The incurable case of the misidentified tenant: Caroline Shea KC & Thomas Rothwell consider a decision of the Court of Appeal on incorrectly addressed notices
- In OG Thomas Amaethyddiaeth Cyf and another v Turner and others, the Court of Appeal has ruled that for a notice to quit to be valid, it is a fundamental requirement of the common law that notice is given to the tenant.
- This implies that a notice addressed to A and received by A cannot be regarded as being a notice given to B, even if A knows that B would have been the correct recipient of it.
Landlord and tenant practitioners will be fully familiar with scrutinising property notices for their substantive validity. Where a notice contains an error, they will also routinely grasp for the ‘reasonable recipient’ test laid down in the well-known case of Mannai Investment Co Ltd v Eagle Star Life Assurance Co Ltd [1997] AC 749.
In last year’s decision in
