A quick outline of a busy news day... The Court of Appeal says that (some) provisions of the Legal Services Commission's Unified Contract are unlawful, specifically the most sweeping of the unilateral amendment clauses. The judgment is pretty devastating,...
Extending security by tenancy agreement?
[Edit, time slightly later on. In the comments to her post Tessa suggests that the case discussed below was not a judgment at all but merely adjourned from the undefended list for a hearing of the issues. So none of what follows is of much significance.] A...
S.85 Application Randomness
We've been doing quite a few s.85 revival of tenancy applications recently, mostly successful. Where arrears have been paid off, our usual line is that no specific payments have been made for court costs and that court costs have not been added to the...
Legal Aid. Could be clearer. Will be smaller.
The judgment in Minister for Legal Aid v Main, R (on the application of) [2007] EWCA Civ 1147 might be of limited general applicability, concerning as it does the provision of 'special case' legal aid funding for inquests, but one passage in the judgment...
Oh what a tangled web…
[Edit. This was originally posted on Friday evening 16/11/07. Not that I'm getting all conspiratorial but it disappeared in the great site downtime and server change... There was also originally an image, which has vanished from the server and apparently was...
Rumours of my demise…
... were entirely due to a technical hitch. Admittedly a walloping great big technical hitch which lasted 3 days and was only resolved by the site being moved a new server and the Domain Name Server records being updated. But as of 11.30 pm on Monday, the...
Not the usual bug infestation
Hat tip to Cearta.ie for this extraordinary story from the Irish Times: Landladies ordered to pay students €115,000 in damages Simon Carswell 14 November 2007 Two Dublin landladies have been ordered to pay damages totalling more than €115,000 to 10 students...
All back to mine
After yesterday's note, an all too brief comment on an interesting Court of Appeal case defended by the firm of a regular reader/commenter, William Flack of Flack & Co. Wandsworth v Randall [2007] EWCA Civ 1126 The situation - son succeeds to a parent's...
Housing case flood
Just a note. Comments to follow, asap. Court of Appeal: Wandsworth v Randall [2007] EWCA Civ 1126 Succession and possession for under-occupation. London Borough of Southwark v Dennett [2007] EWCA Civ 1091 Right to Buy, Delay and Misfeasance in Public Office...
Statistics can be fun at the SHLA
The Social Housing Law Association has released a 'Policy Statement' on the need for legal aid reform. Briefly, they claim that far too many weak cases are brought against social landlords by legally aided tenants and that the subsequent litigation costs to...
Ooops – disproportionate strike-out
A certain amount of amusement has been circulating around London housing firms at the Court of Appeal judgment in London Borough of Southwark -v- Onayomake [2007] EWCA Civ 1426 (Bailii link, or link to WLR case note here, but may only be briefly freely...
Control Orders and secret evidence
I was going to do a fairly long post on the House of Lords judgments in JJ and others, MB and AF, and E, but time went against me, and Head of Legal has some good posts on the issue, here, here and here. So I just want to note that in MB, the House of Lords...