Should Jamaica Cut the Crown Land Squatting Period From 60 to 25 Years?

Kingston, Jamaica, 25 June 2025. Jamaica has two adverse possession periods operating in parallel, and the difference between them says something important about the relationship between the state and its citizens on the question of land. Private landowners must act within twelve years to prevent a squatter from establishing a claim. The government, as the island’s largest single landowner, enjoys a sixty-year protection. Under the 1833 Registration of Titles Act, a person occupying Crown land can only apply for possessory title after proving sixty years of continuous possession. That asymmetry has been largely accepted as part of the legal landscape for generations. It is now, for the first time in some years, the subject of serious political debate.

In a contribution to the Sectoral Debate in Parliament in June 2025, an opposition member of parliament for Clarendon proposed that a future People’s National Party government would reduce the Crown land adverse possession period from sixty to twenty-five years, excluding foreshore land which would retain the longer ceiling. The proposal was framed as a wealth transfer of historic proportions: formalising tenure for long-standing occupants of government land, converting informal settlement into legal ownership, and addressing what the proposer described as close to two centuries of injustice related to the Crown’s historical land holdings. He pointed to the United Kingdom’s own reduction of its adverse possession period for registered land to ten years as evidence that the sixty-year standard is not a fixed principle of property law but a policy choice that other jurisdictions have already revised.

The proposal cuts directly across the direction of the current government’s policy, which drew its own line under Crown land squatting on June 9 this year, announcing that anyone who occupies government land after that date will not be considered for any settlement programme. Two governments, two diametrically opposed approaches to the same problem: one seeking to formalise existing long-term occupation through a shortened limitation period, the other seeking to arrest new occupation through enforcement and enforcement alone. The tension between those approaches is not merely political. It reflects a genuine and unresolved question about what justice looks like in a country where the government controls vast quantities of land, where housing demand is acute, and where informal occupation has been a rational response to both unaffordability and state inaction for generations.

The argument for reducing the Crown land period rests on a straightforward observation: the government is not an individual household in need of shelter. Land held by the state for decades without a clear development plan is not serving the community that surrounds it, and families who have built lives on that land over many years, who pay utility bills, send children to school on the property, and have no realistic alternative housing option, occupy a moral and social position that is difficult to dismiss simply by citing the legal period. Dominica and other Caribbean jurisdictions have implemented land regularisation programmes on exactly this reasoning, with positive outcomes for community stability and formal tenure security.

The argument against reduction is also real. Crown land exists for reasons beyond current housing demand, including environmental protection, infrastructure reserves, agricultural production, and future public investment. Reducing the adverse possession period creates an incentive for strategic occupation in areas where land values are rising, where infrastructure investment is planned, or where a development opportunity exists that occupants are aware of and wish to pre-empt. The current government’s use of drone surveys and spatial mapping to establish a baseline of who was on Crown land before June 9 reflects a recognition that the state’s land holdings are finite and have been eroded by informal occupation in ways that have not always served the public interest.

For the property market, the policy direction on Crown land adverse possession matters in at least two concrete ways. First, it shapes the availability of state land for housing development, including NHT joint ventures and public sector schemes that depend on Crown land being clear of occupation before it can be transferred or developed. Second, it influences investor confidence in the security of government-adjacent land purchases, since a shorter adverse possession period for Crown land that is adjacent to or overlaps with private development parcels introduces complexity into title searches and development planning. The reform debate is legitimate and necessary. Its resolution will have real consequences for how Jamaica manages its most fundamental resource.