Peter Roberts Senior Associate

Peter qualified as an agricultural property lawyer in 2007 and joined Burges Salmon in 2011.

As part of the food and farming team, Peter spends his time working exclusively on property transactions affecting rural land.

He has particular expertise in acting for banks and landowners in relation to agricultural lending transactions and in the dying art of unregistered conveyancing but covers the full gambit of rural property matters including agricultural tenancies, farm sales and purchases and estate management issues.

He is a member of the Agricultural Law Association.

• Acting for the Co-operative Wholesale Society on the landmark sale of its Farmcare business farming portfolio in 2014 for nearly £250 million. It is understood that this remains the most valuable single sale of UK agricultural land to date and included 17,000 acres of owned land and a further 21,000 acres of tenanted/contracted land across England and Scotland.  The deal was both complex and enormous in its scale and required many months of dedicated work to bring to a conclusion.
• Acting for The Crown Estate on the disposal of a series of farms from a single, large, landed estate. The transactions required careful coordination and timing between various different law firms and multiple buyers and funders and included overage, cross-rights and split contracts.
• Acting for a leading bank on the refinancing of a prestigious Cotswold landed estate. The transaction comprised trust, corporate and personally owned land and was notable for the extent of the title issues that required resolution before the land was suitable to be used as security.
• Acting on the first registration of an aristocratic family’s strategically positioned estate in preparation for the land to be developed. The land is now subject to one of the country's most significant development projects.
• Acting for a large family farming business following the service of a blight notice on the Secretary of State for Transport. The farm is on the route of the HS2 project and would have been bisected by the new rail line.
• Acting for the pension trustees of a former nationalised utility provider on the disposal at auction of the remainder of a once enormous Welsh landed estate.
• Acting for a private individual in relation to the identification of the benefit of historic covenants and their subsequent release by the client in return for a windfall payment from a third party.
• Acting for a large South West family farming business on the refinancing and restructuring arising from succession planning. The instructions have been ongoing for several years and have required sensitivity as the family adjusts to a new future following the death of the main shareholder.
• Acting for a leading bank on the refinancing of an anaerobic digestion plant and the funding for the purchase of a landed estate. Both matters were located in East Anglia and the instructing bank commented that “you have provided great added value to the bank and the transaction overall”.