It is hard to believe that nearly 6 years have elapsed since the Supreme Court heard the appeals in Ali and others v Birmingham CC (our note here), where the Court decided that a decision on a homelessness application involving a dispute of fact was not a...
Affordability and intentionality – adding it up
Samuels v Birmingham City Council [ 2015 ] EWCA Civ 1051 A second appeal from a s.204 County Court appeal that addressed the council's decision-making on whether the property from which Ms Samuels had become homeless was affordable (and thus, whether she was...
End of days miscellany
No, I am not going to comment much on the ongoing, unravelling farce of the NHF 'voluntary deal' on housing association right to buy. Partly because nobody seems to have a clue what is going on and what it would actually mean - apparently including the NHF....
Listen very carefully, I shall do this only once
The Claimant in R (on the application of Brooks) v LB Islington [2015] EWHC 2657 (Admin) was the mother of 3 children, who applied to the local authority as homeless following her eviction from a housing association property for rent arrears on 24/3/2015....
Hazard? What Hazard?
When do local authorities have to conduct Housing Act 2004 hazard assessments as part of their homelessness duties? The first part of the answer to this question was provided by the Court of Appeal in Temur v LB Hackney [2014] EWCA Civ 877 (our note here),...
IT wasn’t
In Wandsworth LBC v Tompkins [2015] EWCA Civ 846, Wandsworth had purported to grant Mr and Mrs Tompkins an introductory tenancy of a property; only, as the Court of Appeal found, it wasn't an IT because it couldn't be. Mr and Mrs Tompkins had made a...
Human Rights Update
Zammit & Attard Cassar v Malta [2015] ECHR 751 This is the latest in the sequence of cases dealing with rent controls and breaches of A1P1 (previous note here). The property in this instance was let under a commercial lease and in 2002, the applicants...
Subjective suitability
Poshteh v Royal Borough of Kensington And Chelsea [2015] EWCA Civ 711 At issue in this second appeal from a s.204 appeal was whether it was reasonable for Ms Poshteh to have refused an offer of accommodation. Both parties agreed that the property was...
Primary considerations
In Mohamoud v RB Kensington and Chelsea and Saleem v Wandsworth LBC [2015] EWCA Civ 780, the Court of Appeal were faced with the difficult argument about the interaction between section 11, Children Act 2004 and possession proceedings brought by a local...
Westminster again…
In R(Alemi) v Westminster CC [2015] EWHC 1765 (Admin), which has been widely reported already (eg here; and all over my twitter feed), HHJ Blair QC found that Westminster's allocation scheme was unlawful in disbarring successful homeless applicants (other...
Go away!
Johnston v City of Westminster [2015] EWCA Civ 554 A curious case on the effect of a s.198 Housing Act 1996 referral of a homeless applicant to another Authority. Mr Johnston had applied to Westminster as homeless in 2011."For 7 years from 2004 until 2011 he...
A tantalizing note
R (Faizi) v Brent LBC (Admin Court, 17.6.15) is only available as a Lawtel note and all may become clear once a transcript is obtained, but it is a very confusing little case. At the risk of overly simplifying , in England, homelessness is governed by Pt.7,...