Andrew Todd and Robbie Wishart, THE LANDS TRIBUNAL FOR SCOTLAND: LAW AND PRACTICE Edinburgh: W. Green (www.wgreen.co.uk), 2012. xxiv + 279 pp. ISBN 9780414018891. £80.

Pages438-439
DOI10.3366/elr.2013.0177
Published date01 September 2013
Date01 September 2013

The Title Conditions (Scotland) Act 2003 has been in force now for not quite ten years.

The regime under which title conditions were to be reviewed was expanded and modified under the 2003 Act. While the Lands Tribunal retained the jurisdiction it had been given under the 1970 Conveyancing and Feudal Reform Act, the powers of the Tribunal were extended and it was given new factors against which the application should be tested. In its earliest decisions following the appointed day, the Lands Tribunal made it clear that it did not consider the previous case law to have any particular bearing on the decisions it was to make under the new provisions. Parties to those early applications were feeling their way through the process.

Now, nine years on, a more substantial body of case law and practice has built up. This book usefully distils that case law and practice, providing a convenient and comprehensive guide to the process.

It is perhaps useful to start with what this book is not. It is not a complete guide to Lands Tribunal practice and procedure, dealing only with the procedures for varying title conditions under the 2003 Act and not with any of the other matters in which the Lands Tribunal has jurisdiction such as ratings appeals, disputed compensation or “right to buy” cases. It is also not – and nor does it pretend to be – an academic consideration of title conditions and the rights (or wrongs) of decisions made to date. It is however a thorough practitioner's guide through the process of bringing or responding to an application in the Lands Tribunal.

While dealing only with procedures under the 2003 Act, there are nonetheless a number of procedures available depending on the nature of the condition and the remedy sought. The book is structured so as to allow a practitioner to find all the information about a particular procedure in a single chapter. This inevitably means a degree of repetition, as the authors acknowledge, but this is not a book written to be read from cover to cover (after a first consideration!) but rather dipped into as required. From that perspective, not having to flick between chapters to find earlier or later steps of the process is an advantage.

The book also includes as appendices the forms required for the applications and, particularly usefully, summaries of all the decisions issued by the Lands Tribunal to date. As the decisions on the Lands Tribunal website are ordered by jurisdiction but not further broken down, this...

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