Possessory title — Plaintiff purchasing land — Adjoining land acquired by another by adverse possession — Plaintiff claiming to have succeeded to that adjoining land — Plaintiff relying on possessory title of predecessor vendor — Title vesting in defendants — Whether defendants’ title extinguished by plaintiff’s predecessor — Whether true owner dispossessed — Acts necessary to constitute adverse possession — Whether tests satisfied — Judgment for the defendants upheld on appeal
The plaintiff, P, in 1983 bought a property known as Searl’s Farm at Burghfield in Berkshire from D, the previous registered proprietors. The plaintiff claimed to have succeeded at the same time to a possessory title to certain land adjoining the property (“the disputed land”) previously acquired by D by adverse possession. A statutory declaration in that connection was made by D on June 28 1983. In fact the paper title was vested in the defendants. The question was whether that title had been extinguished before the plaintiff’s purchase in 1983 by 12 years’ adverse possession by D. Prior to the conveyance to D, the disputed land had been fenced off and D believed that it was part of the property conveyed to him. D was asked for and gave a sailing club permission to park cars on the land. When the club sought to put up an extra building, D objected to any encroachment on “his land”, ie the disputed land in his statutory declaration. D stated that he believed the land to be included in the sale to him and had occupied it on that basis. The difficulty was that all that D ever did in respect of the land was to let successive clubs park cars and boats on it and, on the evidence, that was precisely the same as the defendants wanted to do with the land. Judge Paul Baker QC held that the plaintiff did not have a good title and he appealed to the Court of Appeal against that decision.
Held The appeal was dismissed.
1. What had to be shown to establish dispossession of the true owner of land was discussed in the judgments of the Court of Appeal in Buckinghamshire County Council v Moran [1990] Ch 623. The practical task in the present case was to apply the law there stated to the facts of the present case.
2. If the law was to attribute possession of land to a person who could establish no paper title to possession, he had to be shown to have both factual possession and the requisite intention to possess. A person claiming to have “dispossessed” another must similarly fulfil both those requirements. However, a further requirement which the alleged dispossessor had to satisfy was to show that his possession had been “adverse”. If the land in dispute was unbuilt land and the squatter was aware that the owner, while having no present use for it, had a purpose in mind for its use in the future, the court was likely to require very clear evidence before it could be satisfied that the squatter who claimed a possessory title had established not only factual possession of the land but also the requisite intention to exclude the world at large, including the owner with the paper title, so far as was reasonably practicable and so far as the process of the law would allow. In the absence of clear evidence the court was likely to infer that the squatter neither had nor claimed any intention of asserting a right to possession of the land.
3. In the present case, looking at the facts as a whole, the true owner was never dispossessed by D because he had never had, for the necessary 12 years before his sale to the plaintiff in 1983, the requisite factual possession and intention to possess in respect of the disputed land.
David Ashton (instructed by Landau & Landau) appeared for the plaintiff; George Laurence QC (instructed by Turner Kenneth Brown) appeared for the defendants.
