Pre-Contract Searches and Enquiries — SQE1 FLK2 Property Law and Practice

A woman is buying a house for £540,000. She wants it for the uninterrupted view over a large field behind the garden, which the agent called unspoilt countryside. She tells you she would not buy if that field could ever be built on. You order the local authority search. The replies come back clear: no applications, no proposals of any kind. So is the field safe? No.

And not because the search was wrong. Because you searched the wrong thing. A local authority search is made against the property being bought, and its replies are confined to that property. It says nothing about the field behind. This episode is about knowing what each search does, and does not, tell you. Keep the field in mind.

Here is the route. Searches against enquiries, and why the split matters. Then the searches themselves: the local authority search and its two halves, water and drainage, environmental, chancel, and the rest. Then when to order them. Then the enquiry forms, and what the seller has to tell you. Then reading the results. And last, the Law Society Protocol, and what it actually requires.

Start with the split, because it organises everything. A search is a request to an external authority that holds records about the property or the area. An enquiry is a question to the seller, about things only the seller could know. Different sources, different answers, and different remedies if what comes back is wrong.

Searches exist to reveal what no inspection can. A surveyor reports on the fabric of the building. Searches interrogate the public records: planning breaches, enforcement notices, road and rail proposals, contamination, flood risk, and where the public sewers run. A buyer who has had a survey and skips the searches has checked the walls and ignored everything around them.

And back to your field. The local authority search is made against the property being bought. It will not reveal an application, a permission or a proposal relating to other land. If your client's decision turns on that field, you check the planning register against the field itself. And you still warn her that a clear result is only a snapshot. Nothing stops an application tomorrow.

The local authority search is the most important one you will order, and it comes in two parts. The required enquiries, on form CON29, which every local authority answers as standard on every search. And the optional enquiries, on form CON29O, which are raised only if you specifically ask for them, and which attract a further fee. The local land charges register is searched separately, on form LLC1, normally submitted alongside.

What do the required enquiries cover? Planning and building control. Roads and footways maintainable at public expense. Nearby road, rail and traffic schemes. Outstanding notices. Contaminated land and radon. And designations: conservation areas, article 4 directions, tree preservation orders. A nil reply is still a reply, so silence there means there was nothing to report.

Now the trap, and candidates get this backwards more often than any other point in the topic. Two matters people assume are standard are not. Public paths and byways. And common land, town and village greens. Both sit in the optional enquiries. So if nobody requested them, the replies will simply be silent. Not because there is nothing there.

Try one. Is a road maintainable at public expense a required enquiry, or an optional one? Required. Is a public footpath? Optional. Same council, same form family, opposite halves.

Next, the drainage and water search, form CON29DW, answered by the water company. It tells you whether the property is connected to mains water and to a public sewer. It shows where the public sewers and water mains run, often on a plan. And it tells you whether anything has been built over a sewer. What it does not tell you is anything about private drainage. Septic tanks, treatment plants, shared private drains: all outside it, and all expensive.

The environmental search is compiled by commercial providers from sources like the Environment Agency and the British Geological Survey. Contamination and historic industrial use. Flood risk, from rivers, sea, surface water and reservoirs. Ground stability, subsidence and mining. Radon. And it matters commercially as well as legally, because lenders are risk-averse and a bad environmental result can stop a mortgage.

Then the chancel check search, which is worth getting exactly right. Chancel repair liability is an ancient obligation to contribute to repairing the chancel of the parish church, and it is still enforceable. But its reach narrowed sharply at the end of 12 October 2013. From then it ceased to be capable of overriding first registration or a registered disposition, under s.117 of the Land Registration Act 2002.

So a buyer taking a registered title for valuable consideration is now bound only where the liability is protected by a notice on the register. And note what the search actually does. It runs against a database of parishes, not against the title, so a positive result tells you the parish is affected and nothing more. Cheap indemnity cover is still usually taken, because a notice could be entered before your buyer's disposition is registered.

Four more, quickly. Mining searches, in areas affected by historic mining, and not only coal: tin in Cornwall, china clay, other mineral extraction. Commons registration, for rural properties or land next to open ground. A land charges search against the seller, often called a bankruptcy search, which protects your client from buying from a bankrupt. And infrastructure searches where a major scheme is nearby.

Timing. Order searches on the day you receive the draft contract. Local authority searches can take several weeks, and waiting for them is the commonest cause of delay in the whole transaction. You can pay for an expedited search. You can commission a personal search, which is faster but more limited. Many lenders require a regulated search. And results are usually treated as valid for 6 months.

Enquiries now, and the Law Society forms do the standard work. The TA6, the Property Information Form, is completed by the seller and covers the property, its services, disputes, notices, insurance, environmental matters, planning, and fixtures. The TA10, the Fittings and Contents Form, lists what is included in the sale and what is not. That is how you avoid a row on completion day about the oven and the curtains. And the TA7 is the Leasehold Information Form.

For commercial property, the equivalent is the Commercial Property Standard Enquiries, which are more extensive, because commercial property is more complicated. And one practical warning. If a form comes back with blanks, or a row of do-not-knows, raise further enquiries. A seller should know basic facts about their own house. Incomplete answers are either concealment or carelessness, and you need to know which.

Who does what is simple. The buyer's solicitor orders the searches, and the buyer pays for them. The buyer's solicitor raises the enquiries. The seller completes the forms and answers. And there is no legal deadline for answering. None. If the seller is slow, your leverage is not a rule. It is the fact that until exchange, either side can walk away.

Reading the results. Search entries reveal constraints. A conservation area, with extra controls on demolition and alterations. Listed building status, with strict control over any change, inside or out. An article 4 direction, which removes permitted development rights. A tree preservation order. Or a condition attached to an existing permission. Each of them limits what your client can do with the property.

And not every adverse result kills the deal. A planning breach may be covered by indemnity insurance. A road scheme may never happen. Flood risk may be manageable. Your job is not to decide for your client. It is to explain the risk clearly enough that they can decide for themselves.

Last, the Law Society Conveyancing Protocol, which is examined and widely misunderstood. It describes its own use as preferred practice. It is not legally binding between buyer and seller. It is a professional standard, enforced through the Conveyancing Quality Scheme.

And it contains exactly one period expressed in days. At the pre-exchange stage, the seller's conveyancer should generally carry out those steps within five days of confirmation of instructions, and submit the draft contract. That is the only number in it. There is no fixed period for raising enquiries, and none for answering them.

One more thing the Protocol does that catches people out. It limits what you may ask. The buyer's conveyancer is to raise only specific enquiries arising from the documents supplied. Firing off a long list of indiscriminate standard enquiries may itself breach the Protocol, and inappropriate enquiries need not be answered at all.

A word on how SQE1 tests this. You will not be asked to recite form numbers for their own sake. You get a scenario, five answers, and one instruction: pick the best. But the form labels here do real work. The commonest way to lose one of these questions is to put a matter in the wrong half of the local authority search.

If you keep only three. CON29 is answered as standard and CON29O only on request, and footpaths and greens are in the optional half. The search covers the property and not the land around it. And the Protocol is preferred practice with a single period in it, five days, at the pre-exchange stage.

Traps the examiners set. One: the required and optional halves, the wrong way round. Required is answered every time whether there is anything to report or not. Optional costs extra and happens only if you ask. Two: a clear search is not a clean bill of health for the neighbourhood.

Three: the drainage and water search stops at the public system. Septic tanks and shared private drains are not in it, and they are exactly the things that cost money later. Four: chancel repair liability did not disappear in 2013. It stopped overriding. Against a registered title it now binds only where a notice is on the register.

Five: there is no ten working day deadline for answering enquiries. There is no deadline at all, and the Protocol does not create one. If an option offers a neat number of days for replies, it is the wrong answer.

And six, the one that surprises people. The Protocol restricts the buyer's side too. Long lists of standard additional enquiries, fired off regardless of the documents, may themselves breach it, and need not be answered.

Quick check. A solicitor acts for a woman buying a cottage. A public footpath appears to run along the garden boundary, and the seller says the open land opposite is a village green. The solicitor submitted the standard local authority search. The replies deal with planning, building control, roads and notices, but say nothing about the footpath or the land opposite. The woman asks why the matters she raised have been ignored.

Three candidate answers. One: public rights of way and common land are never the subject of a local authority search. Two: those matters are covered by the optional enquiries, which every council answers as a matter of course. Three: those matters fall within the optional enquiries, which are answered only if specifically requested. Pause here if you want a moment.

The answer is three. Public paths and byways, and common land, town and village greens, sit in the optional enquiries. Nobody requested them, so the replies are silent. The remedy is to submit the relevant optional enquiries now, and to check the definitive map for the footpath, before the woman is committed to anything.

Why the others fail. One overstates it. Both matters can be raised with the council; they simply sit in the optional part. Two is the reversal, and it is the single most common error in this topic. The required enquiries are answered as of course. The optional ones have to be asked for.

Five things to take away, and your field covers the first. One: the local authority search is made against the property being bought, so it tells you nothing about the land around it, and a clear result is only a snapshot.

Two: CON29 is required and answered on every search; CON29O is optional, costs extra, and only happens if you ask. Footpaths and village greens are in the optional half. Three: the drainage and water search covers the public system only.

Four: chancel repair liability survived 2013, it just stopped overriding, so on a registered title it binds only where there is a notice. Five: the Protocol is preferred practice, not law, and the only period in it is five days at the pre-exchange stage. Next time, Finance and Acting for Lenders.

Practise this topic with exam-style questions at sqe1prep.co.uk. This episode is for education and exam revision only, not legal advice, and we are not affiliated with or endorsed by the SRA or Kaplan.