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24 March 2017
Issue: 7739 / Categories: Features , Civil way , Procedure & practice
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Civil way: 24 March 2017

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New challenge for lease costs; Saturday, Bloody Saturday; sniffing out a judicial interview & the magic of land registry address.

ADMIN ATTACK

It’s all very well for a tenant to engage in litigation with their landlord but they could be clobbered for some or all of the landlord’s costs thanks to a lease covenant. The tenant may apply under s 20C of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 for an order restricting the landlord from adding costs to the service charge. The tenant could be off the hook for their service charge percentage of the whole or part of the costs. In fact, all tenants could escape liability and an individual tenant might even apply under s 20C to be relieved of bearing their proportion of costs incurred in litigation between landlord and a co-tenant.

The tenant in the recent Bretby Hall Management Co Ltd v Pratt [2017] UKUT 0070 (LC)—gloriously involving 90 disputed items including window cleaning and gardening—applied for a s 20C order to the upper tribunal (lands chamber) which had allowed

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NEWS
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A Court of Appeal ruling has clarified that ‘rent’ must be monetary—excluding tenants paid in labour from statutory protection. In this week's NLJ, James Naylor explains Garraway v Phillips, where a tenant worked two days a week instead of paying rent
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Three men wrongly imprisoned for a combined 77 years have been released—yet received ‘not a penny’ in compensation, exposing deep flaws in the justice system. Writing in NLJ this week, Dr Jon Robins reports on Justin Plummer, Oliver Campbell and Peter Sullivan, whose convictions collapsed amid discredited forensics, ‘oppressive’ police interviews and unreliable ‘cell confessions’
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