Allotment Gardening Advice Help Chat

Growing => Grow Your Own => Topic started by: breizhcymru on November 10, 2017, 09:26

Title: Land registry application for allotment lease
Post by: breizhcymru on November 10, 2017, 09:26
Hello all,

These days, it seems I spend more time doing paperwork than enjoying my allotment. :(

For those of you who are new to the saga, here is a quick recap :

Our local county council is doing a Community Asset Transfer (CAT) of most of its assets, as it is trying to save money. This includes our small (11 plots) allotment. The process has already taken 18 months but we have now finally signed the lease.
A very helpful post in the forum, in the early days, got me in touch with the Allotment Society, through whom we have sorted our insurance and received very sound advice.

We are now at the stage where we need to register the lease with the land registry, using form AP1.
Everything in the process is geared towards the hapless member of the public being forced to use a conveyancing service, at a huge expense (huge, because our allotment is small and therefore the cost is divided between very few people). The online guides, from HMRC, are close to useless and the land registry itself is reluctant to help in filling the form as they are not supposed to give legal advice. As I said, the whole system is geared towards spending money (rant over).
Therefore, I am wondering whether anybody has been going through the same process (whether through lease from the local authority or community gardening...) and would agree to share their experience with us and help fill in that form ?

Thanks for reading.
Title: Re: Land registry application for allotment lease
Post by: mjg000 on November 11, 2017, 11:53
We are currently trying to buy the common parts of our estate (35 houses/flats) I have found it very useful to look at websites offering an online service because this is priced at a set amount.  If you search for "Land registry - filing a lease" or something similar, I'm sure some legal companies will come up. We will do this to set up the company and a local solicitor to do the conveyancing. Hope this helps.