Under the Land Charges (Amendment) Rules 2012 Land Registry telephone service centres will close and the organisation will introduce more types of electronic Land Charges applications.
The amendments to the Land Charges Rules 1974 came into force yesterday (17 December 2012).
The other main changes are: to revoke rule 6 and Form 14 of the rules, which required a statutory declaration to accompany most applications that are not made by a practising solicitor.
To omit rule 13(2) of the rules under which the registrar could require a separate certificate that the land affected by an application is not registered (since this declaration is already included in land charges application forms)
To amend a number of Land Charges forms, namely K1, K2, K3, K4, K5, K6, K7, K8, K9, K11, K12, K13, K15, K19 and K20.
The amendments to these forms will add reference to unitary authority areas as well as county and district and to replace ‘solicitor’ with ‘conveyancer’ (so that the Land Charges rules mirror the Land Registration rules).
The revised versions of the forms will appear on the Land Registry website in both Word and PDF formats and should be used from now onwards.
Old versions of the forms will be accepted until 15 March 2013. The amendment also clarifies that fees can be paid by cheque and direct debit.
There is no change to the fees that are currently paid, except that if a person attends the Land Charges department to lodge an application for an official search in person, they will simply be provided with a written result so will pay a reduced fee of £1 (instead of a fee of £2 for including a visual display of the result).
