Access to our land

[Chick3216]

Hi, does anyone have any advice please?
we bought our house and we knew the lane we use as access was owned by someone else. We have some land at the back of our house and turns out we cannot use the access to access the land, only our house. We will potentially want to build on this land in the future. Does anyone have any experience of this please?

It’s a very complex area. If you have right of way over the access lane to your home it will say in your deeds and also in the deeds of the owner of the lane exactly what you can access. If for example the deeds say you can access the land for maintenance only twice a year that is what you would legally be limited to. If you decided to increase that you would be looking to enhance the access which could only be done with agreement of the lane owner.

Have you spoken to the owner of the lane and offered them a sum of money to change the access arrangements to the land so that you can access the land via the lane?

Thank you for your reply. Yes the owner would be willing to sell but at a high price and as we don’t know for certain if we will get planning, it’s a big risk. It is clearly on our deeds that it’s just for access to the house, with vehicles, on foot is fine

It's probably been done that way to prevent people from building on it to be honest!

Yes it has, he bought it as an investment because of that

We have the same but no intention of building on the land so we are happy with the restriction.

It just came as a bit of a shock because I wasn’t aware. Solicitors said we had full access. We aren’t definitely building on the land either.

You could have an option to call for a deed of easement. You only exercise and pay the money if/when you get planning.

You might have 'full' access for existing use which is all a bog standard conveyancer would investigate at time of purchase.

Development law is different from standard conveyancing.

Thank you, this is helpful

You could apply for planning permission first.

Yes we could but I have a feeling the price will go up even more then! Also we use the land at the moment and we would not want to live here with houses on it and we aren’t ready to move yet

Maybe I am misunderstanding but could you arrange access to the land such that it's accessed from your house? So for example creating a driveway across your current garden to access the land behind ?

No unfortunately not because whoever lives there would still have to drive down his access. That is the only access

Op you also need to check that there are no covenants which prevent development.

Before you spend £££s trying to get planning I would recommend you get a thorough title review done by a development lawyer.

Okay thank you. The land has had planning in the past but they didn’t do anything about it due to health issues if this makes any difference?

Just because planning has been granted it doesn't mean that it is a developable site.

Yes exactly and that’s why we don’t want to pay this person a lot of money for essentially a little lane. Thanks for your help 😊

Yes my point is that if there's a right to access your house then anyone can access that. If they then further access something behind your house using just your land then that's not a violation of any access rights.
But a diagram would be needed here!

I think we need a diagram.

I will do a diagram! 😜

really rubbish diagram

So looking at diagram you could access the land from the garage? Without going along the left part of the lane ? In which case that may be fine ?
Either way you'd need to check the deeds carefully !

Is the main road down at the bottom of the page?

But he says that his access road goes onto cover the garage as well? Sorry if I wasn’t clear before

Yes it is x

Just to say if you use his lane to access the house the n you can't just 'enlarge' or 'intensify' an easement beyond it's original grant.

So accessing the land from the house wouldn't work.