry titles in existence.

In its 2016 five-year business plan the Land Registry included a section entitled “a comprehensive register” and set out an aspiration for all publicly held land to be registered by 2025 with all remaining private land to be registered by 2030.  Almost certainly this plan was derailed by the Covid pandemic and it is interesting to note that the three year business plan published in 2022 makes no reference to completing the registration process.  By that stage the Land Registry was presumably distracted by the need to improve its service following the disastrous collapse in its efficiency caused during Covid.

So, a century after the 1925 Act there is clearly still some way to go with at least 10% of land still unregistered.  If you look at the registration map it is clear that in the countryside there are quite large swathes of agricultural land still unregistered, presumably because this land has not changed hands in the last 35 years.  In due course this will therefore be registered.  In urban areas there are small pockets of unregistered land and examination shows that these often relate to churches, schools and other communal facilities where there has been no change of ownership for a long period.  This land might never be registered unless some form of compulsion is brought in. An interesting conclusion to draw from this is that it takes a very long time to change anything in UK property law.  The government should therefore remain cautious when making promises to “bring the feudal system of leasehold to an end” within a few years – let’s watch this space.

Robert Barham
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Robert Barham

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