Some lawyers chase personal injury claims. Others craft devious tax avoidance schemes. And then there are those of us who live for boundary disputes. Yes, my friends, it’s time to talk about adverse possession—or, as the tabloids might put it, “squatters’ rights” (a phrase that makes any self-respecting property lawyer instinctively reach for a stiff drink).
The case of Brown v Ridley took a familiar neighbourly row all the way to the Supreme Court: a disputed strip of land, an argument over who truly owned it, and the ever-delicate question of whether you can simply believe your way into ownership.
For those of you keeping score, the key issue was this: under the Land Registration Act 2002, if a squatter wants to claim ownership of registered land via adverse possession, one of the ways they can do it is by proving that, for ten years, they reasonably believed the land was theirs. The fight was over whether this ten-year belief had to be the last ten years before their application—or just any ten years during their period of occupation.
The Upper Tribunal had dutifully followed Zarb v Parry and insisted that it must be the final ten years. The Supreme Court, however, was having none of it.
A win for common sense?
Lord Briggs, delivering the judgment, made it clear that requiring the reasonable belief to continue right up until the application date would render the provision largely useless. “The essential problem with construction A, which requires the reasonable belief to persist until the very date of the application (or eviction or court proceedings), is that it would render it practically impossible in most cases for an applicant ever to be able to satisfy the boundary condition.”
Why? Because nobody wakes up one morning, realises they may not own a strip of land, and files a full-blown HM Land Registry application before breakfast.
I mean… I do, but I’m hardly the man on the Clapham omnibus…
The Court recognised that the very moment a squatter realises they don’t own the land, their belief ceases to be reasonable—which, under the strict reading of the law, would mean they’d never be able to make a successful claim. “It is virtually inconceivable that [a squatter] could prepare and make such an application on the very same day as [their] belief ceased to be reasonable.”
But this was more than just legal pedantry. The ruling was grounded in real-world pragmatism. As Briggs noted, “The notion that Parliament should have intended that [a squatter], upon realising their mistake, must immediately start a process likely to lead to a dispute and litigation seems most unlikely. But this is what construction A would require.”
Nobody wants to dive straight into a legal battle. Sometimes, people pause. They negotiate. They figure out their options. The Supreme Court saw this and decided to take an approach that actually works in practice.
No Room For Quick Fixes
One argument floated by the respondent was that a little de minimis wiggle room could fix the issue—that courts could just pretend a short gap between realisation and application didn’t count. Lord Briggs dismantled this with surgical precision: “The need to read in such an extension of time or period of grace is an important matter of substance. It is the very converse of trivial, inconsequential, or irrelevant.”
Translation: You can’t just handwave a problem away when the statute is fundamentally broken.
Why This Matters
For property lawyers and conveyancers, this ruling removes a perverse incentive: the need for applicants to immediately lodge an application the second they learn of a dispute. The Supreme Court recognised that nobody wants to dive headfirst into litigation—many prefer negotiation, or at least a pause to assess their options. This decision means that, as long as they had a solid ten years of reasonable belief at some stage during their possession, they can still apply.
And, crucially, this keeps the adverse possession mechanism workable. Parliament didn’t abolish it in 2002—it just tightened the rules to stop unscrupulous land-grabs. But if the Upper Tribunal’s view had stood, it would have made claims under the “boundary condition” of Schedule 6 virtually impossible.
As Briggs put it bluntly: “There really is no answer to the problem that construction A makes the apparent right to obtain registered title based upon adverse possession purely illusory in most typical cases, as the experienced specialist tribunals below both considered that it did.”
So there you have it: a sensible outcome, a bit more clarity in the law, and one less procedural headache for those of us knee-deep in property disputes.
The Hound waits… but not for ten years.
Contact our Residential Property team
For more information about Bishop & Sewell’s residential property services please contact Charlie Davidson Senior Associate in the firm’s Residential Property team: cdavidson@bishopandsewell.co.uk or follow Charlie; Hound of Holborn on LinkedIn.
The above is accurate as at 07 March 2025. The information above may be subject to change.
The content of this note should not be considered legal advice and each matter should be considered on a case-by-case basis.
