Tenants and their legal advisors should be aware that a claim for an award of a sum by way of a statutory penalty, under section 214(4) of the Housing Act 2004 for the purposes of the Limitation Act 1980, is an action for sums recoverable by statute under section 9 of the 1980 Act and a six-year limitation period applies.
In Lowe v The Governors of Sutton’s Hospital in Charterhouse [2022] EW Misc 8 (CC), the claimant tenant issued a tenancy deposit claim against his landlord. The tenant claimed statutory penalties under section 214(4) for his landlord’s purported breaches of section 213(6) of the 2004 Act, namely, the failure to give him a copy of the prescribed information within the mandated period of receipt of his deposit. The tenant’s claim was ultimately dismissed, as no breach was found to have occurred, but in so doing His Honour Judge Luba KC provided guidance on the application of the 1980 Act to a claim in respect of multiple tenancies.
The tenant alleged that he had occupied his property under a sequence of 10 fixed-term and periodic assured shorthold tenancies; for which his landlord had failed to comply with its statutory obligations under section 213(6). The first of these tenancies began on 4 January 2010 and the last purportedly on 1 October 2017. The landlord alleged that there had only been eight relevant tenancies, the last of which arose on 1 August 2015.
The landlord denied breach and raised limitation as a defence. The landlord contended that, by operation of section 9 of the 1980 Act, a claim for an award of a sum by way of a statutory penalty under section 214(4) of the 2004, was “an action to recover any sum recoverable by virtue of any enactment”. Such a claim could not be brought after the expiry of six years from the date on which the cause of action accrued.
The tenant argued that the claim was “an action upon a specialty” and therefore the limitation period for such an action under section 8 of the 1980 Act was 12 years. Section 9 was not engaged because “a claim to “recover” money [was] a claim for the repayment of monies paid”. In the present case, what was being sought was monies that had been paid; accordingly, there could be no recovery. The court rejected this proposition.
Judge Luba KC first observed that the statutory remedies under section 214 of the 2004 Act included provision for recovery of an earlier paid deposit. Further, a wide meaning was given to the words “recover” and “recoverable” under the terms of the 1980 Act. It treated “recovery” as including the obtaining of money not previously paid out by a claimant to a defendant.
The tenant also sought to argue that the landlord’s breach of section 213(6) of the 2004 Act was a “continuing” breach and therefore any limitation period was not triggered until compliance. Judge Luba KC paid short shrift to this assertion. He found that once the mandated time for compliance expired, without compliance taking place, a breach occurred and the clock started ticking for limitation purposes.
Elizabeth Dwomoh is a barrister at Lamb Chambers
