Kazadi v Martin Brookes Lettings Estate Agents Limited & Faparusi, Edmonton County Court 14 May 2015 Thanks to Legal Action September 2015 Housing law updates for this one. An assured shorthold tenancy deposit and unlawful eviction case in which everyone...
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),...
Right to Rent – just how bad is it?
We though it would be bad. And thanks to the JCWI, we can now have an evidence based stab at an answer. JCWI co-ordinated an evaluation of the West Midlands pilot of 'Right to Rent' and have published the report (summary here, and full report here). Notably,...
The way you Mackie me feel*
The latest episode in the ongoing saga of the unlawful moneylender Dharam Prakash Gopee [or sometimes Ghopee] has just been handed down. (To catch up with the extraordinary history of the predatory, unlawful secured lending of Mr Gopee's many and various...
Making sense of deposits. Nearly.
It started as such a simple idea, the tenancy deposit regulations. But bad drafting and some 'interesting' interpretations by the Courts put paid to that. We now have a confusing mess, for both landlords and tenants. So, in a spirit of helpfulness (and to...
Of bad banks behaving badly and public bodies
An intriguing mortgage possession County Court case featuring a 'bad bank'. While the case itself turns on a failure by the bank to obtain relief from sanctions, it features an interesting line of argument that may well be raised again. NRAM plc v X [Name...
Discrimination between death and divorce?
Samawi v Haringey LBC, Claim no: A01EC488, 3 July 2015 Central London County Court Thanks to an Arden Chambers eflash comes news of a County Court case with interesting potential repercussions, albeit probably some way down the line. Mr Samawi was in many...
‘It did seem to be expensive’
Gateway (Leeds) Management Ltd v (1) Naghash (2) Shamsizadeh [2015] UKUT 333 (LC) If a head leaseholder, or managing company passes on as a service charge, rent charged by a freeholder for property in order to provide services, does this amount to a variable...
Wherever I lay my hat… Residence tests for allocation policies
HA, R (On the Application Of) v London Borough of Ealing [2015] EWHC 2375 (Admin) This is, I think, a very significant case for all Councils who have or are considering setting residence requirements in their allocation policies. Like quite a few councils,...
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...
The Something Must Be Done Bill, Calais edition
The Rent Act 1957 introduced the requirement for a court order for eviction from a tenancy. That is 58 years of eviction without due process of law being unlawful. But no matter, for Something Must Be Done to deter people who have spent months on perilous...