First time buyer woes

Depending on the charge/restriction the solicitor should be asking whomever has lodged the charge/restriction to remove it. If it was a charge by a lender for a secured debt they should have been paid in full when the property sale completed. Until removed the Land registry cannot do anything. Ask your solicitor to clarify if its a charge or not, and if so who for.

Good luck

If you solicitor is not doing this you need to find one that will. Did you use the estate agent's solicitor?

A charge against the property is a condition saying that the title cannot be transferred (i.e. the property cannot be sold) without the consent of the person/company who registered the charge. It's used primarily for debts secured on the property, like a mortgage.

When you come to sell a property with charges on it, you obviously need to make arrangements to clear them, which normally involves repaying the creditors out of the proceeds of the sale. But there's a catch-22 here: you can't satisfy the creditors and remove the charges without the money from selling the house, but you can't transfer the title without removing the charges. The way we work around this problem is the vendor's solicitor checks that the owners of the charges will agree to remove them if they get paid, and makes an undertaking (which is basically a formal promise, backed up by their status as a solicitor) to to the buyer's solicitor that the charges will get removed shortly after completion.

So, it's basically the vendor's solicitor who's primarily goofed here, but your solicitor should really have been on their case about it much quicker than this!