A neighbourly dispute over a strip of land which reached the Supreme Court has seen the UK’s highest court find in favour of the ‘more lenient’ reading of a paragraph within the Land Registration Act 2002.

The leapfrog appeal from the Upper Tribunal (Lands Chambers) centered on adverse possession of registered land in Consett, Country Durham. Alistdair Barclay Brown was registered as the owner of a ‘substantial piece of rough, undeveloped land’ in 2002. Three years later, Richard John and Sarah Louise Ridley were registered as proprietors of land adjoining the Brown land, including a house named Valley View.

The disputed land consisted of a strip along the boundary between the garden of Valley View and the Brown’s land.

A previous owner of Valley View had put up a fence and planted a hedge along what he understood to be the boundary between the Brown land and Valley View. The parties agreed that it enclosed part of the Brown land, the judgment said.

The Ridleys used the disputed land as part of their garden and then as part of the site of their new house. The fence and hedge were removed in 2018 for construction work.

In 2019, the Ridleys applied to HM Land Registry as the owners of the disputed land as they had been in adverse possession of it for the required period of time per the Land Registration Act 2002. Brown objected to the application.

The First-Tier Tribunal sided with the Ridleys. Brown appealed and won in the Upper Tribunal. The Ridleys appealed to the Supreme Court.

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Ruling, five justices said paragraph 5(4)(c) of Schedule 6 to the Land Registration Act 2022 could be read in two ways: that the period of reasonable belief must be at least 10 years ending on the date of the registration application, or, in a ‘more lenient’ construction, the period of reasonable belief can be any period of at least 10 years within the potentially longer period of adverse possession.

Lord Briggs, with whom Lord Hamblen, Lord Stephens, Lady Rose and Lady Simler agreed, allowed the Ridleys’ appeal and restored the decision of the First-Tier Tribunal ‘to the effect’ that the Ridleys are entitled to be registered as proprietors of the disputed land.

He said the paragraph should be read as the second construction ‘just on the ordinary meaning of the words’ - that the reasonable belief of ownership could be any 10 years within the period of adverse possession.

The first construction ‘makes the apparent right to obtain registered title based upon adverse possession under the boundary condition purely illusory in most typical cases, as the experienced specialist tribunals below both considered that it did’.

The judge added: ‘I do not consider that there are any apparent difficulties with construction B which carry anything like the same weight in the process of construction.’