UK Map Centre - accuracy question

[EverHopefull]

Has anyone on the BH forum any experience of the maps available on the UK Map Centre website?

 

I notice that the maps are certified "Land Registry compliant" "Council Compliant" and licenced from Ordinance Survey themselves.

My concern is that the boundary show on the Land Registry documents differ somewhat to the ones available on this website. Clearly the website purchased ones are usable in a planning process and produced under a third party licence from the OS themselves.

 

Anyone ever experienced this differential before?

 

I have been told that Land Registry are trying to "upgrade" the property boundary nightmare whenever a property goes through the process of conveyance and that they are using OS data to perform this upgrade. Anyone herd or experienced this?

[Jeremy Harris]

Why not just get the map from the OS themselves?  I bought an OS licence for a large scale map to use for the site and location plans, and, as it was available in .dxf format it was really useful, as I could import it into Autocad and so tie all the drawings to a common map baseline.

[EverHopefull]

I could do that of course but I am applying for AP1 on a small area of my garden plot that appears to be inclusive to the plot on the plans I can download from this company's website.

The process of AP appears to be more a case of having the boundary certified/amended by Land Registry rather than full AP.

I am not sure at this stage if it would be best to continue with AP with the LReg and wait for them to refer to OS (that is what they seem to do to clarify matters) or just go for a amend to the boundary with LReg making a reference to the mapping OS have?

[TerryE]

There's a bunch of LRO guidelines that relate to this.  Download and read.  IIRC, the rule of thumb is that for normal boundaries within urban areas they only claim ½m accuracy and this falls to 2m or worse in rural areas.  "The boundary is what the boundary is" takes precedence.  

 

We bought a farmhouse plot 35 years ago in pre-registrations days and one side of our garden was separated from the back gardens of 4  houses in a 70s estate development on the previous farmland.  The posts and plot corner-markers for the boundary fence between us and the 4 neighbours had been placed along a taught line and luckily we have photographic evidence supporting this.  However, we planted a laurel hedge along the boundary a few years after buying the farmhouse -- and later discovered that two of our neighbours had moved their fence posts as far into our garden as the laurel hedge would allow.  What an unnecessary PITA, especially when we decided to take out the hedge.  LRO documents won't help avoid this sort of dispute and resolution.  Concreting in concrete spurs for the boundary posts and taking supporting photographic evidence will.

 

The only time that the LRO requires determined boundaries is if you have been in formal boundary dispute with the adjacent plot owner.  Once you are in formal dispute, then the LRO will want a properly surveyed boundary plan, with this work carried out by an appropriately qualified land surveyor.  Neither you nor your neighbour want to go down this route, as it can involve legal and surveyor costs that are factors more than the disputed land, and once a formal boundary dispute has been registered this will come up on any pre-sale searches and will materially impact the saleability and value of both properties.  So both parties should avoid this and seek a negotiated resolution, using mediation if necessary.  If the boundary is agreed then use permanent physical markers to define it and stay with a simple markup of the LFO furnished 1:1250 digitised maps.

 

Going back to our two neighbours one (or his successor) was happy for us to straighten the boundary when we offered to replace then entire fence with a high quality one.  The other couple are a total **!!@@ IMO, but is it really worth getting into a huge barney because they've swung the end of their fence 45cm into out plot, created a dogleg in the fence and pinching a couple of m² of our garden?

 

There is one major loophole in the LR system if you have an unregistered property.  When first registering, your solicitor is supposed to confirm that any adjacent plot holder agrees with the boundaries, but no one ever checks up on this and it is almost impossible to get the LRO to agree that mistake has been made as such cost-consequences of such mistakes are borne by the them.  Instead the onus is on the adjacent plot owner to prove that mistake has been made.  This can be really difficult.  On another boundary we ended up paying a neighbour a £1K inconvenience sweetener to sign a TP1 for a path to our front door that had always been part of our property at least since its first sale in 1913 (when it was formally detailed as part of out property), but the solicitor of a previous neighbour had included it in their property in error on first registration.  No one consulted us so we didn't even know!  

 

The one time that you can remedy such mistakes is to threaten the adjacent seller with a boundary dispute if he or she doesn't agree to correct the boundary by mutual agreement as this would in effect make his or her property a lot less saleable.  I think that this is a reasonable course of action to consider if you are seeking to rectify a genuine error in previous registrations.

Edited February 25, 2019 by TerryE
Typos and grammar

[Jeremy Harris]

I second the above from @TerryE, as we had a major boundary problem, that took nearly a year to resolve before we could complete the purchase of our plot.  The LR were pretty hopeless, as they just said that their title plans are only indicative and don't represent where the boundaries exist on the ground.  We ended up getting the vendor of our plot to pay to have the errors in the LR plans and titles corrected, which involved our neighbours and their solicitor having to agree with the vendor that the existing fence was the boundary and that the scaled title plans that applied to their house and the plot were in error. 

 

I was glad we picked this up when doing a rough check of the positions of the boundaries pre-purchase, as had we left it as it was the house could not have been built on the plot, despite there being planning permission in place.