The cases came to my notice via my subscription to the Destin case law service (authored by Jan Luba QC).

Manchester CC v Javaid

Manchester Magistrates Court, 6 July 2011

This case involved Mr Mohammed Javaid, of Winchester Road, Hale, who pleaded guilty in Manchester Magistrates Court, to 20 offences relating to defective private rented property that he let to tenants in Ardwick (a suburb of Manchester).

The prosecution was brought by the local authority and the fire services authority as the council’s environmental health inspectors had discovered a serious fire risk and numerous other defects within the property.

According to reports from the Portsmouth City Council and Environmental Health News  the property had

• dangerous electrical wiring
• a missing fire door
• cables dangling from the ceiling where smoke alarms should have been.
• missing spindles on banisters – meaning there were gaps large enough for a person to fall through down to the floor below
• broken windows
• no working heating system in the properties, and
• no working lights in the basement
• an exposed hole in the unlit back yard leading to a 2m drop into the basement.

One of the tenants told the Council Officers that she had to regularly visit the cellar, walking past live electric cables at shoulder height, to flick fuses back on.

The property was so bad that an Emergency Prohibition Order was served after the first inspection. However it seems that not only did the landlord completely ignore this, he also moved new tenants in!

Needless to say, the landlord was found guilty, fined a whopping £33,750 and ordered to pay costs of £8,500.

R v Chyna Gray and Others

Croydon Crown Court, 21 June 2011

My next case is even worse and involves violent physical assault.

The three defendants, Chyna Gray, 23, her brother Spencer, 24 and Omar Parchment, 24 were the landlords of a young couple, a 20 year old woman and her 23 year old boyfriend.

The story starts when they were were moving out to escape their violent and abusive landlords. Here is the rest of the tale as told by the Croydon Guardian:

As they packed their belongings into a car, the jury heard they were attacked by Chyna Gray. The next day, when the 20-year-old returned to collect the rest of her belongings, she was tied up and assaulted by the trio who threatened to kill her unless she took them to where her boyfriend was.

She was driven to a home on Norbury Court Road where the thugs launched a violent assault on her boyfriend. Spencer Gray stabbed him in the back with a scalpel after the trio kicked him in the head and beat him with bottles.

The trio were found guilty at Croydon Crown Court and received prison sentences totalling more than eight years.

Bristol CC v Digs (Bristol) Ltd

Bristol Magistrates Court, 22 June 2011

My third and final case (reported by Letting Agent News here) is less dramatic but still serious.  In this case more serious for the landlord than for the tenants.

It involves Digs (Bristol) Ltd, one of the largest student landlords in Bristol, who were prosecuted for letting an HMO without a license.

The directors and company were fined £4,000 and ordered to pay £1,560 costs by Bristol Magistrates Court. However that was not all.

As a result of this the Bristol City Council is banning the firm and directors from holding any HMO licences, as they are no longer considered ‘fit and proper persons’. Meaning that they will now have to employ someone else to perform this function for them.

Finally the Council has informed tenants they can reclaim rent for up to 12 months up to the court date by taking the firm to a Rents Tribunal. So a bad day all round for Digs (Bristol) Ltd.

The moral of the story being that you MUST ensure that your HMO properties are licensed, or the Council (Bristol Council anyway) are coming to get you.

Magistrates Court picture by Thomas Nugent on the Geograph site

Destin specialise in providing services to Local Authorities, and the service is aimed mostly at them, but it will also be useful for other advisors and solicitors.

The digest comes in the following separate modules so you can either subscribe to all of them or just pick the one or ones that you need.  They are:

• Homelessness
• Allocations
• Social Housing Tenancies
• Private Sector Tenancies
• Anti Social Behaviour (ASB)

I have access to the Private Sector Tenancies module.  It only goes back to decisions in 2009 as it is an updating service rather than a database of all case law.  So the case reflects the cases which have been decided since the digest was started.

However it is recent case law that people most need to know.  We can all look up the older cases in the text books.  It is keeping up with the new ones which is so hard, and this service is brilliant for this.

What you get is an index in the left margin of the different case types, and then you can read the (short) summary report written by Jan in the right window.  There is also a link to the full case report online where this is available, and you can search for new cases.

The modules are priced between £100 and £160 each plus VAT and there is a free trial on offer.  There is also a special offer for Landlord Law Members which (if you are a member and logged in) you can read about here.

As there is a free trial it is worth giving it a go.  A service authored by Jan Luba has to be good.

The topic of this blog post is similar in many ways to the post I did on Monday about nightmare co-tenants (which has attracted some great comments by the way).

The neighbours from hell

What do you do if you find that the rented property next door to yours suddenly has the tenants from Hell living there? Loud parties every night, screaming and yelling at all hours, piles of empty bottles in the front garden, and your four year old is asking questions about the embarrassing sounds coming through his bedroom wall.

You tell the landlord about the problems you are having, and he does absolutely nothing about it.

In a way you are worse off than the tenant in my ‘problems with other tenants’ post, as it is much easier to move away if you are renting a room, than if you are living in your own home.

The bad news is that you cannot blame or claim against the landlord. One human being cannot be held responsible for the actions of another human being, which is why your wife’s creditors cannot sue you for her debts. So you can’t threaten action against your landlord, if his tenants are giving you grief.

Or can you?

I heard a very interesting talk recently at a CLT Conference, by barrister Alison Meacher. She was discussing the question of landlords liability for the acts of his tenants in the context of the old case of Rylands v. Fletcher.

Rylands v. Fletcher?

As every law student will know, Rylands v. Fletcher is about a landowner being held liable for damage done by something which ‘escapes’ from his land. Can noise and nuisance from tenants which landlords fail to control be considered in this context?

It seems as if in some circumstances a landlord can be held liable in tort (for non lawyers, this is a type of claim in civil law where someone suffers a wrong and can make a claim even though there is no contract). This is where a landlord can be held to have ‘adopted’ a nuisance by failing to take reasonable steps to abate a nuisance caused by his tenant which he is aware, or ought to be aware of.

She looked particular at a case called Octavia Hill Housing v. Brumby and the judgement of Mr Justice Mackay, quoting Lord Atkin in Sedleigh-Denfield v O’Callaghan :

“It seems to me clear that if a man permits an offensive thing on his premises to continue to offend, that is if he knows that it is operating offensively, is able to prevent it and omits to prevent it he is permitting the nuisance to continue; in other words he is continuing it.”

The cases cited by Alison in her talk all related to public sector houses (apart from the Sedleigh case which is about water damage), so I don’t know what the position would be in the private sector.

Does anyone know whether there are any circumstances in which a landlord has been held responsible for his tenants anti social behaviour, for example in circumstances where he has refused to do anything (such as bring proceedings to evict them)?  There is I suppose Ribee v. Norrie which is about a  a tenant causing damage to a neighbouring property by fire.

However even if there is the possibility of liability, I suspect that it is not going to be a practical solution for outraged neighbours of anti social tenants, any time soon.

Photo by chadmagiera

However although this is a worrying decision for surveyors, it doesn’t mean that landlords can now go out and recoup all losses for low income generating properties from their surveyors!

In this particular case the surveyor was liable as he breached industry guidelines when he compiled his report. This will  not happen that often.

This is a landmark case though, as it is the first time that a surveyor/valuer has been held liable towards buy to let landlords in this way. The judge held that Scullion was entitled to rely on the advice provided by the valuer to the bank and that the valuer owed him a duty of care to ensure that any advice on likely rental income would be accurate.

The £72,000 awarded was in respect of the losses he had suffered which was attributable to the overstatement of the expected rental income in the surveyors report. The award included mortgage costs and other losses arising when the rent made on the property was not sufficient to cover his overheads.

Alexandra Anderson, a partner at Reynolds Porter Chamberlain in her firms report on the case said:

“A lot of non-professional landlords entered the buy-to-let market before the credit crunch because there was so much financing available and it looked like a safe way to make an investment for the future. Many of them will have relied on the survey ordered by the bank and if the survey overvalued the rental income the property should achieve, they could have a similar claim.”

The Reynolds Porter Chamberlain report gives the case citation, Emmett Thomas Scullion -v- Bank of Scotland (trading as Colleys) [2010] EWHC 572 (Ch) and [2010] EWHC 2253 (Ch). You can read the report of the damages part of the judgement here (many thanks to J and NE1 Investigations Limited for letting me have this). Does anyone have a link to the trial report?

I often get people emailing me with a problem and saying “What is the law which covers that?”.  The answer to which is often “There isn’t one”.  Not if you mean Act of Parliament law.

Non lawyers often seem to think that there is this vast body of statute which details everything, so that somewhere there will be an act of Parliament saying whether their landlord has to get rid of the wasps nest in the loft and how long their notice period should be.

Some of these things will be covered by statute but others won’t.  What do you do then?  This is where the Common Law comes in.

The theory of common law

The theory is that there is this great underlying body of common law which covers everything, and this is then, from time to time, changed (or perhaps clarified) by an Act of Parliament which lies on top of it.  If for any reason the Act does not apply, then the underlying common law will.

So for example, there is a big act, the Housing Act 1988, which set up a statutory code governing rented properties created since 15 January 1989 (before that the Rent Act 1977 applied).  But in some circumstances (eg if the tenant is a limited company, or the let is a genuine holiday let)  the act does not apply.  We then have a common law tenancy.  One which is governed by the common law rules rather than those set out in the Housing Act.

Finding the common law

How do you find out what these common law rules are?  The answer is often “with great difficulty”.  The common law is Judge made, and has been built up over the centuries by Judges deciding cases.  You need to find a case which applies to your situation, and then you may have your answer.  But not always.

For example it is not the facts which are important but the reason for the  decision (what lawyers call the ratio decidendi).  If you have a situation involving a border collie and an engine driver, you are not necessarily looking for a report of a case involving a border collie.  That case with the spaniel and the elderly lady may be more relevant.  If indeed the point of law involves an animal at all. It could be all about the engine driver, or drivers in general.

Then there is the level of case.  A case decided by the House of Lords (now the Supreme Court) is binding on everyone (in the UK that is) whereas a County Court decision is binding on no-one (although it may be persuasive).

So how do Judges decide a case if there is no Act of Parliament and no relevant case law?  The theory is that there is an answer.  They just have to find it, as Michaelangelo found the statute inside the block of marble.

• They  look at case law covering similar situations
• They look at custom and practice (often going back many years)
• They look at what courts have decided in similar situations in other countries (particularly those with common law legal systems)
• They look at respected academic legal writings, government and industry reports, and perhaps reports in Hansard
• They consider what would be fair and just in all the circumstances
• Sometimes they also consider the impact of a certain decision and whether or not this is something they can do or whether it should be left to Parliament (e.g. Lord Hoffman in Birmingham City Council -v- Oakley [2000] House of Lords)

Many important areas of law are almost completely Judge made.  For example the law of negligence is based on a famous case called Donoghue v. Stevens in 1932.

But this is all a bit difficult for people just wanting to know whether they are entitled to ask their landlord to repair the fridge.

This is why I set up the Landlord Law site.  So there is somewhere, at a reasonable cost, where people can go to find out answers like this (in a landlord and tenant context), and if there is no obvious answer, discuss it on the site forum.

But bear in mind that for some situations there may be no law or decision covering the point.  It may need someone to take a case to the Court of Appeal or even the Supreme Court before we can discover what the answer is.

In this situation all you can do is act in a way which you think is fair and just, and hope for the best.

Photo by Hello. I am Bruce.