Co-Owners' Rights to Occupy Trust Land

Abstract

Few lawyers would dissent from the view, voiced by the Law Commission in 1989 in their Report on Trusts of Land, that the trust for sale mechanism, introduced in 1926 to regulate the co-ownership of land, had for long ceased to be appropriate to the conditions of modern home ownership. Every conveyancing practitioner will have experienced the difficulty of explaining to clients about to marry that the matrimonial home which they were so eagerly looking forward to occupying would by law be owned by them as trustees, subject to an immediate binding trust for sale. No doubt in practice discretion played the better part of valour. Soon after qualifying, solicitors learned to abandon any attempt to explore the mysteries of such an apparent absurdity.