The Grand Chamber judgment in JA Pye (Oxford) Ltd and another v United Kingdom [2007] PLSCS 179 may have been a costly defeat for the landowners in the case, but it has provided much needed simplification to the law of adverse possession, say property barristers Oliver Radley-Gardner and Jonathan Small QC.
On 30 August, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ruled that the English law of adverse possession did not breach a landowner’s right to peaceful enjoyment of his possessions. In the case, the complainant property development company had lost prime building land worth £21m to farmer “squatters”.
The government had therefore successfully overturned previous rulings by the English courts and the ECtHR decision in November 2005, that the human rights of Oxford-based JA Pye had been violated and it would be entitled to compensation for its losses.
JA Pye had hoped to build houses on the land, of which it was the registered owner. However, the House of Lords ruled in 2002 that Caroline Graham was entitled to squatter’s rights after proving that her late husband, Michael, had grazed cattle on the land for more than 12 years.
Radley-Gardner and Small, barristers at property set Falcon Chambers, say: “The earlier Strasbourg decision in Pye had proceeded upon the basis that adverse possession amounted to a deprivation of possessions… by contrast, the majority in the Grand Chamber considered the effect of the laws on adverse possession to operate as a mere control of use of land.
“In practice, the jurisprudential effect of this approach was to render adverse possession easier to justify. In particular, the absence of compensation was no longer fatal to the government’s case.”
They added: “Potentially, the English law on adverse possession has now been simplified. First, there are no longer two human rights regimes operating, depending upon whether the land in question is registered or unregistered, since neither engages the Convention.
“Second, county court judges no longer have to attempt the (almost impossible) task of making the words of the relevant statutes Convention-compliant.
“Third, the absurd position whereby the landowner’s remedies [against the squatter] depended upon whether the 12 years’ adverse possession fell before or after the coming into force of the Human Rights Act 1998 (which is not retrospective) no longer pertains.”
