Looking at purchasing a house and the Land Registry plan document has come back the solicitor. On the plan none of the fences/boundaries are marked with a T, so the documents says unless marked with a T it will be a joint responsibilities for maintaining and expenditure.
Is this common or is there another way of trying to find out more details? What are the advantages of this. I guess the disadvantage is that we will be jointly responsible for maintaining and paying for the fences and agreeing it all with the neighbours. But I guess the advantage is that we will have some say in what is put up etc. If the fence is a neighbours respsonsibility I beleive we have to ask to paint the fence and they can say no and they we are left with unpainted fence.
Two sides of the fence we have the good side and one we have the bad side, but I guess that is irrelevant if the plan doesnt have the T’s marked on.
The house was purchased from new and the document shows the transfer from the Developer to the owner.
Any help / advice would be appreciated.

Depends. My ex-neighbour claimed ownership of all the fences and boundary between us, which I was more than happy to remind him about when they blew down last year.

It not uncommon for developers to forget their ‘T’ marks. You might ask your conveyancer to look at the neighbours title to see if a ‘T’ mark was added there.

In the absence of any detail in the conveyance the type of boundary may determine whether or not the provisions of the party wall act apply. Your conveyancer should be answering these questions for you.

Traditionally you own up to the good side so if you can see the good side its not yours but this isn’t a hard rule by any stretch and fences get replaced any which way over time anyway. If none of the fences are clearly marked then it’ll come down to an agreement with the neighbours. TBH its all a bit irrelevant IMO. If you have good neighbours then its fine, if you have bad neighbours then its an issue no matter who owns the fence.

This may help:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/land-registry-plans-boundaries/land-registry-plans-boundaries-practice-guide-40-supplement-3

Our deeds also explicitly say “joint” responsibility for the fences.

We needed a new fence on one 15m stretch with a neighbour.

In practice it means you need to consult them if you want to replace the fence which you should do anyway.

If you both agree it needs replaced, technically they should pay half. However if you want something more expensive than they imagine, you might have to pay the uplift.

I suppose if you don’t get on you could put the new fence on your side of the boundary leaving the original. But thats not going to improve relations.

In our case I bought everything, I spent two weekends diggging holes and installing the fence myself. My neighbour payed half for the materials.

Basically if you want a new fence, be prepared to pay for it yourself, and see your neighbour paying half as a bonus. Equally your neighbour might decide to replace a fence that in your opinion is perfectly fine and ask you to pay half…..

So we have a puzzling one – our house backs onto two properties that are older than ours and we have a fence at the bottom of our garden with the posts and arris rails on the other side (which suggests that the fence is our neighbours’ responsibility. However, there are remnants of a much older fence some 1ft back towards their houses which suggests that is their boundary. I don’t care about the few feet of ‘no-man’s land’ – so my question is – do you reckon the fence is actually ours and has simply been erected contrary to popular convention?

do you reckon the fence is actually ours and has simply been erected contrary to popular convention?

If your house is later it could’ve been put up by the developer which would probably make it yours but also may have been put up by the neighbour at that time who took the chance to pinch a bit of land. In that case its probably theirs by adverse possession by now

I own all the fences on my boundary as I put them up and I put them up 6″ inside the boundary to be sure.