HL Deb 29 November 1973 vol 347 cc227-33

3.21 p.m.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR (LORD HAILSHAM OF SAINT MARYLEBONE)

My Lords, I beg to move that the House do now resolve itself into Committee on this Bill.

Moved, that the House do now resolve itself into Committee.—(The Lord Chancellor.)

On Question, Motion agreed to.

House in Committee accordingly.

[THE EARL OF LISTOWEL in the Chair]

Clause 1 agreed to.

Clause 2 [Establishment and constitution of the new registering authority]:

On Question, Whether Clause 2 shall stand part of the Bill?

LORD GARDINER

On Clause 2 may I revert to a point raised by the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor during the Second Reading debate on November 20, where at column 912 he referred to the membership of the new governing body of the Land Registry and said: … I should like to say something about the membership of the board. The first thing I have to do is to appoint the Chairman who will be the Chief Land Registrar and, in consultation with him, the other members. The Land Registry's business is, of course, highly technical and it seems to me inevitable that the full-time members of the board should be drawn from the senior members of the present management who are civil servants with great experience and knowledge of the system. Whether there is advantage in having outside members in addition is a point on which I have an open mind. I certainly do not rule out part-time members representative of other interests and I shall of course listen to any representations made to me about that. At column 927 the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor said: … I am attracted by the suggestion that there should be others on the Board apart from full-time members of the Office … I think that members of the public should also be on the Board in order to represent the consumer interest. Having had an opportunity to consider this matter since the Second Reading, may I respond to the Lord Chancellor's request for views by saying that I think that there ought to be outside representatives. The first and perhaps main reason is that while I fully join with him in the tribute he paid to the efficiency with which the Registry has always been conducted by the Chief Land Registrar, things may go wrong in the best regulated establishment. At the moment any member of the public or any person interested who considers that there has been a piece of maladministration at the Land Registry is, as I understand it, entitled through his Member of Parliament to have it inquired into by the Parliamentary Commissioner. Schedule 3, paragraph 42, removes that right. It would, I think, be strange if the only people to whom persons interested can complain of a piece of maladministration are the very people against whom he is complaining. The noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor referred to the consumer being represented. Of course, the consumers are those concerned with transfers of land, but in practice those who really have to deal with the Registry are the solicitors. I do not know how far the Law Society may have been consulted about the contents of this Bill, but I should hope that among outside representatives we should see one, or preferably two, solicitors of considerable conveyancing experience.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR I am grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, for his contribution. As he said, I would welcome the expression of opinions, and I welcome his above all. I indicated on Second Reading that this was also my provisional view. As I think his is the only outside opinion I have had so far, it confirms me in my professional view. Of course, I shall await other views as well.

Clause 2 agreed to.

Clause 3 agreed to.

Clause 4 [Further provisions as to the functions of the registering authority]:

3.27 p.m.

LORD GARDINER moved Amendment No. 1:

Page 5, line 22, leave out subsections (3), (4) and (5) and insert— ("(3) The registers shall be open to public inspection on the payment of such fees as may he determined by the registering authority.")

The noble and learned Lord said: I beg to move the Amendment standing in my name on the Marshalled List. There have been many systems of recording transfers of land. I am afraid that in the school in which I was educated the world's history began at 1066 and stopped at George I. I managed twice to get into the form that was starting again at William the Conqueror so I never got beyond George I. But I do remember enough to know that the Doomsday Book was compiled as a result of public hearing by jury in every hundred as to who owned what land, and where there were tenants, who the tenants were. For a long time after that the transfer of land was always a public occasion because it was always carried out on the land, and, indeed a piece of land was handed by the vendor to the purchaser in the presence of witnesses who would be able to prove the transfer in question.

From the Middle Ages onwards we had the Manorial Court rolls and the Manorial Courts. Manorial Courts went on until after my time at the Bar, although they are now abolished. But I remember that as Chairman of the Professional Conduct Committee of the Bar Council, where one is apt to be asked awkward questions about conduct at any moment and is required to answer, I was asked whether a barrister should wear wig and robes when sitting as a steward of the Manorial Court. There are three methods in use to-day. There is the private investigation of title which means solicitors having to burrow back, until quite recently, for at least 30 years—expensive, cumbersome and so on. There is the system of registration not of the title, but of the title deeds. That applies in Scotland where, so far as I know, the register is open to public inspection and nothing awful has followed from that practice. In some Continental countries that system still operates. In our pragmatic way we tried it in England, in the Deeds Registries in Middlesex and Yorkshire, but I have, rightly I am sure, gone over to the system of registration of title. That system is now in use in Germany, Austria—I think in Austria it has existed for 100 years, and the register has always been open to inspection by the public—Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand and most of Canada.

On the face of it I cannot see why the register should not be public. The noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor on Second Reading, in column 906, referred to the Register as a public register. Schedule 2 expressly provides that the Register shall continue to be "public records" within the meaning of the Public Records Act. I do not know whether this has been of vast importance in the past. This is not a reform I have ever contemplated trying to carry through myself; it did not seem to be important in comparison with other reforms required in law. But we are now living in an age of considerable property speculation. Some of your Lordships may have seen in one of our national newspapers this morning a letter commenting on the inactivity of the appropriate Minister in dealing with this. It is a letter sent by four Parliamentary candidates, all Conservative. As your Lordships may know, there is a valuable site in the West End of London with a block of offices on it called Centre Point. I remember Mr. Walker saying that he was writing a strong letter to the owner, and intimating what measures he would empower local authorities to take if people went on leaving such buildings empty.

It is, I suppose, a curious commentary that the justification for using that precious site in such a way is that our industrialists and merchants have insufficient offices in London. But it has stood empty for years and years, and it is, as it were, a question partly of taxation law and partly of rating law that it should be more profitable to keep it empty than to let it. It still seems to me to very odd that a local authority should not be entitled to look at the register to see who are the owners of the properties within their domain, particularly where, in so many cases of property speculators, there is a myriad of subsidiary companies and it is very difficult otherwise to find out. They can know the occupiers, of course, for rating purposes, but not, apparently, the owners. Again there are many tenants who have no idea at all who owns the property which constitutes their home.

On the Second Reading, the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor intimated that while he would be glad to consider the subject further, he thought that there might be two objections to this. At col. 926 he said: … it does not seem to me that there is a case for making registered titles non-confidential and unregistered titles, which still represent more than half, confidential. Indeed it might impede the principle of the extension of land registration which I want".

With the greatest respect I do not quite follow that. If the first question is whether it is desirable to have compulsory registration of title to land, and the answer is Yes, the second question is whether there is any objection to our doing this all at once, so that for some years some people will have compulsorily to register their title whereas others will not even be allowed to. I say "will not even be allowed to" because one of the reforms carried into the 1966 Land Registration Act was to prevent, in most cases, voluntary registration, for the reason that it was holding up compulsory registration. With compulsory registration you take a county, you build a building, if necessary train the staff; it is in a sense a military operation. But in other places registration at somebody's request, where there is no compulsory system, no local register, takes up the time of a great many staff; special ordnance survey maps have to be made and so forth, and that is why voluntary registration was largely abandoned in the 1966 Act. So I cannot see that there would be any objection.

I do not know whether the noble and learned Lord could tell us how long he now estimates it will take to complete compulsory registration in all the built-up areas of the country. I think it had run for two years until we struck the pledge given at the time of economic crisis. More years have now gone by. I should imagine that it is now about halfway through, and it means only about another four years. I cannot see why, if the registers ought to be open to inspection, it is really any argument that it cannot be done all at once, any more than it is an argument on compulsory registration as a whole.

The other point which the noble and learned Lord raised was this. He said: "I do not think I should like to see it written into the Bill". He said that he did not think the Bill was the proper place for it. His words were: I should not like to see it in this particular piece of legislation". [col. 927.]

When I nut down this Amendment on Monday, I was quite unaware until the following day, that the honourable Member for Lambeth, Vauxhall, Mr. George Strauss, who has drawn a place in the ballot for Private Member's Bills in the other place, is himself introducing a Bill the sole object of which, as I understand it, will be to make the registers of the Land Registry public. Obviously I have had a word with him since I discovered that. We are a little anxious that I shall not be told I had better leave it to his Bill, and he will not be told it is obviously a matter for this Bill. On any view, I apprehend that this Bill will become law one way or another before the Second Reading of his Bill, and I should have thought it was perhaps a matter for a Bill of this kind rather than a Private Member's Bill. Indeed, in a sense, as the Land Registry is now being hived off, this is perhaps the last opportunity that we shall have for providing for this.

I add only that I should welcome any views, whether in favour or against those I have expressed, which the House may think fit to give, particularly perhaps from any Scottish Members, who have themselves a system where such records are open to the inspection of the public. There is, in my submission, good reason for doing this now. It may not have mattered very much in the past, but it is a reform which would be desirable now. I beg to move.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR

I understand that my noble friend Lord Drumalbyn is now ready to repeat a Statement. I have seen two noble Lords ready to speak on this Amendment, so it might be convenient to have the Statement now. If that is the general feeling of the Committee, I beg to move that the House do now resume.

Moved accordingly and, on Question Motion agreed to.

House resumed.