Cotton & Ors, R (on the Application of) v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions & Ors [2014] EWHC 3437 (Admin) This was the Liberty backed judicial review of the bedroom tax regulations on the basis that the regulations amounted to an article 8...
A very unlawful eviction
(Finally) AA v London Borough of Southwark [2014] EWHC 500 (QB) This High Court judgment is remarkable in many ways, most of them worrying. It was the result of a six day hearing, with Southwark putting Kelvin Rutledge QC up against Mr AA in person and ended...
Should auld acquaintance…
In which we revisit a couple of old friends. Mr Gopee of Barons Finance (and many other companies) continues to fare poorly in the RCJ. He apparently sought permission to appeal a couple of orders by HHJ Mackie QC, granting permission to appeal out of time...
Bedroom Tax: Upper Tribunal on Article 14
Following my plaintive cry here, I now have copies of the two Upper Tribunal judgments from Scotland referred to by the DWP. And, while the judgments do do something rather more and rather different to the outcomes suggested in the DWP Circular, sadly, what...
Not enough information: Bedroom tax and disability discrimination
[Update 6/10/14 - got the judgments now. Detailed comment here] This is frustrating! A DWP circular HB U4/2014 contains an annex with notes on four Scottish Upper Tribunal bedroom tax decisions. Two of them I have already addressed here, but the first and...
The way we live now.
This is not exactly a housing law post, though the operation of housing law runs through it at an angle. It is more of a snapshot of the present reality of social and private housing, at least in London, traced through the history of a remarkable group of...
Retaliatory Eviction and Law Reform
The government (through its Minister for Communities and Local Government, Stephen Williams) today announced its backing to Sarah Teather's private members bill, whose aim is to prevent landlords from evicting tenants who have complained about disrepair in...
A Thursday stuffed with housing stuff
A busy Thursday for housing law, not yet law, housing benefits and housing misc. Item one. A Scottish Upper Tribunal is to hear a room size appeal on 18 September. This is one of the first Fife decisions. It is not the lead case in the English Upper...
Affordable Homes Bill & the bedroom tax
I haven't written about the Affordable Homes Bill, partly because time, and partly because I was deeply cynical about the Bill's prospects of getting anywhere pre-election, and the omissions it contained. (In fact for many of the same reasons contained in...
Cannot undertake to the FTT to patch up bad work
In Nogueira v Westminster the Upper Tribunal had to deal with a rather odd decision of the First Tier Tribunal (called the "F-tT" in the report - an orthography I shall avoid). To cut what must have been a long story short, the case was about major works to...
Ch ch ch ch changes
When is a Secure Tenancy Agreement not a Secure Tenancy Agreement? News has reached us of an interesting case in Bow County Court involving the right to succeed to a secure tenancy and the operation of s.103 of the Housing Act 1985: London Borough...
The public sector equality duty and priority need
We are (or more accurately I am) a bit late on this one. It is quite important though and the fact I have only just written it up should not detract from that. In Kanu v Southwark LBC [2014] EWCA Civ 1085, the Court of Appeal considered whether the public...