House changes and registering deeds

[Peacock]

We have a bit of a tricky problem at the minute so any help would be greatly appreciated. I'll summarise the situation first.
We were given an old building as a gift by my wifes father. The building was originally two houses. My wifes father then merged the two houses into one and built an extension on to the back of the building some years back without obtaining planning permission for this work. This work was done around twenty years ago. After we received the house we then built another small extension to the house for which we would not require planning permission (was under 40 square meters). We are now in the process of changing over the deeds of the house to our names.
The problems now are twofold. First of all the deeds of the houses do not currently reflect the current situation where it is now one large house (with extensions built on). So would we be better to now apply for retention planning permission for these changes? We are afraid that if we do and it is rejected we could be in major trouble as effectively we would have to undo all the changes made! Would the council be sympathetic to our situation in this case? Does it matter if the deeds registered with the Land Registry do not match the actual situation? I know that is a strange question but we do not intend to ever sell this house on - it is going to be our home and will remain in the family.
The second problem is that as part of the change over of the deeds to our names requires a valuation of the house for stamp duty calculation, we now find ourselves in the situation where, having already renovated the house, we have increased the value of the building significantly and given the current valuation would have to pay a much higher stamp duty than we would have on the value of the building when it was given to us. Is it possible in this case to get a valuation of the building before we applied the changes (i.e. can we describe to the auctioneer/valuer the changes we applied and ask what it may have been worth prior to these changes)?
As I said, any help at all on these problems would be hugely appreciated.

 

[mf1]

Gosh, its quite a mess. Even though you say you never intend to sell, I take the view that a mess always needs to be sorted out - and sooner rather than later.

In broad terms, you do need to sort out the planning situation - if you currently have an unauthorised development on the property you need to get retention permission. And yes there are risks. Its worth getting a good architect/ engineer to advise also on whether what was done when the properties were amalgamated poses any planning issues.

The deeds should accurately reflect the real situation but the fact that there are two properties now held as one does not seem to me to be a problem. In any event, when the solicitor is doing the deed, that will be resolved.

And finally, the value. When was the property transferred? Why was the Deed not done then? There is an implication that the transfer is only now happening and therefore duty should be payable on current value. Or Deed could be dated to reflect actual date but then you will have penalties because its late. Finally, stamp duty will be at half the normal rate if the property is taken in your wifes sole name.

mf

 

[Peacock]

Thanks for that mf1. It is indeed a bit of a mess - we were naive and didn't do our homework up front! The deeds were not transferred before we renovated the house simply because we didn't realise that a valuation was part of the process for changing the title on the deeds. When you say there could be penalties for it being late if we date the valuation to before we made the renovations, what penalty would this be and how late would we have to be for it to kick in? We began the renovations last year (approx 5 months ago). Thanks again for your help in this.