Property — Peaceful enjoyment of possessions — Defendant claiming exclusive possession and control of disputed land — Whether defendant acquiring adverse title to land — Whether claimant being deprived of property contrary to human rights — Claim allowed
The claimant was the registered owner of green-belt land in the vicinity of Heathrow Airport. It sought an order restraining the defendant from entering onto or using the land. The defendant contended that he had acquired adverse title to the land by virtue of having enclosed it and by allowing his cattle and horses, and, subsequently, horses belonging to other people, to graze on it for more than 12 years, ending in October 1998. He said that he had enjoyed exclusive possession and control of the disputed field at all times after 1 October 1986, prior to which he had been a licensee.
The claimant argued, inter alia, that the defendant had made no substantial use of the land for grazing horses until approximately the beginning of 2003. Alternatively, even if the defendant had enjoyed exclusive possession from 1986, time did not begin to run until the end of June 1991, so that the 12-year period for adverse possession ended in June 2003. The defendant argued that the claimant was seeking to take advantage of the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA), which had come into force in October 2000.
The claimant contended, inter alia, that the effect of section 75 of the Land Registration Act 1925, read together with the Limitation Act 1980, was to deprive it of its property without compensation, which would contravene Article 1 of the First Protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights. Thus, the court was obliged, by section 3 of the HRA, to give effect to the statutory provisions so as to render them compatible with the Convention if possible.
Held: The claim was allowed.
On the facts and by virtue of section 75 of the 1925 Act, the defendant had established adverse possession by the end of June 2003 (when the HRA was in force) as a result of his exclusive possession for the previous 12 years and because he had intended to exclude everybody from the land, including the registered owner.
However, the claimant’s loss was incompatible with its rights under the Convention, which protected the peaceful enjoyment of property. The effect of the legislation as a whole was to deprive the owner of the land of all its rights to it and of any means of recovering possession. It transferred the right to possession and title to the trespasser and amounted to a deprivation of possession within Article 1 of the First Protocol.
The expropriation of registered land without compensation in circumstances such as those in the present case was disproportionate to the aims of the statutory provisions. The registered owner had lost its land because it had failed to take steps to evict a trespasser within a 12-year period. However, the acts of trespass might not be obvious or might be trivial. The owner might not know the law or realise that failing to put an end to a situation that was not causing harm might prejudice its position. Little or no fault might have been involved. On the other hand, the trespasser would usually have done nothing to deserve the windfall of a property merely because he had used it illegitimately over a long period. Nothing could justify a transfer of property without compensation from the deserving to the undeserving except in specified circumstances, which were not applicable here: JA Pye (Oxford) Ltd v Graham [2002] UKHL 30; [2002] 3 WLR 221 applied.
Reinterpreting the legislation in accordance with section 3 of the HRA, the defendant’s claim to have acquired the disputed land failed and the claimant remained the owner.
Peter Knox (instructed by Vyman) appeared for the claimant; Steven Woolf (instructed by Seakens, of Virginia Water) appeared for the defendant.
Eileen O’Grady, barrister