I wonder if anyone else has been faced with the somewhat bizarre interpretation of the word 'disposition' recently advanced to me by the Land Registry in response to an application to rectify a registered title charged to one of the principal banks? The bank in question has incorporated in its standard mortgage a restriction, broadly speaking, in Form P from the list in schedule 4 as to the Land Registration Act 2002 prohibiting any 'disposition of the registered estate' without the consent of the proprietor of the charge.


As is not unknown in first registration applications, the plan on the transfer inducing first registrations was inaccurate and the title as registered subject to the bank's charge omitted a portion of the land acquired. You would think that it would be a reasonably simple matter, where both buyer and seller agreed that the plan was wrong and the extent of the error, to substitute a new plan, by a simple deed of rectification, without involving the mortgagee, whose security is after all being enhanced rather than reduced and where the transaction does not involve in any normal sense of the word a disposition by the registered proprietor.



If you thought that, then, like me, you would be wrong. The Land Registry has an entirely new take on the word 'disposition', and according to its letter states that it is clarified by the Land Registration Act 2002 as being 'some action by the proprietor', praying in aid section 41. However much as I study section 41, I cannot find anything that says the accretion of land to a charge or to a title as a result of rectification of an error is 'a disposition'.



How has anyone else resolved this? Or have we all bowed to the inevitable, on the basis that the Land Registry is all-powerful and we have no choice but to go running to the mortgagee for consent, however unreasonable that may seem to be?



Peter Cross, Walter Williams, Fishguard, Pembrokeshire