Many local authorities use private accommodation for temporary accommodation under Housing Act 1996 Part VII. This may be by an LA ALMO 'managing agency', on which more at another time, or by licence agreements with private agencies. One of the latter came...
Outright orders and drug offences
Knowsley Housing Trust v Prescott & Prescott [2009] EWHC 924 (QB) Mr & Mrs Prescott were the assured tenants of Knowsley Housing Trust and had been since 2002. On 11 April 2006, Mr Prescott pleaded guilty to charges relating to the supply of cocaine...
Emergency remedial action
In Luton Borough Council v Universal Group we have the first (and almost certainly last) decision of the Lands Tribunal under the Housing Act 2004 on appeal from a Residential Property Tribunal (or RPT). 15-17 Chapel Street, Luton is (or was) consisted of a...
Green Paper "within 10 days"
It's the little things in life which get me excited and, as a bit of a policy nerd on the side, it looks like a Green Paper is to be expected within 10 days if The Times is to be believed. I'd heard on the grapevine that the GP had been canned because they...
Redolent of Improbability
I don't think there is any significant point of law or practice in Lemas and Sealy v Williams [2009] EWCA Civ 360, but it is a strange case (although one suspects many readers will have been involved in similarly chaotic cases at one stage or another) and...
Tenancy Deposit – it gets worse
Hat tip to Tessa at Landlord Law for this. There are reports on various tenant/landlord forums of tenants losing Housing Act 2004 claims for 3x deposit on unprotected deposit/lack of notification cases where the landlord has returned the deposit to the...
Request for info
Garden Court's bulletin of 27 April includes a case note, Thornhill v Sita Metal Recycling Cambridge Ltd [2009] All ER (D) 162, on nuisance, possession of and interest in land. The upshot being that the nature of a claimant's legal interest in land is by the...
Constructive trust and misrepresentation
Qayyum v Hameed & Anor [2009] EWCA Civ 352 is a case with a complicated background - it originated in the collapse of BCCI, for heaven's sake - but thankfully, the issues in this appeal were relatively straightforward, if novel. In 1991 Mr & Mrs Qayyum...
Tenancy Deposit on 'Renewal of Tenancy'
Our grateful thanks to the Painsmith blog again for news of another Tenancy Deposit case (and for giving me something to write about in these case bereft times). This is a County Court case on the issue of 'renewal' of a tenancy that started before April...
Miscellany
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...
Searching around …
NL set a kind of challenge. There hasn't been anything interesting I could find, but there is a kind of footnote to allocations by way of a circular issued by CLG under section 169, Housing Act 1996, to honour a commitment made to members of the armed...
Tumbleweed
It's not that we've stopped posting lately, it's just that there has been nothing to write about. There is lots to come - Weaver v L&Q in the Court of Appeal, Moran v Manchester, Aweys v Birmingham in the Lords (all heard, I believe, and judgments awaited);...