Mine and mineral rights

queenbee4000

Hi, I am towards the end of a moving process and one of the items flagged is the fact I don't have access to the mines and minerals underneath the house. The solicitor has put together an indemnity policy but I am not sure whether the mineral owners have a separate title deed associated with this and who actually owns it. I believe the indemnity covers me from damage to my property if someone did try and dig under the house and also if they tried to get me for trespassing on their land. Whilst I appreciate the risk is low that someone would want/ be able to excavate underneath the house, my main concern is if I wanted to do any further construction or development, would I need to get their permission somehow? I have asked my solicitor this too but thought I would see if anyone had any issues with this in the past. Many thanks

Fuse99

The owner of the land and the owner of the mineral rights are likely two entirely independent parties, so there's no issues with regards trespass. You will own the land the house is built on, but not the minerals that could be in the ground beneath it. 

Rest assured nobody will ever come and try and dig those minerals up! At worst the indemnity policy will cover compensation payment to the owner of the mineral rights if they ever become aware / choose to pursue those rights.

Technically I expect if you wanted to extend your property and needed to build foundations you'd need to inform the owner of the mineral rights, but the fact there's a house there already almost certainly renders it impossible to excavate for said minerals, so it comes down to a compensation issue again. Obviously if you've got an indemnity policy you need to be careful about invalidating that by approaching any interested party and rendering the policy void. 

Section62

queenbee4000 said:

Hi, I am towards the end of a moving process and one of the items flagged is the fact I don't have access to the mines and minerals underneath the house.

This is relatively common - when parcels were sold away from a large property estate it was common for the mineral rights to be retained by the estate.  This was either because they wanted to reserve the right to exploit any reserves themselves, or to prevent the purchaser from developing some awful extractive industry on the periphery of the estate.

I've never heard of a situation where the reserved rights include excavating in the surface to gain access to deposits below - the norm is that they would be able to tunnel under the land (often with conditions such as leaving a %age of deposits undisturbed to provide support to the land above).

In practice it is unlikely to be an issue, unless your property is sitting on an economicially viable deposit of some highly valuable mineral or metal.