Section 2 turns 25

Children don’t always turn out as hoped or achieve what they were intended to. Twenty-five years after s 2 of the Law of Property (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1989 came into force it is a good time to ask: has it done the job it was meant to?

Under the old law, oral land contracts were enforceable if supported by a written memorandum or part-performance. The result was in many cases uncertainty as to whether there was a binding agreement and, if so, what its terms were—a minefield for the unwary and a litigator’s delight. But as Lord Justice Lewison said in Shirt v Shirt [2012] EWCA Civ 1029, [2012] 3 FCR 304: “Formal requirements for the disposition of interests in land exist for a good reason. They are designed in part at least to prevent expensive disputes about half-remembered conversations which took place many years before a dispute crystallised.”

Section 2 was