A very odd case was noted on Lawtel this morning - AB v Leicester City Council, Court of Appeal, 19.2.09. ([2009] EWCA Civ 192) AB had applied under Part 7, Housing Act 1996, to Leicester City Council ("Leicester") for assistance as a homeless...
All the blog posts, most recent first
North of the border
Glasgow City Council v Mitchell [2009] UKHL 11 This is a Scottish appeal to the House of Lords on the scope of the duties owed - if any - by landlords in respect of the behavior of their tenants. It is a difficult case to read (at least for any...
Dead and gone
The mopping up of the tail end of tolerated trespasser cases continues. Barry Austin v LB Southwark [2008] EWCA Civ 66 was the Court of Appeal hearing of the appeal from the High Court hearing we noted earlier. The issue at stake was whether Mr...
Something for the weekend
The House of Lords will be giving judgment in Glasgow CC v Mitchell on Wednesday 18 Feb 09 (link is to a .pdf). This is a case that we've missed so far but, in essence, is about the scope of the duty of care (if any) owed by a landlord to their...
Housing waiting lists in Parliament
Yesterday the House of Commons debated a Conservative Party motion on housing waiting lists: That this House notes that social housing waiting lists have increased to a record 1.8 million families, over 4.5 million people, over the last 12 months;...
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear
We all knew that Lambeth Housing was in a bit of a self imposed mess, and this is an outline of what it amounts to. I'm not going to add much in the way of comment, but anyone who acts on occasion for Lambeth tenants or leaseholders or homeless...
Nelsonian ignorance
Iyekekpolor Ugiagbe is a dream appellant - or, rather, an appellant whose homelessness story is a dream for a neo-liberal Court of Appeal who allowed her appeal against Southwark's finding that she was intentionally homeless (Ugiagbe v Southwark...
The Gas Man Cometh
The case of Ferguson v British Gas [2009] EWCA Civ 46 concerns a complaint that British Gas harassed a former customer for some 6 months after she had transferred her gas supply to nPower. Although it is not a housing case, the report contains some...
Mersey Paradise?
The Court of Appeal has - today - given judgment in R (Liverpool CC) v London Borough of Hillingdon and Ayan Khan (interested party) [2009] EWCA Civ 1702, a case concerning two local authorities who were in dispute over which one of them should be...
Protection from repossession
Andrew Dismore MP (he of Chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights fame) has introduced a ten minute rule bill entitled 'Home Repossession (Protection) Bill'. In his own words, the Bill will: amend the Law of Property Act 1925 to require a...
Evictions and Proportionality
We're a bit late with this one, and it is arguably quite a biggie (hat tip to Niki Goss who first pointed it out, to me at least, in the comments here). Anyway, Cosic v Croatia is a decision of the European Court of Human Rights that should be of...
Bankruptcy and disrepair
In the end, I couldn't resist writing this one up from the report in January 09's LAG updates. It is a very late report and only a County Court decision, but is a) just too topical for these insolvent times and b) vaguely technically interesting....