Commons Bill [HL]

On behalf of the whole Committee, I wish to say how much we welcome the presence of my noble friend Lord Williams of Elvel, who, sadly, was missing at Second Reading. We missed his contribution then and it is a pleasure to have him here today. I hope that I will be saying that by the end of Committee stage—I am sure that I will. I can see that we will have to watch out for the ““Radnorshire Two”” during our debates. Amendment No. 2 would amend the purpose of a register of common land in Clause 2(1) to include registering ownership of common land. Amendment No. 5 would likewise confer additional power to make regulations regarding the information to be contained in registers about the ownership of land. As my noble friend said, Amendment No. 33 is slightly different, and I do not think that I need to refer to it. The first two amendments deal with the ownership of common land and how such information is registered. The Commons Registration Act 1965 provided for the registration of claims to ownership of common land but the registers were not, and are not, conclusive of ownership. Only the register of title held by Her Majesty’s Land Registry has that standing. The register of title is the right place to keep and to find information about ownership of land because the state guarantees the title shown in that register. Within the foreseeable future, the ownership of most common land will have been registered with the Land Registry. Indeed, the Land Registry has a target to complete the registration of all remaining unregistered titles by 2012. So we see the ownership section of the commons registers as obsolescent, and we have taken powers in paragraph 7 of Schedule 2 to require its removal. That is why there is no reference to the registration of ownership of land as one of the purposes of the commons registers set out in Clause 2. It is just a transitional matter with a limited life. My noble friend perhaps will understand that we do not see a need to include reference to ownership as a purpose of the registers. Likewise, we do not think it necessary to adopt Amendment No. 5 because, to the extent that we need to make regulations in the short term about the presentation of information in the ownership section of the registers, it can be done without amendment to Clause 3. Later today I will move an amendment to Clause 3 that will make it clear that regulations can promote any other information to be included on the register. I hope that that is an adequate answer to my noble friend. The facts of the case that he mentioned a few minutes ago, while not unique, are, I hope, fairly unusual in this day and age.