Overriding interest

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Overriding interest is a term in English land law. The general rule in registered conveyancing is that all interests and rights over a piece of land have to be written on the register entry for that land, otherwise, when anyone buys that piece of land, the interests won't apply to the purchaser, and the rights will be lost. Overriding interests are the exception to this general rule. Overriding interests need not be registered to still bind any new owner.

Overriding interest was created because it was perceived that for several classes of interest, it would be unreasonable to expect such interests to be registered. Such interests include short term leases, seen as being too minor an interest to burden with the bureacracy of registration. They include the rights of people in actual occupation, perhaps unaware of their legal rights. They also include public rights of way, as it wasn't clear who should be made to register them.

Overriding interests were introduced as part of land registration legislation in 1925, originally governed by the 1925 Land Registration Act section 70. This Act has been completely replaced by the Land Registration Act 2002, where the rules on overriding interests can be found in Schedules 1 and 3. However, case law based on the 1925 provisions is generally thought to still be good law.

A leading case is Williams & Glyn Bank v Boland^[1] - in this case, a wife successfully claimed an overriding interest in a property which her husband had mortgaged to support a failing business. As she didn't have a legal interest in the property, but had made substantial contributions to the purchase and was in actual occupation of the property, her overriding interest was upheld when the bank tried to take possession.

There has been some recent academic concern over the effect on overriding interests of the 1998 Human Rights Act. If a purchaser were to buy property, only to find themselves subject to numerous restrictive or expensive obligations that they did not and could not have known about, they may have some relief courtesy of Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights.