business – BRUCE AND HOLLY

BUILDTECH construction site with cranes, workers, and Hard Hat Area signs — Workers and heavy machinery advance construction of a multi-story building beneath a towering crane.

This article first appeared in Local Government Lawyer

The Provision of Information (Contractual Control) (Registered Land) Regulations 2026 take effect on 6th April 2027 and introduce a new layer of statutory registration for any development agreement which includes within it a conditional transfer of a land interest, an option or a right of first refusal. These are referred to as ‘contractual control rights’.

The new legislation will also operate retrospectively as it will also apply to agreements signed between 8th June 2026 and 6th June 2027. The beneficiaries of those agreements will have until 6 October 2027 to register. Everyone else will have 60 days from the date of signing to complete registration

To what agreements might the regulations apply?

The regulations will apply to any conditional contract which has a significant development element and which includes a future obligation to transfer ownership to another party, whether freehold or on lease. This will also include some section 106 planning obligations, including highways or open space agreements but only where those statutory agreements include a future obligation to transfer ownership. Other Section 106 agreements not involving land transfers will be exempt from registration. There are also exemptions for small developments not involving the construction of new dwellings or other buildings where the floor space created is less than 100 square metres. Nor does an overage obligation trigger any obligation to register. There is also an exemption for temporary agreements with a duration of less than 18 months. Mortgages and other financial securities are similarly exempt.

Most importantly, the new registration requirements will only apply to registered land. It will not apply to a contractual control agreement affecting land which is for the time being unregistered. Nor would it apply to a private individual entering into a conditional contract to acquire land on which to build their own home. That individual would not be an ‘undertaking’ for the purposes of registration

What is the purpose of the new registration scheme?

The accompanying Government guidance does not expressly state the purpose of the new registration requirement. But reading between the lines, it seems to be about information gathering on pending developments, which the Government will then use to inform the rollout of its affordable housing agenda.

What is the process of registration?

Whilst there are still some segments of the compliance jigsaw yet to fall into place, the Land Registry has now issued its Practice Guide 84 ‘Contractual Control Rights’.

Between now and the full launch on 6th April 2027, the Land Registry will introduce ‘Report Contractual Control Over Land’ as its new registration platform. The new process will be entirely digital. The Land Registry will not accept plans as PDFs, although the new digital registration system will include an integrated map drawing tool.

Responsibility for compliance will be entirely on the beneficiary of the contractual control mechanism. In many cases that will be the registered social landlord acquiring surplus housing land for redevelopment. However, it will be for the local planning authority to register any section 106 planning obligation which includes a prospective land transfer.

With the exception of existing contract control agreements signed before full launch on 6th April 2027, registration must take place within 60 days of signing. That registration must also be updated on any future assignment or variation of that contract. Applications for registration can only be made by a UK registered conveyancing practitioner.

What information must be provided on registration?

The full names of the grantor and the grantee;

A unique reference or company registration number for any corporate party to the agreement.

Where the grantor is an individual, their date and place of birth;

The type of contractual control right

The date, parties and title or other description of the contract

In the case of an option or other conditional sale, the date from which that contractual right can be exercised or, for a conditional contract, details of those conditions

Details of the initial period of control and any provisions to extend it as well as an entitlement for either party to terminate it

The title number of the qualifying estate

The address and postcode of the land subject to the right

Details of whether the land subject to the right includes anything above or beneath the surface.

What about commercial confidentiality?

Apart from the summary registration details which have to be provided, commercial confidentiality will be preserved. Although a grantor’s date and place of birth may have to be disclosed in the registration application, that information will not fall into the public domain. Access to the contract control register will not enable anyone to download the contract itself. Only the summary details.

What are the sanctions for non-compliance?

Although there is a possibility of prosecution for non-compliance under section 225 of the Levelling Up and Regeneration Act 2023, the main sanction for non-compliance is the inability to protect any agreement by registration of a Restriction or Notice under the Land Registration Act 2002. What this means is that the contract control agreement would not be binding on anyone dealing with that registered title who did not have deemed notice of its existence.

How does it interface with other registration regimes?

Section 106 planning obligations are already registerable as local land charges. The same is true of agreements expressed to bind successors in title under Section 33 of the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1982 and Section 16 of the Greater London Council (General Powers) Act 1974. There is also the regulatory obligation under Article 40 of the Town and Country Planning (Development Management Procedure) (England) Order 2015 to publish the entirety of any Section 106 obligation on a council’s planning portal. None of these existing registration requirements are affected by the new regulations.

What do I have to do now?

Identify any contract control agreement signed since 8th April 2026 which benefits your corporate client and obtain any outstanding information you need to get it registered by the 6th October 2027 deadline. Ensure that future contracts are clear as to responsibility for registration. Include any nomination agreements, where the Council is reserving nomination rights over a future development. Update case management systems to ensure that anyone dealing with these transactions is alerted to the need to register.

Law, Uncategorized

Legal Department of the Future: The stories behind the statistics

August 30, 2025 bruceandholly

As someone who has spent more than 30 years of a legal career working with local authority in-house teams, the statistics contained in this report ring true for me. But behind every statistic, there is a story, which I now attempt to explain from my own experience and discussions with others.

It is not about being cheap and cheerful.

Providing ‘more for less’ requires an understanding of what a corporate client really wants from an in-house legal service. It is not about being cheap and cheerful. If that were the case, no legal work would ever be outsourced. A corporate client wants value for money. But not only value for money. They also want a quality service which lifts the burden from their own shoulders and provides a timely turnaround. And a corporate client is prepared to pay more for that type of service. For me, the benchmark comparison for a good in-house team should be that which the client could obtain from a private sector firm of equivalent size, expertise and resource. What is also important to a corporate client is the added value which only an in-house legal team can provide. An on-site presence. An understanding of the client’s ‘business’. Making yourself part of the client ‘team’. Presenting to elected members. Navigating the council’s constitution. Dealing with those tiresome freedom of Information requests and registration of assets of community value.

It’s about the technology

For me, having the right technology and systems in place are key to providing a client with more for less. Because it is that technology and the systems which go with it, which creates the environment in which fee earners are able to work quickly and efficiently and which, in turn, produces lower unit cost. A problem for legal services managers is that many of these systems are not under their direct control. All they can do is report a failure and wait for someone else to come and fix it. Walking up and down looking for a printer that works and then lining up behind two other fee earners, is hardly an efficient use of lawyer time. Some of that technology is already free to download and use on any modern computer, such as voice dictation.

I’ve noticed that local authority legal teams always appear several years behind their private sector counterparts when it comes to adopting new technology. Whilst there may be exceptions, I would think it safe to assume that most local authorities have not yet adopted the electronic signing and attestation of documents which is now the standard in most private practice. The adoption of such systems is not expensive and saves money as well as time. Using DocuSign not only avoids the need for a corporate seal and a wet ink signature, it also avoids the need to prepare and circulate hard copy engrossments and can bring forward a completion by more than a week.

Staff Recruitment and Retention

Whilst salary levels for local authority lawyers are significantly lower than those working in private practice, what must be factored in is the Local Government Pension Scheme. Whilst this final salary scheme may no longer be as generous as it once was, it is still better than anything you are likely to get elsewhere.

Headline locum hourly pay rates may be higher than the equivalent salaries paid to permanent staff but remember that from that hourly headline rate, anyone working off payroll has to fund the costs of their own employment,before any money can go into their pocket. This will include employers’ National Insurance, rolled up holiday pay, and making their own pension arrangements. Any tax advantages which staff might once have enjoyed from working off-payroll disappeared with IR35. So maybe the pay difference is not as significant as it first appears. Even the 15% commission paid to the locum agency is not money for nothing, as it covers the administration and due diligence which would otherwise have to be carried out by the council’s own HR and payroll teams

By contrast, the locum market enables legal services managers to quickly upsize or downsize to meet day-to-day operational requirements without the paraphernalia of a long-winded recruitment or redundancy process. For a good locum, the issue is not how long a particular assignment lasts but whether there will be something to move on to after it has ended. It is about personal marketability. The ability to quickly adapt to a team’s requirements and make a real contribution to getting the work done. The first thing I notice when looking at a locum CV is the length of previous assignments and, more importantly, whether any of those previous assignments have been repeated or extended. If the answer is, ‘none’, that for me sends its own message. When it comes to ‘diva tendencies’, the worst locums I have come across are the semi-retired grandees. The former chief executives coming new to transactional work but who refuse to be told.

Retention of good staff has always been a problem for me, much more than the permanent recruitment of new staff. I believe it’s because of the limited opportunities which local authorities provide for internal promotion, where every opportunity has to be advertised to the World and where even the best candidate can be pipped at the post by someone who may be less able but whose answers score better in a structured interview. Then, the only way for that internal candidate to achieve promotion is to adopt a scatter gun approach, by sending multiple applications to other local authorities until someone bites. A system which is hardly conducive to corporate loyalty.

Getting into management.

I found it disappointing that only 38% of local government lawyers aspire to management, even though leadership is a valuable life-skill which can only be learned by doing. Management is your chance to make a difference. To put in place the changes you always wanted to make but never had the seniority to make. A chance to experiment with your own ideas instead of implementing someone else’s. Taking credit when something goes well and responsibility when it does not. Something I have always tried to do when taking up a new management’s role is to repair some of those client relationships which had previously become soured.

Third party income

Something not mentioned at all during the survey is the opportunities for a legal team to help meet its budget by maximizing third party income. The costs of many transactions can be loaded onto the party receiving the benefit of that transaction. Examples include section 106 planning agreements; highway agreements; statutory lease extensions; leasehold sub-dealings, such as licences to assign or underlet. Licences for alteration or change of use. In fact, any transaction carried out at the request of another party.

Whilst an in-house legal team cannot make a profit on such transactions, it is important they are at least cost- neutral for the local authority. It is about accurately assessing the amount of work likely to be involved and seeking a professional undertaking for that amount. And then being able to work within that quoted budget so that there is no cost overrun.

On a final note, what I have always valued from my work with in-house legal teams is the general culture of courtesy which has always existed between local government officers at every level.

…………………………….

V.Charles Ward is a Senior Property Lawyer with HB Public Law and author of Local Authority Conveyancing: Law and Practice (UK)

First Published in Local Government Lawyer – August 2025

business

Top Tips for Filing Your Self-Assessment Tax Return

June 8, 2025 bruceandholly

I never understand why some people wait until almost the January 31st deadline to submit their self-assessment tax return. Or forget to do it altogether and cop a £100 penalty. I uploaded mine yesterday. And it was easier than I had expected. It’s actually a long time since I last filed my own tax return. I had been using a payroll company to do this. But they stopped providing this service. So I had a choice of either finding another accountant or dealing with it myself. I did the latter.

I always used to fill out my own tax returns using the paper forms which HMRC posted out to me. One day my completed form got lost in the system and I began to worry as I got closer to the submission deadline. Online submission was at that time very new and difficult to navigate. Which was why I gave £150 to the payroll company to file it on my behalf.

Even if you are not required to submit a self-assessment tax return, there may be reasons why it is advantageous to do so, particularly if there are things which you can legitimately deduct from your tax liability, like professional subscriptions. So here are a several tips for anyone who has to fill out a self-assessment tax questionnaire:

Pull together the information and get it in as soon as possible, so that you don’t have to worry about it later. Best time to get it in is as soon as you get your P60 (perhaps more than one if you have a portfolio of jobs). It’s better to know now if something is missing, than later.

2. Keep accurate records so that you have all the information to hand when you fill out the online form, particularly about those legitimate deductibles, like professional subscriptions and training courses. I included in my own tax return a deduction of £177 for sundries. But that deduction could have been much bigger if I had kept better records of business purchases. Like the letter-scale which I purchased several months back from Amazon so that I didn’t have to traipse along to the post office and wait in line every time needed to post a larger item. I’ll make sure that I don’t forget when I fill out next year’s return.

3. Don’t forget those charitable donations which you made through the tax year. Legitimate charities can claim back basic rate tax relief directly on any donations you make. But this doesn’t mean that you can’t set it against higher rate tax by including it as a deductible on your tax return. The effect of a gift aid charitable donation is boost your basic rate threshold to reduce the amount of higher rate tax which you would otherwise pay

Uncategorized

Ten New Year’s Work Resolutions for Local Authority Conveyancers

January 5, 2025 bruceandholly

It seems strange that in today’s corporate world, the only people to have full secretarial support are those who are least likely to need it. They are the captains of industry who spend most of their time in meetings instead of sitting in front of a screen pushing out documentation in volume. For the rest of us, it’s about making the best of what limited support is available to us. One of the positives coming out of the covid lockdowns was a permanent change in working habits, which means that we can do more of our work from the back bedroom instead of traipsing through the morning and evening rush hours. Who would want to go back to that? It was also fortuitous that this change in working habits coincided with technical developments which enable us to meet on teams at the moment’s notice instead of taking an afternoon out of the office to meet face to face. So what has all this got to do with New Year’s resolutions? Just this! In conveyancing, time is money. A delayed completion often means a delayed rental stream or a delayed capital receipt. And everyone loses.

If progress on a transaction stalls completely, other things will supervene and it will begin to unravel. One of the issues I have with traditional time recording is that it rewards inefficiency, with the slowest most inexperienced fee earner charging out the most time for a transaction. When it should be all about unit-cost, meaning that the faster you are able to work without compromising on quality or accuracy, the better value you are providing to your corporate client. In this post, I provide suggestions for ten New Year work-resolutions which can help you become one of the most efficient conveyancers in your team, simply by making the best use of the resources which are available to you . Here they are:

Dictate! Dictate Dictate! All computers which are Windows 10 and above, have a voice dictation facility. But you will need to find it and enable it. Voice dictation is improving all the time but is still far from perfect. Unlike a secretary, automated voice dictation cannot interpret what you have said. It will simply transcribe what it thinks you have said. So if I dictate the word, ‘ comma’, it will tell me to ‘Call my Mum’. If I say ‘draft’, as in document, it will give me the draught which is blowing in through the open window behind me. So why do I use voice dictation? Because even with its many faults, it is still three times quicker than typing everything out longhand.
Purchase a wired mouse, a wired keyboard, a wide-screen monitor and a wired headset which you are going to use if you are going to dictate. Unless you have micro fingers, don’t try doing all your work on the tiny keyboard which is attached to your laptop. Invest in a wide screen monitor so you don’t have to squint. Using a wide screen also makes it easier to proofread documentation and reduces the risk of mistakes.
Take an interest in legal developments, even if they don’t directly relate to your work. If you are working in a bubble, it is too easy to miss the big changes which are happening in mainstream conveyancing. Subscribe to an online newsletter like ‘Today’s Conveyancer,’ which is aimed at the high street practitioner.
Take time to get to know your corporate clients and learn what they really want from an in-house legal service. It’s not about being ‘cheap and cheerful’. Instead of huddling together with other lawyers, try to become part of the client team.
Be serious about meeting your financial targets, even if colleagues are not meeting theirs.
The 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. core hours slot is sacrosanct. Nothing must be allowed to get in the way of chargeable work. Try to keep training and other distractions out of those core hours.
Be prepared to innovate and discover ways to improve productivity. Set up templates and standardise wherever possible. Don’t send out documentation in draft if you can send out an engrossment.
Look for ways to raise your own professional profile. Remember that meeting continuous professional development (CPD) requirements need not only involve being a passive listener. You can also earn points by presenting training to clients and prospective clients and raise your own profile in the process.
Have confidence in your own professional judgement. And be prepared to provide your client with clear and robust advice. If you don’t have confidence in your own professional judgement, why should anybody else have confidence in you?
Never pass up an opportunity to get into management, even if it’s only for a few months to cover somebody’s maternity leave. Management experience does not only look good on your CV. Leadership is also a valuable life skill which can only be learned by doing. And if you go into management, make sure that you look, act, and sound like a manager, because it will affect the way other people react to you.