Specific Common Land BPS Issues

Demonstrating title

If the name of the BPS claimant is not on the commons register in column 2 the RPA may request claimants to prove title to their common rights. A copy of a tenancy agreement, title or a letter from a land agent or solicitor usually suffices to confirm you have the common rights at your disposal on the 15th May.

Prescriptive rights

Before the introduction of BPS, commoners associations could, under previous schemes, agree live registers and forward these to the RPA in order to avoid an unclaimed area. Under BPS, the RPA only accepted common rights on the register.

Therefore, rights of common acquired through prescription could not be used to claim entitlements. Initial appeals were taken to the RPA but to date (Spring 2010) there has been no change in the policy.

Unregistered rights let by the owner of the common to their tenant(s)

Where a tenant’s landlord is the owner of the common, the rights may not have been registered in 1965 as, at the time owners were advised that they could not register rights over their own land.

After initially refusing to accept these rights, the RPA subsequently accepted such rights where there was an owner’s surplus on the common. They have recently accepted claims made by Dartmoor tenants where the stocking rate equivalent of the total number of registered rights exceeded the prescribed stocking density and the tenants’ rights had been exercised since before 1965.

Owners surplus – claim by owners who only owned part of a common

Where there was more than one owner of a common and not all the owners claimed the surplus, there was a question over what happens to the balance of the surplus. Does it become naked hectares or can it be returned to the commoners? The RPA agreed that, where the second owner has agreed not to claim the surplus, then the balance can be divided proportionally among the registered common rights

Dual registered rights

Many commons run contiguously with another common or a number of commons and, at the time of registration under the 1965 Act, some commoners registered identical rights on more than one common. These are referred to as mirror entries or dual registrations. This inflated the number of rights available. The RPA refer to them as split-rights.

The RPA decided that, for the purpose of BPS, where dual registered rights exist, they would share the number of rights registered for one of the commons with the other commons in proportion to the areas of those commons. Consequently, some commoners did not realise they had to establish entitlements on all the commons involved and were therefore awarded a reduced number of entitlements. In other cases, some of the dual registered rights were sold and now belong to separate individuals (the severance of rights from land was permitted until 2005). The purchasers were then disappointed to find the rights they had bought were not worth as much for claiming BPS entitlement.

The RPA’s current position is that, if they had included all the dual registered rights, those without dual registered rights were penalised.

Here is an example calculation:

CL0001 is 100 ha and CL0002 is 25 ha and Mr Smith has rights to graze 10 cattle on CL0001 and on CL0002.

The RPA add together the two areas of common land and allocate the 10 cattle rights proportionately across the two commons:

The numbers of stock are then converted into LUs and then a notional area determined as in the Commons Rights Calculation.