Tag Archive for 'HLPA'

Miscellany

Published
by
NL
on 21/04/2009
in Housing law - All and Various (non-housing)
. 0 Comments

In the continuing absence of anything like actual case law, here are some news items and catch up bits on previous stories.

The Government has announced the availability of its Homeowner Mortgage Support Scheme. This is available for those with mortgages up to £400,000 and savings under £16,000, who have suffered a sudden drop in income. They must currently have mortgages with a limited list of providers (Lloyds Bank Group which includes Halifax and Bank of Scotland, Northern Rock, the Royal Bank of Scotland which includes NatWest and Ulster Bank, Bradford and Bingley, Cumberland Building Society, and the National Australia Bank Group which includes Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank. So, largely those who have significant public ownership/capital injections). The mortgagors who apply will be able to reduce their mortgage payments to 30% for two years. The missing amount will be repayable later, so effectively an arrears to capital scheme, but the lenders are underwritten on the deferred amount by the Government/taxpayer. The amount of underwriting available is estimated to be enough for up to 40,000 mortgagors.

Nearly Legal, we will freely admit, runs the risk of being London-centric. We do our best, yet still most, but not all, of us are London based. So we’re happy to get news of the forthcoming first annual general meeting of the Yorkshire Housing Law Practioners Association on 7 May. A PDF flier with details is here.

Barrister and editor of the employment law updates, Daniel Barnett has broken through his £10,000 charity fund raising target on the 10th anniversary of the email updates within two weeks of announcing it. Excellent work and all further donations are sure to be gratefully received.

And lastly comes news of a participant in one of this blog’s favourite (by number of comments and number of page views) Naughty Step posts. According to the Estates Gazette, Shamim Karim is suing Foxtons. Shamim Karim was, lest we forget, struck off as a solicitor for serious and repeated dishonesty. (Am I alone in thinking we can do with a better term than ’struck off’. Vicars are defrocked, barristers disbarred, Surely solicitors should be ‘unrolled’. The campaign starts here.)

Now, like an English tourist stumbling into a corrida, this is one of those fights that leaves you unsure who to root for, but watching in horrified fascination. On the one hand, Shamim Karim, found to be responsible for dishonest appropriation of client funds in the hundreds of thousands, or on the other, well, Foxtons, fresh from their latest defeat in the Court of Appeal by the Office of Fair Trading. But the reported claim is as follows…

The Karim house in Esher (oh fragrant Esher) has been repossessed by the Furness Building Society, who instructed Foxtons on the sale. Shamim Karim claims that Foxtons reduced the price of the property against her instructions and is claiming £100,000 in damages in breach of contract and deceit.

As it was apparently the Furness BS that instructed Foxtons on the sale, I must confess myself slightly puzzled as to the privity of contract, but no doubt the report is lacking salient details. Foxtons, meanwhile, claim that Shamim Kaim failed to grant access for viewings or return phone calls ‘within a reasonable time’, thereby deliberately frustrating its efforts to secure an offer, and for this reason it resigned as agent.

You can pick sides if you want, but NL is sitting this one out as a disinterested, but entertained, observer. Always keen on Tauromachia, I’m just trying to work out who is the torero and who the bull.

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Housing Law Conference clash

Published
by
NL
on 09/12/2008
in Housing law - All, Tolerated trespasser and secure-tenancy
. 8 Comments

So, the Housing Law conference is tomorrow, 10 December, and I suspect a swathe of the Nearly Legal contributors will be there. I will, anyway. Naturally this coincides precisely with the House of Lords handing down one of the more significant housing related judgments of recent times on the tolerated trespassers cases, as we noted a couple of posts ago.

Thusly tomorrow may prove to be a test of both my mobile blogging kit and instant judgment digestion abilities. But should either fail – and given that this will be a day rammed to the gunwales with housing law goodness in any event – you may have to wait till thursday for reports on the Lords judgment.

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A shameless plug: HLPA Conference 10 Dec 2008

Published
by
J
on 20/09/2008
in Housing law - All
. 0 Comments

The Housing Law Practitioners’ Association annual conference is being held on the 10th December 2008 at the Royal Institute of British Architects, London. Those of you who subscribe to Legal Action should already have had your application forms, but, for everyone else, details can be found here. The speakers include:

  • Rabinder Singh QC on equality and discrimination law after Malcolm;
  • Andrew Arden QC, Jan Luba QC and Caroline Hunter on current issues in homelessness;
  • Robert Latham and Christopher Baker on allocation schemes;
  • James Stark, Derek McConnell and Bob Lawrence (CLG) on possession proceedings;
  • Matthew Hutchings and Stephen Cottle on housing and human rights.

The conference lasts from 9am till 6pm, is fully catered and attracts 6 CPD points. A day of housing law. With food. And CPD points. What more could you ask for?

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Views and news from Hlpa meeting

Published
by
NL
on 17/09/2008
in Benefits, Disrepair and Housing law - All
. 2 Comments

The Hlpa meeting tonight (17/9/08) was a particularly interesting one, on the topic of disrepair. Talks were from Mel Cairns, Andrew Brookes of Anthony Gold and Marina Sergides of Garden Court.

Among the end of meeting news items were:

  • The current intent is that the main body of the Housing & Regeneration Act, including the tolerated trespasser provisions, will come into force on 6 April 2009.
  • New Housing Benefit regs coming into force on 6 October 2008 mean that HB backdating claims can only be made for 6 months (for those of working age) and 3 months (for pensioners). Not good news.

There were a few surprises for me arising out of discussions of the talks.

One was that relatively few people have much experience of CFA funding for disrepair claims, despite the effect of the new regulations in easing the requirements and therefore subsequent costs challenges to the validity of the CFA. Given the large proportion of social tenants who will not be leigible for legal aid, I would have thought that, as Andrew Brookes suggested, this was a clear option for funding claims that the tenants otherwise have no way of bringing.

The other surprise was that basically no-one in London/the SE is bringing EPA 1990 private prosecutions anymore. The history, which was news to me, was that there were great swathes of prosections in the 1980s, mostly in east London, and that a batch process was in place, which still operates in Birmingham, apparently. But recent experience seems to be that they are difficult, massively unpredictable in the Magistrates Court, and prone to unexpected detonations or collapses. I’ve not done an EPA, though I’ve been slightly involved in someone else’s. I can appreciate that focussing on the Criminal standard of proof is a hefty adjustment for civil litigators. I can also appreciate that it an be difficult presenting the Magistrates, or a DJ in the Mags, with an unusual and unfamiliar prosecution, but it may be a chicken and egg thing. More solicitors and Counsel wth experience of EPAs and more Magistrates Courts used to dealing with them could bring a different approach.

Marina Sergides did a useful run down of recent(ish) cases. Most, I am pleased to say, were previously reported on Nearly Legal. Some were unreported (anywhere) and I shall shamelessly purloin those, with attribution, for notes over the next few days.

Levels of damages were a topic at Hlpa and, as I have noted before, we seem to be in something of a state of stasis (or even a real terms fall on these), partly due the lack of higher court cases, and for that reason, I’m all for some upward pressure. A commentor at Hlpa suggested that he was seeing settlement figures routinely higher than many recent reported County Court cases. I could probably say the same, but even non-binding County Court cases aren’t helpful in making the argument.

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