Land Charges Legislation
The Register
The Local Land Charges Register is maintained by all Metropolitan, City, Unitary and District Councils in England and Wales and in London by the London Boroughs.
The Purpose of the Register
The 1925 property legislation had as one of its major objects the protection of purchasers of land, thereby enabling practical conveyancing to be simplified, and the Land Charges Act furthered this objective by requiring charges on land that run with the land to be registered in public registers in which searches for such charges could be easily made. Under the Local Land Charges Act 1975, Local Authorities are the registering authorities and it is their duty to register charges brought into existence by themselves or by another originating authority.
The Legislation
The basic law relating to local land charges was introduced by then Land Charges Act 1925 (Amended by the Law of Property (Amendment) Act 1926) and this remained the only statute on the subject for many years.
After minor amendments made by the Land Charges Act 1972, the law is now a code contained in the Local Land Charges Act 1975 and the Local Land Charges Rules 1977. Both of these came into operation on the 1 August 1977. The Act of 1975 made a fresh start, then whole of the Land Charges Act 1925 was repealed and all rules made before 1 August 1977 ceased to take effect.
Local Land Charges Act 1975
The most considerable change of principle is to be found in Section 10, which has the effect of making any local land charge enforceable against subsequent purchasers of the land affected, whether or not the charge has been actually registered at a material date and whether or not its existence (when registered) has been disclosed by an official certificate of search requisitioned by or on behalf of a purchaser. All entries registerable in the register are expressly made local land charges – there are no longer any items that are registerable ‘as if they were local land charges’ and Schedule 1 to the Act contains a long list of detailed amendments to earlier statutes to this effect. Acts passed since 1977 have generally followed this practice.
Local Land Charges Rules 1977
The principal feature of these rules as compared with their predecessors is their simplicity and brevity.
Instead of there being a Rule for each Part of the register, the Rules give a list of the 12 Parts with a concise description of the nature of the charges registerable in each Part.
