Brown v Ridley [2025]

Brown v Ridley [2025] UKSC 7 is a landmark Supreme Court case that concerned a boundary dispute rooted in adverse possession. Mr Brown owned land in Consett, County Durham, while his neighbours the Ridleys owned the adjacent plot, Valley View. A previous owner of Valley View had erected a fence and hedge that inadvertently enclosed a strip of Mr Brown's registered land. The Ridleys used this disputed strip as part of their garden and later built a house on it, obtaining planning permission in 2018. When Mr Brown raised objections under the Party Wall Act in October 2019, the Ridleys responded by applying to the Land Registry in December 2019 to be registered as owners of the disputed land by adverse possession under the Land Registration Act 2002 (LRA).

The central legal question turned on paragraph 5(4)(c) of Schedule 6 to the LRA, which requires an adverse possessor, in boundary dispute cases, to have reasonably believed they owned the disputed land for at least ten years of the period of adverse possession ending on the date of the application. The Ridleys' reasonable belief had ended around February 2018, approximately 21 months before their application, meaning the ten years of reasonable belief did not run right up to the application date. The First-Tier Tribunal found in favour of the Ridleys, but the Upper Tribunal reversed that decision, reading the provision as requiring the ten years of reasonable belief to be the ten years immediately preceding the application.

The Supreme Court unanimously allowed the Ridleys' appeal. Lord Briggs, giving the sole judgment, held that the provision required only that there be any ten-year period of reasonable belief within the overall period of adverse possession, not necessarily the final ten years ending on the application date. The Court reasoned that requiring belief to subsist right up to the date of application would have the perverse effect of forcing adverse possessors to apply immediately upon losing that belief, which was both unrealistic and likely to inflame neighbour disputes.

The Court rejected Mr Brown's suggestion that a short de minimis grace period would solve this problem because it has no basis in the statutory language and sits awkwardly alongside the way grace periods are handled elsewhere in adverse possession legislation. The Court also dismissed the argument that human rights considerations under Article 1 of Protocol 1 of the ECHR required a narrower, less expropriatory interpretation, noting that the European Court of Human Rights had already held that even the more generous pre-LRA adverse possession regime was Convention-compliant. The Ridleys' application to be registered as owners of the disputed land was therefore permitted to proceed.