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Driveway rage

We are a small transfer landlord and have received a complaint from a tenant about a driveway he shares with the owner next door. The tenant’s neighbour, who bought the home under the right to buy, has created a driveway by removing a dividing fence and sheds and concreting over the area between the two houses. The work took place while the previous tenant was in residence. The standard of work appears to be good and a dropped kerb has been created. Each occupier now parks his/her car in their rear garden.

But there are no records of permission being granted for this work and the dispute centres around who owns the driveway. What would the legal status of the land be?

Do we need to take action to formalise the shared use, or even to force the removal of the driveway?

First, sort out where the boundary is of what the council sold to the right-to-buy owner. To do this, have a look at the land registry title (which is never definitive) and if that is at all unclear, have a look at the plan with the transfer deed from when the house was sold.

The fact that it has been concreted over and the visible boundary has been removed makes no difference to the legal ownership.

Is it really a shared driveway, in which case the council will have kept ownership of it and given the purchaser a right to drive over it, or is it – a more likely scenario – split down the middle?

If part of it belongs to the right-to-buy homeowner, you could fence off your part (that is to say, the tenanted part), discussing with the tenant an appropriate kind of fence.

But if that’s going to make the shared drive difficult to use, you could simply put in studs to indicate where the boundary is.

If the entire driveway belongs to you, you must inform the two neighbours and you could remove it from your land. It’s unlikely you’ll have much success getting the owner-occupier to remove the driveway from their land if it is theirs. Even if he or she had it put in without permission when he was a tenant, the then-landlord did nothing about it, so the owner-occupier now owns it.

Whatever happens, try not to get drawn into a lengthy boundary dispute about a piece of land that doesn’t really affect the value of what you own – they are the worst kind of disputes, costing a lot and achieving nothing. Catherine Hand

I assume that the right-to-buy owner and the previous tenant got together and agreed to the installation of the concrete drive – it would be surprising if it were otherwise.

However, the agreement or collusion of the previous tenant in allowing the driveway to be built on your side of the boundary does not, of itself, bind the association. You can argue that the driveway trespasses on your land and should therefore be removed. This presupposes, though, that neither the association nor the council before it consented to the alteration – whether expressly or implicitly.

If the neighbour refuses and does not allege consent from the council or association, you could seek an injunction enabling you to reinstate the boundary and the garden on your side.

As to the land on the right-to-buy owner’s side, there may have been a breach of the terms of the right-to-buy transfer. These terms may have placed restrictions on making alterations to the premises, including the garden, without your consent.

If the association or the council before it had good reasons not to give consent – for example, a policy of not allowing gardens to be paved over – the terms of the lease could be enforced to remove the drive (whether it is on the association’s land or not).

Of course, the owner could raise the same argument that the association, or the council before it, had agreed to the alterations. And if a long time has passed since the alterations were made, the courts might well refuse an injunction requiring removal of the driveway – whichever side of the boundary it lies on. If so, you might only be entitled to nominal damages.

It may be simpler to formalise shared use of the driveway, now that it’s there. Nick Billingham