Land Charge Registration Reviewed

Abstract

It is not often that an expert committee, asked to report on a technical problem, have to admit defeat. But the Lord Chancellor's Committee on Land Charges, in their recent Report, confess that to rectify the 1925 machinery of registration, now that it is more than thirty years old, is a task beyond the wit of man. When so eminent a committee as that which sat under Mr. Justice Roxburgh reach such a conclusion, one may be sure that the law has thrown up an exceptionally tough conundrum. And it is of general interest that such things can happen. If the inventions of one generation of legislators fail to justify themselves, the next generation should be able to amend them, at any rate where the difficulties are purely technical and there are no questions of policy. But Lord Birkenhead and Sir Benjamin Cherry appear to have succeeded in creating the conveyancing equivalent of a Franckenstein's monster, which with the passing years would become not only more dangerous but also more difficult to kill.The Report nevertheless contains plenty of valuable suggestions. In the first thirty years of the new system of registration many defects have come to light, and the Committee have attacked a number of familiar conveyancing problems. Of outstanding interest are their conclusions that registration of restrictive covenants should be discontinued, that the so-called rule in Re Forsey and Hollebone's Contract should be abolished, and (more tentatively) that the reversal of the rule in Patman v. Harland by section 44 (5) of the Law of Property Act, 1925, was a mistake.