Williams & Glyn's Bank v Boland [1980] is a House of Lords judgment in English land and trusts law (family co-ownership) on an occupier's potentially overriding interests in a home.

Mr Boland, registered owner of the house, borrowed money from Williams & Glyn's Bank for his building company.

Mrs Boland argued that because she made substantial financial contributions to acquiring the home, she should be able to stay.

The bank argued: The lack of registration defence/claim does not work if the party claiming the unregistered right is in actual occupation.

She was in actual occupation under section 70(1)(g) of the Land Registration Act 1925 and that therefore she had an overriding interest in the property.

She was there, ostensibly, because she was the wife, and her presence there was wholly consistent with the title offered by the husband to the bank.

Anyone who lends money on the security of a matrimonial home nowadays ought to realise that the wife may have a share in it.

Lord Wilberforce held that the words ‘actual occupation’ under section 70(1)(g) of the Land Registration Act 1925 should be interpreted in plain English and did not require anything else but physical presence.

The rights of a spouse under a trust for sale are capable of recognition, if with difficulty, as overriding interests.

He approved Lord Denning MR rejecting that the spouse's right was merely an interest in the proceeds of sale, rather than the house itself for living in it.

Lord Wilberforce said among his reasoning:[6] The solution must be derived from a consideration in the light of current social conditions of the Land Registration Act 1925 and other property statutes.... [...] This brings me to the second question, which is whether such rights as a spouse has under a trust for sale are capable of recognition as overriding interests—a question to my mind of some difficulty.

To reach a conclusion upon it involves some further consideration of the nature of trusts for sale, in relation to undivided shares.... How then are these various rights to be fitted into the scheme of the Land Registration Act 1925?

It is clear, at least, that the interests of the co-owners under the "statutory trusts" are minor interests—this fits with the definition in section 3(xv).

And, moreover, I find it easy to accept that they satisfy the opening, and governing, words of section 70, namely, interests subsisting in reference to the land.

652 per Pennycuick VC with whose analysis I agree, and contrast, Cedar Holdings v Green [1979] 3 W.L.R.31 (which I consider to have been wrongly decided).

There are decisions, in relation to other equitable interests than those of tenants in common, which confirm this line of argument.

475, Harman J. decided that a purchaser of land under a contract for sale, who had paid the price and so was entitled to the land in equity, could acquire an overriding interest by virtue of actual occupation, and a similar position was held by the Court of Appeal to arise in relation to a resulting trust (Hodgson v Marks [1971] Ch.

282, 284 per Lord Eldon) provide an answer to the argument that there is a firm dividing line, or an unbridgeable gulf, between minor interests and overriding interests, and, on the contrary, confirm that the fact of occupation enables protection of the latter to extend to what without it would be the former.

I should add that it makes no difference to this that these same interests might also have been capable of protection by the registration of a caution (see Bridges v Mees p.c.

...whereas the object of a land registration system is to reduce the risks to purchasers from anything not on the register, to extend (if it be an extension) the area of risk so as to include possible interests of spouses, and indeed, in theory, of other members of the family or even outside it, may add to the burdens of purchasers, and involve them in enquiries which in some cases may be troublesome.... the extension of the risk area follows necessarily from the extension beyond the paterfamilias, of rights of ownership, itself following from the diffusion of property and earning capacity.