A person who is in adverse possession of registered land may apply to the Land Registry to be registered as its owner on the basis of ten years’ adverse possession of it, ending on the date of the application. If the application is opposed by the existing registered owner, the applicant must satisfy one of three conditions specified in Paragraph 5 of Schedule 6 of the Land Registration Act 2002.
One of those conditions, found in Paragraph 5(4), includes a requirement that ‘for at least ten years of the period of adverse possession ending on the date of the application’, the applicant reasonably believed that the land belonged to them. The Supreme Court recently ruled on whether the required ten-year period of reasonable belief must continue until the date of the application or whether it could end some time before the application was made.
The case concerned a strip of land which a couple had used as part of their garden since buying neighbouring land, including a house, in 2004. In February 2018, in the process of obtaining planning permission to build another house on their land, evidence emerged which meant that from that point the couple could no longer have reasonably believed they owned the strip of land. They applied to be registered as its owners in December 2019. This raised the question of how the condition in Paragraph 5(4) should be construed: was it necessary that the reasonable belief persist until the date of the application, or was it only necessary that the adverse possession continue until that date?
The Supreme Court looked at the legal as well as the practical issues. An application for registration of title to adjacent land along an undefined boundary could not be put together in an afternoon: it would require professional advice and the gathering of evidence.
The Supreme Court decided on the second construction and the ordinary meaning of the phrase – ie the words ‘ending on the date of the application’ naturally describe the end of a period, that period being the period of adverse possession described immediately beforehand. The couple were therefore entitled to be registered as the owners of the land.
Brown v Ridley and Another (Rev1) [2025] UKSC 7
