News

Judicial review challenges

The Civil Procedure (Amendment No. 4) Rules 2013 (SI 2013/1412) come into effect on 1 July 2013 and reduce the time limit for judicial review applications in planning matters from 3 months to 6 weeks.

Accordingly, the following documents on this website have been altered to remove references to a “Challenge” being made within a three month time period and instead to refer to “the relevant time period” for making Challenges:
– Agreement for sale (subject to planning).
– Overage clause.
– Development agreement for lease.

Chancel repair liability – Practice Guide 66 updated

Land Registry Practice Guide 66 – Overriding interests losing automatic protection in 2013 – was given an interesting updating amendment at the end of last month. LRPG 66 says “Section 6 [of the Practice Guide] has been amended to confirm that the courts have still to consider if and when it may be possible after 12 October 2013 for the holder of an interest to apply for alteration of the register for the entry of a notice following first registration or the registration of a disposition for valuable consideration.”

As we all know, from midnight on 12 October 2013, some of […]

Property webinars: July to December 2013

A new programme of property webinars by Alan Riley, running through to the end of 2013, is published at http://propertypsl.co.uk/online-cpd

The programme includes webinars on agreements for lease (with development obligations), overage issues in property transactions, lease exit strategies for tenants, drafting reports to clients, development problem areas, legal drafting for property lawyers, and many more.

SDLT and ARPT

New webinar for March: SDLT and ARPT for 2013.

Date: Tuesday 26 March 2013.
Time: 12.30pm – 2.00pm.
Venue: Your PC (wherever you like).
Speaker: Alan Riley.
Contact: Use the contact button above.

For details of online property seminars, see http://propertypsl.co.uk/online-cpd

EPC Regulations – amended (as anticipated)

“It is probably fair to say that we should expect some amending regulations any time soon…”

As anticipated, The Energy Performance of Buildings (England and Wales) Regulations 2012 (“the EPB Regulations) which have been in force since 9 January 2013 have been swiftly amended.

The Building Regulations &c. (Amendment) Regulations 2013 include provisions to correct an error in the original EPB Regulations which created a requirement for an EPC on the sale or letting of the whole of a building but did not create the same requirement on the sale or letting of a “building unit” (i.e. part of a building). […]

Alterations to Property PSL documents

Minor updating amendments have been made to all Property PSL leases on this website (to make reference to the new Energy Performance of Buildings (England and Wales) Regulations 2012 which are in force from 9 January 2013) and to licence for alterations (to align the drafting of clauses 7.1 and 9.4 in circumstances where the landlord’s permission may cease to be of effect).

New EPC Regulations: is this what they really intended?

One wonders whether, when the Government published The Energy Performance of Buildings (England and Wales) Regulations 2012 which are in force from today (9 January 2013), the publishing department mistakenly put up a draft version of the regulations instead of the final version – so open to criticism is the published version.

Let us start with the most startling aspect of the 2012 Regulations: from today, the Government seems to have removed the requirement for a seller or landlord of a flat (or other part of a building, whether residential or commercial) to produce an EPC to its intending buyer or […]

New EPC Regulations

The Energy Performance of Buildings (England and Wales) Regulations 2012 (SI 2012/3118) are in force from today (9 January 2013). These regulations consolidate the Energy Performance of Buildings (Certificates and Inspections) (England and Wales) Regulations 2007 and subsequent amendments made to those regulations since the 2007 Regulations came into force. As well as consolidating existing legislation, the new EPC regulations introduce the following changes:

– A requirement for property advertisements to include details of the energy performance certificate rating of a building where available (regulation 11);

– The removal of the requirement to attach the front page of the energy performance certificate […]

Tenants’ break rights

This month’s CPI Update reports on the latest failed attempt to challenge the application of harsh rules relating to the exercise of tenants’ break rights – Canonical UK Ltd v TST Millbank LLC [2012] EWHC 3710 (Ch). This case will be considered fully in Friday’s webinar: A Comprehensive Guide to Lease Break Rights – tenants’ rights and landlords’ rights.

In the Canonical case, as a condition of its break clause, the tenant was required to have paid rent and other sums due “up to and including” the break date, and to have paid a break premium equivalent to one month’s […]

Service of statutory notices

Freetown v Assethold Ltd [2012] EWCA Civ 1657 is a case relating to the effect of the notice serving provisions of the Party Wall etc Act 1996 to be found in section 15 of that Act.

Freetown had lodged an appeal against an award of a surveyor under the Act. The time limit for appealing an award is strict: there is a 14 day period “beginning with the day on which an award… is served”, with no power for any extension of time. If the date of service of the award was the date of its posting, Freetown was out […]

Property fraud – Davisons Solicitors (a firm) v Nationwide Building Society

An injustice appears to have righted in Davisons Solicitors (a firm) v Nationwide Building Society [2012] EWCA Civ 1626. This was a case in which the appellant law firm had found itself unwittingly embroiled in a property fraud and ended up releasing mortgage advance moneys to complete a transaction that simply did not exist. The seller’s “solicitors”, although appearing to exist on Law Society and SRA databases of law firms, were fraudsters. The appellants were necessarily held to have committed a breach of trust since they had parted with the mortgage advance on terms that were not permitted. (See Lloyds […]

New 2013 webinar programme

Click on 2013 Webinar Programme to see a list of property webinars programmed for the first half of 2013.

Commercial Property Update webinar: 29 October 2012 (12.30pm)

Topics so far identified (or requested) for coverage in this webinar include:
– SDLT update;
– Assets of Community Value Regulations (“the next town or village green dispute”);
– Even more cases on tenants’ break rights;
– 1954 Act update;
– Unlawful assignment of leases;
– CIL Regs update (forward thinking drafting issues);
– Rights to light disputes;
– Receiver sales;
– and more….

Click on contact above to request to join.

Licensing the use of land

Licensing or regulating the use of land, or activity carried out on land, can help avoid the grant of greater, longer-lasting, potentially permanent rights in the land – including ownership rights acquired by adverse possession, prescriptive legal easements, dedication of a road as a highway dedication, recreational rights in the form of a registered town and village green, or simply leasehold estates with security of tenure. This is the matter under consideration in next Monday’s webinar “Licensing the use of land to avoid the grant of greater rights”

Commercial premises are not houses

In what may be seen as a sensible outcome of a long running debate, the Supreme Court has ruled that it is not reasonable to refer to commercial premises as “houses” for the purposes of the right to enfranchise under the Leasehold Reform Act 1967. The Supreme Court has determined that a building that may well have been originally built as, designed as, and once used as a house, but which was now wholly used for office accommodation was, whatever its original design or current appearance, not a house reasonably so called for the purposes of enfranchisement under that Act. […]

City of London Certificate of Title (long form) (7th edition)

The City of London Law Society’s website includes a new updated version of The City of London Certificate, published today on 1 October 2012. This is the City of London Certificate of Title (long form) (7th edition). The new form of certificate, along with other minor changes, now provides for disclosures of information against relevant certifications to be made in each of the certificate’s schedules, rather than en bloc in Schedule 5 as was the case with the 6th edition. Just click on CLLS Certificate of Title documents to access the whole suite of CLLS certificate documents, which consist […]

Criminal trespassing and adverse possession (2)

Hot off the press, the Land Registry states that it is in the process of updating its adverse possession practice guides. It states that it will not proceed with an application for registration based on adverse possession unless, from the evidence presented to it, it is satisfied that the factual possession relied upon in support of the application did not constitute a criminal offence under section 144 Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012. However, it points out that the offence under section 144 is not retrospective, so that applications based exclusively on adverse possession before 1 September […]

Criminal trespassing and adverse possession

From 1 September 2012, squatting in a residential building has become a criminal offence under section 144 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012. An offence is committed if a person is in a residential building as a trespasser having entered it as a trespasser, the person knows or ought to know that he or she is a trespasser, and the person is living in the building or intends to live there for any period. A building is “residential” if it is designed or adapted, before the time of entry, for use as a place […]