History
From pre-Reformation times, churches in England and Wales have been ministered by either a vicar, who received a stipend (salary), or a rector or parson who received tithes from the parish. The rectors (of around 5,200 churches) were responsible for the repairs of the chancel of their church, while the parish members were responsible for the rest of the building. Monasteries and Oxford and Cambridge colleges could buy or receive rectorships, and thus become liable for chancel repairs. When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and sold their land, or the colleges sold such land, the chancel repair liability passed with that land and persists today, even after subdivision. The owners of such land are called lay impropriators or lay rectors.
The recovery of funds from lay rectors is governed by the Chancel Repairs Act 1932.
In concept, to be a lay rector is entirely a burden for having taken rights over land such as glebe or abbeylands and therefore being exempt from paying the tithes that other parts of that parish paid. Lay rectors would usually be wealthy landowners owning a substantial amount of property in the parish. Tithes have been terminated or commuted for centuries and in mass since the Tithe Commutation Act 1836, remaining ones terminating in the Finance Act 1977, so it is difficult to discover definitively from free database whether a given piece of land is still glebe in a present parish that must have had a rector but no longer does. It is currently common practice to check whether the local applicable ecclesiastical parish, of the 15,000 which cover England and Wales), includes an older rector's church, (not evolved from a chapel) but now with a vicar, and if so to take out chancel liability insurance.
An online petition to the Prime Minister requesting legislation to remove this liability resulted in the following response in 2008:
Chancel Repair Liability has existed for several centuries and the Government has no plans to abolish it or to introduce a scheme for its redemption. The Government has, however, acted to make the existence of the liability much simpler to discover. From October 2013, chancel repair liability will only bind buyers of registered land if it is referred to on the land register. By that time, virtually all freehold land in England and Wales will be registered. The Government believes that this approach strikes a fair balance between the landowners subject to the liability and its owners who are, in England, generally Parochial Church Councils and, in Wales, the Representative Body of the Church in Wales. The Government acknowledges that the existence of a liability for chancel repair will, like any other legal obligation, affect the value of the property in question, but in many cases this effect can be mitigated by relatively inexpensive insurance. It is for the parties involved in a transaction to decide whether or not to take out insurance.
Peter Luff, MP for Mid Worcestershire led an adjournment debate in the House of Commons on 17 October 2012 to seek a change in the law, above and beyond the required registration entries and notifications on all affected properties by 13 October 2013.
The minister responsible was not convinced that a change was necessary at the time.
Read more about this topic: Chancel Repair Liability
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