Acquiring a site is one thing, but equally as critical is the ability to use it for your desired purposes. Do you have sufficient parking provision on-site or do you need to use a neighbouring car park? Are you able to access your property directly from the public highway or do you need to pass over land in third party ownership? If, in either case, the latter applies, do you have the benefit of sufficient rights to do so?
On 1 October 2017 the new Pre-Action Protocol for Debt Claims against individuals (“the Debt Protocol”) will come into force.
Usually houses are sold as freeholds where a purchaser buys the building and the land it stands on outright. In some cases, houses are sold as leasehold. This may be appropriate for some houses for example because they are on National Trust land. However, in other instances it seems that new build houses are being sold on a leasehold basis to create an income stream for the freeholder from the ground rent, or to generate additional income from the sale of the freehold interest or a lease extension at a later date.
A few days after we wrote about wide-ranging changes to European data protection law coming into force in May 2018, under the EU General Data Protection Regulation, the UK government published a statement of intent regarding plans to introduce a UK Data Protection Bill.
Lawyers do sometimes make life difficult for themselves. Let's take lease classification as an example. The same lease may be variously described as a concurrent lease, a lease of the reversion and an overriding lease, sometimes rightly and sometimes wrongly, and, to complicate matters further, there are also reversionary leases, which may be leases of the reversion.
In 2017, it is Bitcoin that is back in the news.
Having previously advised that only postal applications would be accepted, HMRC’s website has now revised its guidance to confirm that notifications of options to tax land and buildings can be submitted to an email address ([email protected]) as well as by fax or post.
HMRC hasn’t explained why email submissions were temporarily halted, but it is good to know that this quicker means of notification is once again permitted.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was adopted at the EU level in April 2016 and will replace the current UK Data Protection Act 1998 on 25 May 2018.
In a typical commercial property transaction, the seller/ landlord will provide the buyer/ tenant with replies to CPSEs, and often, replies to additional enquiries.
In May we advised on the changes to the UK's existing 'People with Significant Control' (PSC) regime.
