What Court Order should I apply for?

Hi Stuart,

Not being a Lawyer myself please could I recommend you contact our team at Hawkins Ryan from this page >> https://www.property118.com/ownership-restructuring-tax-purposes/

No need for a Court Order. The restriction without actually seeing the title would tend to indicate that it is held as Tenants in Common. a transfer showing both of you as transferor and you as transferee would need to be signed by both of you.and witnessed As the consideration was £4000.00 should not need the ID1 form to be completed. I assume your former partner will co operate in this matter.
John Pettman

My first port of call, if you have paperwork to prove what you instructed your solicitor to do and what they charged you for at the time is their door. There could be a case against them at least to get the mistake corrected free of charge.

John Pettman - I may be wrong but that could be a shot in the dark, how many former girlfriends from twenty years ago are you still in touch with 🙂

Yes, Colin is right. Check your old correspondence if you still have it and verify what you asked the solicitor to do and what they told you they would do for the price quoted.

I recently had a situation myself where we remortgaged a pair of semi's and there was also a transfer of equity. The lender required the titles to be split as they were on a single title at Land Registry which we were told would be done on completion.

A couple of years later I did a title search on the land registry website and saw that the titles were never split which would have caused us a problem when we came to remortgage. The solicitors firm had since changed hands, but old business is always protected in these instances and the new owners amended it all free of charge for us.

The only hitch with regard to this is the amount of time which has passed. Many solicitor firms destroy old files after around 7 years or so.

As John said the transfer itself is technically a simple process. You can print off an AP1 form (form for a change to the register) and a TR1 form (transfer of a whole title) from the internet and fill it in, or have your solicitor deal with it for a very small fee. The difficulty as Colin points out will be whether you still have the ability to contact your ex-girlfriend, as she will be required to sign the form in front of a witness and provide proof of her identity. Whilst technically the amount involved falls below the limit the land registry requires an ID1 form, I don't know a solicitor breathing who will do anything without identity verification for all parties.

The land registry will not remove charges without proof that meets their requirements that it is valid to remove the charge. I have recently been through this where a past commercial tenant of 30 years ago had registered a charge on a commercial property we were trying to remortgage and it was a right to lease for a lease which had long since expired, but since the old landlord no longer had a copy of the lease to prove it had expired and the tenants were no longer contactable they would not remove it, without which our new lender would not release funds. I was luckily able to trace them and turned up on their doorstep to have them sign the necessary forms to release the charge. It was a very close call, we were literally able to complete the remortgage on the day before the offer expired. Had we not been able to trace them we couldn't have remortgaged at all.

What is the exact wording on the title document? If it is this:

> "RESTRICTION: No disposition by a sole proprietor of the registered estate (except a trust corporation) under which capital money arises is to be registered unless authorised by an order of the court."

The this is a standard Form A restriction, which in layman's terms, means that you own the property as Tenants in Common (as oppose to Joint Tenants), i.e. you own half and she owns half.

In which case, follow the above advice as given. If however it says something different (there are many restrictions covering disposition that mention the need for a court order), then the advice may vary. Either way, going back to the original solicitor should be your first point of call.

For info, this document fully describes title restrictions, in all their gory details:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/notices-restrictions-and-the-protection-of-third-party-interests-in-the-register/practice-guide-19-notices-restrictions-and-the-protection-of-third-party-interests-in-the-register#standard-form-restrictions