The keynote policy of the act was to reduce the number of legal estates to two – freehold and leasehold – and generally to make the transfer of interests in land easier for purchasers.

The Act followed a series of land law and policy reforms that had been begun by the Liberal government starting in 1906.

This is how one American legal scholar, Morris Raphael Cohen, described it: That which was hidden from Maitland, Joshua Williams, and the other great ones, was revealed to a Welsh solicitor who in the budget of 1910 proposed to tax the land so as to force it on the market.

When this budget finally passed, the basis of the old real property law and the effective power of the House of Lords was gone.

Section 84 of the Act sets out the powers of an appointed authority to alter or remove restrictive covenants on property deeds.

[6][7] Abolished the last legal statutes relating to copyhold, a successor to the feudal system of villeinage where a tenant was obligated to provide special duties and services to a mesne lord in return for manorial land.