[2024] UKUT 57 (LC)

There has been no dispute about the relevant law and I can summarise it briefly.

The Limitation Act 1980 has the dramatic effect that once a person has been in adverse possession of land for 12 years, the title of the person he or she has dispossessed is extinguished. Hence the strength of a “squatter’s title”. Section 96 of the Land Registration Act 2002 provides that title to registered land is not extinguished by adverse possession. Schedule 6 to the 2002 Act creates a procedure whereby a person in adverse possession may apply for registration as proprietor by adverse possession and may in certain circumstances succeed. Anyone may object to that application; but in addition the registrar will send notice of the application to the registered proprietor (and a short list of other persons, in paragraph 2 of the Schedule), and the registered proprietor may respond by requiring the application to be dealt with under paragraph 5.

If the registered proprietor does so, as the respondents did in this case, then the applicant is entitled to be registered as proprietor of the land if he can show that one of the three conditions in paragraph 5 of the Schedule is met. Relevant to this case is the third condition in sub-paragraph (4):

“(4)

The third condition is that—

(a)

the land to which the application relates is adjacent to land belonging to the applicant,

(b)

the exact line of the boundary between the two has not been determined under rules under section 60,

(c)

for at least ten years of the period of adverse possession ending on the date of the application, the applicant (or any predecessor in title) reasonably believed that the land to which the application relates belonged to him, and

(d)

the estate to which the application relates was registered more than one year prior to the date of the application.

In the present case there was no difficulty about points (a), (b) and (d), but the judge found that the appellant could not meet point (c).