Land Registration in UK Law

The reality is that, in the vast majority of cases, the acquisition of the legal estate and the charge are not only precisely simultaneous but indissolubly bound together.

In the case of unregistered land, and in the days before registration became the norm, such a result could no doubt be justified as avoiding protracted uncertainty where the title to land lay. But where land is registered it is difficult to see any justification for a legal rule which compels such an apparently unjust result, and even harder to see why the party gaining title should not be required to pay some compensation at least to the party losing it.

Its effect will be to make it much harder for a squatter who is in possession of registered land to obtain a title to it against the wishes of the proprietor. The unfairness in the old regime which this case has demonstrated lies not in the absence of compensation, although that is an important factor, but in the lack of safeguards against oversight or inadvertence on the part of the registered proprietor.

Unlike section 5, which deals with first registration, that registered estate is not vested in Cheshire "together with all rights, privileges and appurtenances…." In those circumstances, Cheshire's status as registered proprietor is subject to the rights of Malory BVI as beneficial owner. It follows that I accept that Malory BVI has sufficient st and ing to sue for trespass even without seeking rectification of the register because it is the true owner and has a better right to possession.

There is a gap between any transaction and its registration. Assuming that all relevant registration requirements are met, the purchaser has now acquired an absolute right to the legal estate (and the mortgagee an absolute right to the charge). Her interest is of a different order from that of a purchaser before completion, who has the contractual right to have the property conveyed to her but may never in fact get it.

It was, in my view, designed to protect those working in the Registry from being plagued by vexatious actions. Accordingly, the fact that no corresponding provisions to Sections 83, 85 or 131 of the Land Registration Act appear in the Land Charges Act seems to me to be irrelevant to the question we have to decide.