Land Charges and Notice

Abstract

The Property Acts of 1925 have restricted in several ways the old equitable doctrine of notice. This article is an attempt to bring together and summarise some of the effects and problems which result from one of the innovations which the Acts introduced to that end.Section 10 of the Land Charges Act, 1925, enacts that certain ‘charges on, or obligations affecting, land’ may be registered as land charges in His Majesty's Land Registry. Some of these registrable charges have long been recognised as imposing an equitable burden upon the land concerned, and for present purposes we may confine our attention to two of them: (i) estate contracts, (ii) restrictive covenants. By ‘estate contract’, the section means a contract by an estate owner to convey or create a legal estate. By ‘restrictive covenant’ it means a covenant or agreement (not made between a lessor and lessee) restrictive of the user of land.Both estate contracts and restrictive covenants are registrable if created after the Act came into force. But those which were already in existence before the Act are subject to a distinction: restrictive covenants older than the Act are not registrable—section 10, indeed, so defines a restrictive covenant (for the purposes of the Act) as to exclude them from the Act entirely; estate contracts older than the Act, however, do sometimes become registrable, namely, ‘if acquired under a conveyance’ (i.e., if the person who has the benefit of the estate contract assigns it) after 1925. This distinction, of course, is important and should be borne in mind.