Commons Bill [HL]

I begin by speaking to Amendment No. 24. We are unable to support the noble Lord’s amendment. The noble Earl, Lord Peel, put it very succinctly in Grand Committee, when he said:"““I fail to see the difference between the sale of common land and the sale of ordinary land.””—[Official Report, 1/11/05; col. GC41.]" I agree with him. The function of Her Majesty’s Land Registry is to register the sale of land, not to act as an early warning system. Where someone has a legitimate interest in land, such as the interest of an estranged spouse in the matrimonial home, then it is possible to register a caution in order to receive notice of an application affecting the register—but that is not the case here. The sale of a common to another party can have no legal impact on the commoners’ entitlement to exercise their common rights. The noble Lord’s amendment implies that he would like the Land Registry to go further than merely giving notice; it refers to a ““proposal”” for a change in ownership. The register of title, held by the Land Registry, is open to all, so if a commons association becomes aware of a change in ownership, and is not immediately able to establish who has bought the land, it may apply to the Land Registry in writing or online for details of the new registered owner. It is a very simple process. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Livsey, has concerns about common land being bought and sold without local people being aware of what is happening, but that is a consequence of having an open market for land in this country. We are taking steps to integrate the existing statutory pre-purchase commons search system into the existing, more widely used, conveyancing search forms, and we hope that this will mean that buyers of common land are far less likely to claim ignorance of the special status of the land that they have acquired. I hope that will be of some comfort to the noble Lord. It will come as no surprise to the noble Lord if I say that Amendment No. 32 has precisely the same effect as Clause 1. Every registration authority is to keep the registers whether they are in paper or electronic form. Moreover, we have provided in Clause 20 for a right for the public to inspect the registers. That right will endure even where the registers have been digitised, although regulations may make specific provision as to how the right is to be exercised where the legal data is held in electronic form. For example, the regulations may provide that a person is to be able to view the data on a screen, or that a print-out must be provided of relevant extracts. We had a good debate in Grand Committee on Amendment No. 33 on whether the Secretary of State should have a power or a duty to make regulations under Clause 25 to enable the conversion of commons registers to an electronic form. My noble friend explained then that regulations should not be our first priority, but that we were determined to get on with the task so that registration authorities could begin to convert their registers. Were we to have imposed a duty on registration authorities to convert their registers, then funding for that purpose would have followed through the usual channels via the revenue support grant, which would have been a rather blunt method of targeting funding. Given our plans to roll out the implementation of Part 1 of the Bill on a regional basis, we expect that registration authorities will also wish to co-ordinate plans to digitise their registers with the regional commencement. For example, it may be sensible for an authority to undergo conversion to electronic format before embarking on the transitional period under Schedule 2, but the timing of the transitional period may vary between authorities and between regions by as much as several years. I reassure the noble Baroness that funding for this purpose, as with funding for the transitional period itself, will best be provided, at least initially, on a targeted basis. Some authorities have already made good progress in establishing electronic registers, even though those cannot at present have the same force of law as the paper registers. In the longer term, should we find that some authorities are being left behind in an increasingly universal era of e-government, we have conferred a power in Clause 25(1) to require authorities to keep their registers in an electronic form, and the imposition of such a duty would require commensurate funding at that stage. I hope that I have been able to answer the points raised by noble Lords on this group of amendment and they will not seek to press them.