Real estate is usually the bulk of someone’s net worth. Stealing it is no different than robbing a bank.
Even in British society it shouldn’t be a problem to break the lock to your own house and invite 30 of your closest friends over (with furniture) for a party. Simply squat on your own property until the police can sort it out. If the burglars want to get physical that’s what video cameras are for.
overcrowding has nothing to do with the price of rice or this issue. You’re adding sentiment in place of law. A person has every right to own a house and keep it empty or use it for storage. It doesn’t not entitle another person to use it.
According to that article, “The law of adverse possession was fundamentally altered following the passing of the Land Registration Act 2002. In effect, after 10 years of actual physical possession, a squatter must apply to the Land Registry to have their title recognised as the owner in fee simple. The original owner of the property will receive notification from the Land Registry and has the ability to defeat the application by simple objection.”
So, the squatter has to prove continuous occupation for a decade, and the landowner has to ignore notification that the occupier has applied for ownership.
IMO if you haven’t looked at a property you own for a decade and noticed it occupied, and then ignore notification that someone else is claiming it - for which the remedy appears to be extremely simple - then bad luck old bean.
If you ever see the headline “Is the Metric System Having Sex with Pensioners?” for real, let me know. That’d be an article worth reading.
In the case of the story in question, it appears that the owners will have to spend money to solve this problem. That cost should be assessed back to the squatters.
And I disagree with your idea that ownership requires vigilance. Many people buy land to hold as an investment. pulling up in a gypsy house-on-a-truck and digging a latrine is not a valid reason for changing the ownership of property.
I think you’re mistaking “shouldn’t be” for “isn’t”. Under the law, acquiring title through adverse possession is different from robbing a bank, because the way one owns real estate is substantially different then they way the bank owns the money in its safe.
There are legal processes through which the government can confiscate your land to use for public purposes. Unlike any other piece of property, you can be taxed on the same piece of land every year and the government can take your land away if you don’t pay. If you let people cross your land, or use a well on your land, or a number of other things, you can lose the right to prevent those things from being done in the future. You may not be allowed to take minerals off your land, or redirect rivers on your land, or build a dance club on your land, or any number of title restrictions. And squatters, if uncontested, can acquire title to your land.
The kind of “it’s my land and I can do what I want with it and no one can ever take it away from me” ownership you’re thinking of simply isn’t available to someone without an army and navy to enforce it. Maybe you can argue that it should be, but it certainly isn’t that way now.
You’re wrong, though - see Jjimm’s post. If you leave the house empty to that extent then you are giving up your rights. You don’t exactly have to do a lot to keep the home not empty. Using it for storage would actually be enough, although then you would have to pay council tax.
Claiming a moral ‘right’ over property is every bit as sentimental as pointing out that overcrowding makes empty properties (partic. in cities) undesirable. Note that I’m not saying it’s morally wrong (I do think that, but I don’t think it’s relevant), but for practical reasons, long-term empty properties are best discouraged.
Remember too the original concept was established hundreds of years ago when things were not so complicated and not everything was surveyed to the last inch norr registered in immutable computer registries. Someone chanced upon unused land and began using it, or found a long-abandoned cottage and started to live there and fix it up. The concept was that an established user of the land could not be tossed off because someone showed up 50 years later with a piece of paper that would be almost impossible to verify and claimed their ancestors owned the land.
SO the simple concept (enshrined in common law?) is “use it or lose it”. 12 years was plenty of time for someone to realize they were the land owner and do something about it. Otherwise, you could not just toss someone out of their house or off their farm after a generation and possibly just let it lie unused all over again.
If I found a suitcase full of money in the street and, after handing it in to the police, no owner could be found for a period of something like three years, I would become the legal owner. The moral being that if you abandon your property, it isn’t your property anymore.
And a home might normally be the majority of someone’s net worth, but one doesn’t abandon a significant part of one’s net worth for over a decade without bothering to check on it.
That would be breaking and entering. Squatters aren’t meant to break locks, smash windows or similar to obtain entry. Then they can be removed with a court order. If they smash the door in they can be immediately arrested. If you choose to go around and break in rather than going through the courts, then you should be the criminal.
You’re mistaking “right” for law. The law is made by democratic representatives in the putative interests of the mass of the people. If they make a law regulating adverse possession, then you don’t have the right to retain your house after abandoning it. Similarly, if planning regulations require a building to be used for residential purposes you can’t use it for storage or whatever else your heart might desire.
And also, I believe Adverse Possession is intended to protect people who discover defects in the chain of title from a long time ago (at least in countries WITHOUT Torrens title systems). Imagine coming home one day to find a “Notice to Vacate” order and a letter from someone claiming that he recently discovered that his great-great-grandfather’s “sale” of the property to your great-great-grandfather was technically void because it was not witnessed by a notary (which was required under local law until 1920) and, oh, by the way, here’s a refund of the $200 that your great-great-grandfather paid for it and get out of my house plz kthx. Adverse possession says that the time to object to the nullity of that old deed is long since passed, sorry.
I understand the differences between land and other forms of property but the distinctions don’t really apply in this case (unless the squatters moved in the day after it was vacated. I confess I don’t understand why taxes are not collected during a vacancy but that is a different issue.
Are back taxes paid upon occupancy?
You’re wrong about a person having ‘every right’ because those rights are to do with the law. It’s the law that says you can own that property, and the law which says you don’t own it any more after giving up on it for long enough.
Back taxes aren’t due, no. Council tax is paid by the occupier, not the owner.
It’s essentially buying somewhere in a country with limited habitable land and leaving it uninhabited with no tax paid on it for twelve years even when someone says ‘I’m living here; it’s mine; anyone want to contest that?’
If you want to keep the property then all you have to do is say, within that period, ‘no, it’s mine!’ And then be liable for tax from then on, at least for a while, since you’re saying you’re the occupier. But it would be a lower rate of tax than for your main home.
The analogy to finding money is apt - if you lost a trunk full of money at a train station and never tried to get it, would you still expect to get it back in twelve years’ time? Even if you knew there were laws saying you wouldn’t?
You should also realise that as far as I understand it, to have legal rights to claim it at the end of the time, the occupier, not the owner, would have to have been paying council tax (the only tax due, and you pay it for where you live, not what you own) all that time. So if you’re going to bring taxes into it, the squatters will have been paying at least £1000 a year (depending on where it is and how large the property is) for living in that property. For twelve years, while the on-paper owner couldn’t even be arsed to say “mine”.
Thanks for this post, by the way. Nice to have at least one in the thread actually addressing the OP. Sadly, it seems everyone on the Dope but me has you on Ignore. 
The other posts were addressing the OP too and you hadn’t posted in this thread before.
No, every other post has been “The Daily Mail sucks” or going on about the law of adverse possession, which doesn’t apply to the story in the OP, as the family hasn’t been squatting for anything near 10 years.
Only that answer answered the question: “I would really like to try and understand the problem…it is illegal to break into and enter a private property in the UK, right? If so why were the squatters not arrested for that?”
Answer: because the media keeps reporting it this way so much that even the police officers think they don’t have any power to remove the squatters. They’re wrong, of course, but that doesn’t stop the false reporting.
But Wallenstein had already provided a cite answering that part of the OP, in the second post in the thread. Not a lot of point just repeating what he said.
As far as I can tell, though, at least for the first case in the OP’s link, the police actually weren’t able to do anything.
The situation seems to be that Mrs Mason had inherited her mother’s house, and had been renting it out. Her tenants left, and she was planning on selling the property, when she found out that another family had moved in without her knowledge or permission. That’s her story.
The people living in the property claim that they are legitimate tenants with a legal tenancy agreement, which they’ve apparently shown to the police who arrived at Mrs Mason’s request. That’s their story.
Now it’s possible that these people broke into the property, changed the locks and faked up a plausible tenancy document. Or perhaps the previous tenants illegally sub-let the property to them, without Mrs Mason’s knowledge. Or maybe Mrs Mason really did rent the house to them, and then decided she’d rather sell it quickly and wanted them out.
I don’t know what the truth is, and I don’t see how a police officer called to the scene could reasonably be expected to make a fair on-the-spot judgement either.
I understand that it must be frustrating for the Masons, but looked at objectively, I wonder how many of us would be happy giving the police the power to throw a family on the streets on one person’s unsupported say-so.
Why should you get to say it is *your *possession in perpetuity in the first place ?