[2025] EWHC 1955 (KB)

These paragraphs both relate to a specific disclosure application issued on 12 December 2024, shortly before trial. The Judge heard and dismissed the application on the first day of trial. At paragraph 3 of his Judgment, he records that the application was based upon an assertion that the Club had made a recent application to amend the boundaries at the Land Registry. The Club refuted this and the Judge directed that a statement on the issue be filed by the Club. On the basis that there had been no such application to the Land Registry by the Club, the disclosure application was dismissed. Mr Askan does not appear to challenge this.

Instead, he asserts that the application also sought all title plans of the Club listed in the Land Registry ‘DL’ document filed with the TR1 document dated 2004 which led to (in the circumstances described above) the first registration of the Club’s title. Mr Askan refers to conveyances referred to as having taken place in 1991, 1987, 1985, 1977, 1973 and 1919. The application itself has not been included in the Appeal Bundle, and nor has the transcript for Day 1 by which this Court could see the arguments deployed and/or any reasoning of the Judge.

In refusing the application, the Judge was exercising a case management discretion. In such a decision, the Judge will be afforded a significant latitude. It is not clear whether the Club said these documents were or were not in their possession. However, it is clear that a number of the conveyances had been disclosed and were in the trial bundle: conveyances in 1947, 1949, 1953 and, importantly, 1997. As identified above, the latter referred to conveyance of the, ‘yard and outbuildings and premises thereto belonging and containing by admeasurement Two hundred and sixteen square yards or thereabouts All which said property is for the purpose of identification only delineated and edged red on the plan annexed to an Indenture of Conveyance dated the Thirteenth day of October One thousand nine hundred and nineteen’. This is the 216 square yard parcel which contains the Red area forming part of the contested land. There was no basis upon which the Judge would have had grounds to consider that yet other conveyancing documents in the years identified by Mr Askan would have added in any way to Mr Askan’s case. Mr Askan did not substantively engage with the difficulties for his case caused by the consistency of the description of conveyanced land between 1919 and 1997, and beyond to 2004; nor did he explain why even if a differently described parcel of land had been conveyed in (say) 1991, that would be of relevance given the 1997 conveyance, the one immediately pre-dating the 2004 registration, which was clearly consistent with the 1919 conveyance.

It is not therefore reasonably arguable that the Judge erred in his case management discretion in refusing that part of the disclosure application about which complaint is made.