Resolution of boundary disputes – a long overdue and sensible suggestion

Readers will no doubt have seen press reports (they appear all the time) of the long running argument over a property boundary which has taken years to finally resolve and cost tens of thousands of pounds in legal and surveyor’s fees. There is generally ‘a point of principal’ involved but one party inevitably loses and the judge reprimands them both for not having resolved the matter amicably.

Help however may, at long last, be at hand.

It is in the form of a private Member’s bill sponsored by Charlie Elphicke MP and is currently going through Parliament having had its first reading in the House of Commons on 25th June 2012. It is scheduled to have its second reading in the House of Commons on 30th November 2012.

The Property Boundary (Resolution of Disputes) Bill will be published shortly before its second reading. While the devil is in the detail and this is yet to be seen it is understood that the bill will seek to apply to property boundary disputes a dispute resolution mechanism similar to the one currently in place for party walls (see Party Wall etc Act 1996). The party wall process is explained in the helpful DCLG explanatory booklet.

The intention is that the parties would jointly appoint a single surveyor to determine the dispute or in the alternative each would appoint its own surveyor and absent any agreement the surveyors would appoint a third independent surveyor to resolve the issue. Thereafter, the proposal would allow for an appeal to the Lands Chamber of the Upper Tribunal.

It seems to me that this is a most welcome and long overdue suggestion to resolving what is very often a bitterly acrimonious and damaging process when it is in fact something that should be resolved on the ground.

Plans are, very often, key to such things and there is no substitute for a good plan to a useful scale as I have found especially in the planning enforcement context. However scales used often mean that Land Registry title plans are not always definitive or of much help especially with small discrepancies and especially when one considers the point about the thickness of a boundary line on a plan (see Land Registry Practice Guide 40 which explains the various rules applied and assumptions made in respect of plans).

By and large the party wall works mechanism has been a useful and sucessful tool in arbitrating on and avoiding potential disputes between neighbours arising out of proposed works caught by it. It is to be hoped that the Bill will, if enacted (and it is a big ‘if’ given that it is a private Member’s bill very few of which survive the Parliamentary programme), provide a similar mechanism to avoid entrenched positions moving inexorably to lengthy and costly court proceedings.