Prescribed Clauses Leases - Spring 2006

01 April 2006

From 19th June 2006 all Leases granted out of Registered Land for 7 years or more must be Prescribed Clauses Leases (PCLs). There are few exceptions and the Land Registry’s objective is that leases for 3 years or more become registrable.

The purpose of PCLs is to make the Land Registry’s task of registering leases easier. The Registry need only look at the 14 prescribed clauses which must appear at the front of the lease. The only prescribed clauses which may be omitted are numbers 13 and/or 14, but if you omit 13, do not renumber 14. Whilst there is no prescribed form required for the date of the lease, there is a preferred form. We are all getting used to the ‘tick the box’ approach adopted by this country’s bureaucracy in dealing with its citizens. Fortunately, there are only 14 clauses which need completing, so, after getting over the horrors of Stamp Duty Land Tax Returns, this should not present too much of a problem for us practitioners.

Unfortunately, for those of you who were hoping that 14 clauses would mean short leases, we are sorry to disappoint. The Registry is only concerned with things such as the identities of the parties and the property, amount of rent, transferability of the lease etc., most of which information already appears in the first few pages of most leases. The clauses which govern the working relationship between the landlord and tenant are not of concern for registration purposes.

The moral of this little tale is that if you are offered a seven year lease to start after 19th June 2006, be sure the front pages contain clauses numbered LR 1 to LR 14, otherwise your application for registration will be rejected.

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