Derek Wood CBE KC co-founds Property Law Reform Group (PLRG)
The year 2025 marked the centenary of the passing of important property legislation affecting the ownership, sale, leasing and transmission of real property in England and Wales and the existence and enjoyment of rights in and over it. Following a conference at Cambridge University in September 2025 a group – the Property Law Reform Group (PLRG) - has been formed to conduct a long-term detailed review of our land law. Its aim will be to identify the parts of our law which remain important and relevant , to assess whether they function as well as they should, to identify the parts which need reform, restatement or re-framing, and to single out how much can be discarded. There is also seen to be an underlying need to restate the law in simpler, plainer language shorn of the technicalities and obscurities in which some of our legislation is expressed.
Founded by its co-conveners Derek Wood CBE KC, a former practising member of Falcon Chambers and now a chambers academic fellow, Professor Nicholas Hopkins, a former Law Commissioner and now Professor of Land Law at University College London (UCL), and Dr. Lorren Eldridge, Assistant Professor in Private Law in the University of Cambridge, the PLRG held its inaugural meeting at UCL on 27 October 2026. The meeting was attended by representatives from a number of professional associations practising in the property field, including the Law Society; the City of London Law Society; the Property Litigation Association; the Chancery Bar and Property Bar Associations and the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. Leading academics from Oxford, Birmingham and Reading with specialist knowledge in the field also attended together with two senior judges. The current Law Commissioner with responsibility for Land and Trusts, Professor Lisa Wibley, was present as an observer with colleagues. The PLRG has also been in correspondence with the Ministry of Justice.
Strong support was expressed at and after the meeting for the formation of the PLRG and its ambitious aims. It will stand as a discussion forum and think-tank for the property law community. It is building a website. Its next step will be to circulate a Discussion Paper which will include an invitation to its recipients, strongly advocated at the meeting by a former judge, to contribute to a list of points of principle or detail or practice which respondents think should be investigated. These responses will provide a focus for the next stages of the PLRG’s work. The project is complex, for the long term, and important for the entire public.
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