Houses in Multiple Occupation – A Cautionary Tale for Errant Landlords

Pressure on the housing market has led to the conversion of many redundant office buildings into flats and the number of such projects is likely to be greatly increased by shifting work patterns brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. A Court of Appeal ruling, however, powerfully signalled that…

Jan 28, 2021

The case concerned an office block that had been converted into 47 flats. After a housing officer visited, the local authority employed its powers under the Housing Act 2004 to serve a number of improvement notices on the company that owned the block’s freehold. The notices, amongst other things, required the company to remedy fire safety and electrical hazards and to install double glazing and central heating in some of the flats which were said to be excessively cold.

After some of the notices were not complied with, the council imposed civil penalties on the company totalling £140,000. The company’s director and majority shareholder received identical penalties on the basis that he had consented to or connived in the company’s failures. In addition, each of them received penalties of £96,600 in respect of breaches of the Licensing and Management of Houses in Multiple Occupation (Additional Provisions) (England) Regulations 2007.

After the council served a prohibition order barring the building’s use as residential premises, the company’s rental income dried up and it entered administration. The company’s and the director’s appeal to the Upper Tribunal was subsequently rejected, save in respect of the amount of the penalties. The company’s overall penalties were reduced to £75,000 and the director’s to £99,000.

Dismissing the director’s appeal against that outcome, the Court rejected his plea that he had suffered double punishment, both as an individual and as a shareholder in the company. His penalties reflected his responsibility for the conduct of the company’s affairs, his personal knowledge of the condition of the building and his responsibility for the occurrence of similar problems at another property. The penalties, whether viewed individually or in aggregate, could not be impugned as excessive or unjust.

There is No Known Level of Safe Exposure to Asbestos – High Court Ruling

Exposure to even very low levels of asbestos can be a source of tragedy many years in the future. The point was made by the case of a retired joiner who succumbed to asbestos-related cancer more than 50 years after he worked for just a few days on the construction of a flagship office building. During the late 1960s, the man worked on construction of an insurance company’s headquarters. The job lasted two weeks at most, but involved handling cement panels which contained asbestos. In 2019 he…

Disability Discrimination – ET’s Reasons for Dismissing Claim ‘Inadequate’

One of the most fundamental principles of justice is that unsuccessful litigants must be given an adequate explanation of the reasons why they have lost. In the context of a disability discrimination claim, an Employment Tribunal (ET) was found to have failed in that basic task. The case concerned a probationary employee who suffered from medical conditions that amounted to a disability. She was dismissed, purportedly due to performance issues. She launched a direct discrimination claim on the…

Employment Tribunals Can Spot a Sham Redundancy When They See One

It can be hard to distinguish an unfair dismissal from a genuine redundancy process. As was shown by the case of a property manager who found himself on the receiving end of his boss’s unjustified pique, however, Employment Tribunals (ETs) tend to know a sham when they see one. The founder of the business for which the man worked had taken strongly against him. During a recorded meeting, she made a number of offensive remarks about him in his absence. After he launched proceedings, an ET found…