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Those affected by a unilateral notice, and any future buyer of an affected property, should be be aware that the liability does still exist -- even if the notice is withdrawn. There's a very real risk that it could still apply to a future buyer. Also, many people may ne legally liable and not even know it, because parish churches did not register a notice against all liable properties, and one liable party could pursue another liable party at County Court even if the parish church does not pursue everybody directly.

Parish churches which issued notices in most cases must now do the right thing and issue a Deed of Relinquishment to eliminate the problem altogether. Otherwise this medieval madness curse of Henry VIII will continue plague both the PCC and its victims forever.

The law on CRL is extremely unsatisfactory and numerous serious issues need to be corrected by new legislation as reported in Law Com. 152.

Victims of CRL must ask their local MP to pursue the FULL implementation of Law Com. 152. The Government is openly unwilling to correct these well known problems with the legislation, despite knowing that real people are suffering as a result and more will suffer in the future, and that position is clearly unacceptable.

As I see it, registering CRL was generally an unnecessary and avoidable exercise, and little more than a back-covering exercise. PCC members are persecuting their own neighbours as a sacrifice to save themselves -- but they did not need to do it. The wider Church could have handled this better by assisting PCCs with information and policy guidance, and PCCs which registered notices could have saved everybody a lot of trouble by simply not doing so.

What really annoys me is that the liability may already have been compounded or otherwise extinguished, but the church hasn't checked all of the necessary records! There has already been one case where this was proven. It is disgraceful that the church can do a woefully incomplete job of their research thus forcing victims, their own neighbours, to either finish the job or pay up. It's extortion.

If we're all brutally honest, the truth is that in parishes affected by the 13 Oct deadline nobody has done enough research to be sure that the liability still exists. It was long forgotten and may already have been compounded. All these PCCs have done is check the enclosure. That's not good enough! I'd at least want to check historical deeds and other church records including accounts of who paid for previous repairs. But nobody should have to, it's madness, it's ancient history with too much water under the bridge. In my own parish that would include the Essex archive not just our own county archive! I know of at least one case where the PCC registered a notice when the liability had been compounded and the church had kept no record of it in the archives! Luckily somebody had kept a copy of an old paper deed, but that is unusual. Clearly, what PCCs have done is ridiculous. A grossly inadequate job, putting an impossible onus of research onto the shoulders of ordinary people. And vital pieces of the jigsaw were probably lost forever when paper deeds were replaced by electronic ones. That's why relinquishment is the only way.
At the very least one could argue that the church has given up their right to claim CRL "by custom" when they have not used that right for so long. Perhaps the reason why they have not used it is because throughout the past couple of centuries they did not believe the liability still existed -- until this year and based on inadequate research!

It's a legal minefield, even worse than acknowledged by Law Com. 152 which recommended abolition to clear up the legal mess and extreme injustices of CRL.