Birmingham CC have been using High Court Sheriffs for evicting secure tenants after a possession order. This is often quicker than county court bailiffs and importantly, there is often no notice given of eviction date, the Sheriffs simply turning up. There is a process to be followed before a county court possession order can be enforced by High Court Sheriffs.
CLP and counsel Andrew Byles acted for a tenant, Mr M, on an application by Birmingham for enforcement by High Court Sheriffs. In the course of the hearing, counsel for Birmingham made the remarkable admission that Birmingham “had obtained possession writs against families without following the correct processes”. An FOI request then obtained the information that up to 53 High Court Sheriff appointments had previously been obtained by Birmingham. As CLP put it:
It appears that Birmingham City Council implemented a system of using High Court bailiffs without getting proper legal advice. Marstons Group High Court Enforcement Officers handled the applications for bailiff writs and got the procedure wrong.
If this was indeed the case on the other warrants, then there may be some 50 odd unlawful evictions, with those evicted entitled to seek re-entry and damages. Any Birmingham based housing solicitors should be aware of this.More information about this, hopefully including the actual error made, as and when we get it.
Birmingham had also apparently not been informing tenants of their right to apply to stay an eviction. As the judgment in this case apparently put it: “I have been concerned about the deliberate policy of Birmingham City Council not to inform tenants of their ability to seek to suspend the writs of possession”.
While on the topic of landlords not behaving well, DCLG have released a consultation paper on extending the requirement for mandatory licensing for HMOs to smaller properties, based more on number of households/occupiers than the number of storeys in a property. There is also a proposal for a national minimum room size standard – at least for HMOs – in part in response to Clark v Manchester City Council (2015) UKUT 0129 (LC)
More prosaically, some of you may have noticed a problem with our email updates of late. An absence of dates in case references to be specific, rendering case references somewhat less than actually useful.
To cut a long and tedious story short, this is because the software we use to send out email updates interpreted anything in square brackets as a particular kind of software code and stripped it out of the emails. After extensive correspondence with tech support, some curt if not actually rude words, and some fiddling in the source code, it still isn’t fixed. Infuriatingly. It will be. But for the moment, you might have to click through to the site for full case references.
By and large, it might have been easier to persuade the higher courts to change their standard reference system to use {2015} instead…