A High Court judge today said that a notice to quit served on a tenant farmer was invalid because the new owners of the land served it before their purchase had been properly registered.
The case is a test of the legal implications of the so-called “registration gap”, the time taken between the completion of a property transaction and its entry on the Land Registry.
The case concerns the sale of a small plot of land that took palace in Ashton-with-Stodday, near Lancaster, on 19 June 2013 between Stodday Land Ltd and Ripway Holdings. Although the transaction completed in June, Ripway’s purchase wasn’t processed by the Land Registry until 16 July.
Even so, on 1 July Ripway served a tenant who farmed some of their land with a notice to quit, even though the land hadn’t yet been registered to them.
The farmer challenged the notice saying it was “not good in law”.
In a ruling today at the High Court in London, Mr Justice Norris agreed, because at the time of serving the notice, Ripway wasn’t the registered owner of the land.
In his ruling, the judge said that he was not taking an overly legalistic approach, and said that completion packs in property transactions could be altered to stop issues such as this from arising.
“As a concluding remark, I do not accept the submission of counsel for Stodday and Ripway that this is an overly formalistic approach that magnifies the risk arising from the ‘registration gap,’” he said.
“The same problem exists in unregistered conveyancing. It is not difficult to address it”, he wrote. “The time will come when every completion pack for the sale of a reversion includes a document in appropriate form” that can be used by the new landlord in such circumstances.
Stodday Land Limited and Ripway Properties Limited -v- William Marsland Pye
Mr W E Hanbury (instructed by Atkinson & Firth) for Stodday and Ripway
Mr Jamie Sutherland (instructed by Loxley) for Pye
High Court of Justice Manchester Appeals Centre, on appeal from the County Court at Preston (Norris J) 7 October 2016
