What is a Personal Tenancy?

• Property as a relative concept.
• The recent trend towards the loosening of the categories of proprietary entitlement within leasehold law.
• Criticisms of the Bruton ruling.

The concept of property is elusive. To most property lawyers, it is the ‘twin indicia of assignability of benefit and enforceability of burden’ which provide the hallmarks of a right of property (see K Gray and S Gray, Elements of Land Law, (2009, 5th ed.), at 96-97). At the same time, however, the authors highlight the inherent circularity of this approach since ‘if naively we ask which entitlements are “proprietary”, we are told that they are those rights which are assignable to and enforceable against third parties. When we then ask which rights these may be, we are told that they comprise, of course, the entitlements which are traditionally identified as proprietary’.

Interestingly, K Gray poses an alternative definition, namely, that property consists primarily in ‘control over access’ and that ‘propertiness is represented