Town & Village Greens - A Guide to Registration

Introduction

Covid 19 ‘lockdowns’ saw the public make good use of informal local exercise spaces. Town and village green registration is being looked at with renewed vigour as a means of safeguarding access to such areas and protecting them against development. Landowners and developers will need to be ever more vigilant if they wish to guard against unwanted village green registration.

Against this backdrop the Supreme Court has recently considered and shaped the law of town and village greens in two cases which have far reaching implications on the scope of future registration.

On the one hand the Supreme Court in Lancashire gave comfort to many public authorities by applying the principle of statutory incompatibility to make village green registration very difficult on public land. On the other hand the same court in TW Logistics rejected the extension of this principle to private land and reminded us how very broad, and potentially unexpected the scope for registration is on private land, even where the land has a coexisting commercial use by the land owner, in this case as a working commercial port.

This virtual classroom seminar is aimed at those with an understanding of the basics of town and village greens who need to understand and apply the new and complex legal landscape which governs these important property rights.

The session will in particular examine and apply the principles of statutory incompatibility, coexisting user, user ‘as of right’ and the scope of post registration rights for inhabitants (whether and if so to what extent the scope of qualifying user limits the scope of post registration user), the scope of post registration rights for land owners (the Victorian Statutes and the risk of post registration criminality) and how the changes brought in by the Growth and Infrastructure Act 2013 fit into the above.

What You Will Learn

This live and interactive session will cover the following:

• The scope of the ‘statutory incompatibility’ bar to registration
• The application of the ‘co existing user’ principle - (when can public use of land still used by a landowner still be qualifying user for registration purposes?)
• What light the recent cases can shed on the application of the ‘user as of right’ doctrine
• Post registration rights - what is the consequence of registration for inhabitants - can they enjoy new sports and pastimes that had not featured in the qualifying user
• Post registration rights - what is the consequence for landowners. What can they still do with the land, and could such use be unlawful under the laws that protect village greens (‘the Victorian Statutes’)
• How can a landowner guard against unwelcome registration
• How does a registration authority avoid expensive village green litigation!

Recording of live sessions: Soon after the Learn Live session has taken place you will be able to go back and access the recording - should you wish to revisit the material discussed.