Claims that title to land has been acquired by adverse possession are not easy to establish and can be resisted if it can be shown that the claimant has not been in possession of the land for the required period. Recently, a woman's claim to have acquired...
Claims that title to land has been acquired by adverse possession are not easy to establish and can be resisted if it can be shown that the claimant has not been in possession of the land for the required period. Recently, a woman's claim to have acquired title to a parcel of land behind her property by adverse possession was successfully opposed by the land's owner.
The woman claimed that she had used the land as her garden continuously since 1996, when her property had been purchased by her mother. The woman's neighbour owned the land, but she asserted that she had been in continuous adverse possession of it for at least 10 years since the neighbour had acquired it. Alternatively, she claimed that for at least 10 years of the period of adverse possession, she had believed that the land belonged to her.
The woman claimed that she had continued to use and control the land throughout the relevant period, including maintaining it and planting on it, using structures such as a greenhouse and polytunnel, and challenging interference both when the neighbour had purchased the land from the council in 2010 and when building works had begun on it in 2018.
The neighbour, who had owned her property since 2002, gave evidence that the land had been disused when she had purchased it. In 2018, she had sold part of her garden for housing development. As a condition of sale, she had stipulated that the purchaser had to level and seed the land to provide a substitute garden. Photographs from that time showed machinery on the land, the land completely churned up, and the land inaccessible to anyone not involved in the works. The neighbour also produced evidence showing that, between 2003 and 2015, another family had been living at the woman's property.
The First-tier Tribunal (FTT) observed that contemporaneous evidence consistently showed the land as overgrown wilderness and was wholly inconsistent with the woman's claim of regular garden maintenance. Her absence from her property for prolonged periods, the fact that she had offered the property for sale in 2015/2016, and the general condition of the land all suggested that there had been no clear intention to exclude the world at large. The FTT found that she had not established factual possession or an intention to possess the land for the required 10-year period. Even if she had established some form of possession prior to 2018, the levelling and seeding works carried out on the neighbour's instructions constituted an interruption of any adverse possession.
The FTT also found that the woman could not establish that she had reasonably believed that the land belonged to her for any 10-year period. She had known that her father had previously tried to purchase the land from the council. A person who knew that a family member had sought to purchase a parcel of land could not reasonably claim to have believed that it already belonged to them.