Events > Current Events
The CPA's Annual Law Reform Lecture 2025
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When: Wednesday 13 February 2025 | Location: Hybrid Event - Burges Salmon LLP, London | Timings: Registration: 16.00 Start: 16.30; Close: 19.00 | |
CPD Hours: 2.5 Hours (Event is followed by a Drinks Reception until 20.00) | Price: Free for CPA Members (£110 + VAT for Non Members) | ||
The Compulsory Purchase Association invite you to attend the 2025 CPA Reform Lecture. In the year where the Law Commission conducts its consultation on CPO reform, it’s hardly surprising that the 2025 Law Reform lecture will focus on its provisional proposals. It’s an opportunity for CPA members and non-members who practice in compulsory purchase work to engage with the reform process.
The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government asked the Law Commission to review the current law on compulsory purchase and compensation. The project covers both the procedures governing the acquisition of land through compulsory purchase orders (CPOs), and a review of the system for assessing the compensation awarded to parties in relation to such acquisitions.
The Law Commission published its consultation paper on compulsory purchase on 20 December 2024. It runs to some 300+ pages that represent the Commission’s initial thinking about how the law could be improved. It also contains 100+ questions to which practitioners at all levels of experience are encouraged to respond via an online form to help inform about possible changes to the law.
The responses to the Consultation will inform the recommendations that the Commission eventually makes to the Government, along with a draft Bill.
The CPA will use this event to engage with its members (as well as non-members who have an interest in and experience with compulsory purchase practice) in order to inform on some of the key matters addressed in the consultation, to stimulate debate, and to encourage practitioners to respond by 31 March 2025.
If you practice compulsory purchase and compensation, or have clients that are affected by the process, then you really cannot afford not to be part of the debate.
The CPA expects high demand for the event. Whilst there are limited places for attending in person, there are unlimited places available virtually. Comments and questions can be expressed and will be recorded for the purposes of preparing the CPA response; and we shall attempt to share them at the event when practical.
Speakers:
Daisy Noble, Francis Taylor Building; Vice Chair of the CPA
Professor Alison Young, Law Commission
Debbie Reynolds, TLT LLP
Guy Roots KC, Francis Taylor Building
Raj Gupta, Town Legal LLP
Programme:
Some of the Law Commission’s principal proposals which we seek to address at the event include:
- Amalgamation of the procedures for ministerial and non-ministerial CPOs and modernising the terminology
- Streamlining the safeguards for statutory undertakers
- To repeal special parliamentary procedure for statutory undertakers’ or local authorities’ land
- Creating a single unified procedure for implementing CPOs based on GVDs with adaptations
- Formalising the rules around the ability to withdraw CPOs
- To clarify the procedural steps in relation to abortive orders.
- Abandoning the concept of compensation being a single global figure
- Retaining the formula in the existing Rule 2 for assessing the value of land
- For severance and injurious affection, introducing a valuation date and possibly allowing post-valuation date evidence
- Retaining equivalent reinstatement compensation but possibly enacting more definitions
- Ensuring that the cancellation assumption is consistent for planning assumptions and the No-Scheme Rule
- Repealing s.4 of the Land Compensation Act 1961 (governing costs in the Tribunal)
- In relation to compensation where no land has been taken, amalgamation of s.10 of the 1965 Act