15.2. Characteristics of the English land registration system

540Property Law

and until a triggering event occurs. Because the system has always been geared towards marketability of land, the only triggering event is a dealing with the land – either a transfer on sale, or, since 1997, the grant of a lease for more than twentyone years (reduced from forty years by the Land Registration Act 1997, and now reduced again down to seven years by section 4 of the Land Registration Act 2002) or a legal mortgage over a fee simple or such a lease (section 4 of the 2002 Act).

This means that land which is not traded simply never gets on the register unless the title holder chooses to put it there. In addition, the process has been prolonged still further because it was decided in 1925 to limit compulsory registration to specified areas of England and Wales, and to progressively add additional areas of compulsory registration only as and when resources permitted. It was only if land was in area of compulsory registration that a plot of land had to be put on the register following a dealing with it: in other areas registration was merely voluntary, and indeed for many years a shortage of resources led to prolonged suspensions or restrictions of voluntary registration. This process of gradually extending compulsory registration to cover the whole of England and Wales was not completed until 1 December 1990: the last areas to be brought in comprised the districts of Babergh, Castle Point, Forest Heath, Leominster, Maldon, Malvern Hills, Mid Suffolk, Rochford, St Edmundsbury, South Herefordshire, Suffolk Coastal, Tendring, Wychavon and Wyre Forest, all under the Registration of Title Order 1989 (SI 1989 No. 1347).

As a consequence of all this, although there are 18.87 million registered titles in England and Wales (as at the end of 2003), the Land Registry estimates that there are about 3–4 million still to go (Land Registry, Annual Report and Accounts 2002–2003). The Land Registry reports that it is now taking active steps to encourage voluntary registration. In its Annual Report and Accounts 2002–2003, for example, it says that it is working with, among others, the National Playing Fields Association to register playing fields and the Court Service to register 180 court buildings, and also reports that it has managed to complete registration of all its own land (ibid., p. 41). However, the option of completing the process by compulsion was rejected in the joint Law Commission and Land Registry report whose recommendations were implemented by the Land Registration Act 2002 (Law Commission and HM Land Registry, Land Registration for the Twenty-First Century: A Conveyancing Revolution (Law Commission Report No. 271, 2001)) – for no very good reason, as we see in Extract 15.2 below. Consequently, despite the report’s recommendation that the matter be re-examined in five years’ time, it remains a real prospect that we will never have a comprehensive land registration system.

This sporadic, transaction-based approach to putting land on the register has had a profound effect on two aspects of our registration system. The first is the way in which boundaries are treated, and the second is the limited range of interests in land that are eligible for registration. We look at these in the next two sections.