Dwelling-house – Multiple occupation – Adverse possession – Appellant claiming adverse possession to upper part of house — Whether appellant entitled to acquire possessory title to part of building – Whether appellant establishing title by adverse possession — Appeal dismissed
The appellant was born in 1942 and had lived in the upper part of a house in Trinidad since she was eight. She had become a tenant of the lower part of the house in the 1970s but stopped paying rent in June 1977 following a dispute arose over ownership of the property. The respondent freeholder issued an ejectment summons and the appellant claimed that she had obtained title to the property by adverse possession.
The appellant argued that a second tenant of the property (L) had been her licensee since 1979. However, the judge found that L was a tenant, so that the appellant had not been enjoying and exercising exclusive possession of the premises since 1979, as she claimed. However, even if she had, she had not been in continuous, exclusive possession of the premises for at least 16 years, as required to claim adverse possession under the law of Trinidad and Tobago, because the respondent had issued the ejectment summons in 1994.
The Court of Appeal upheld the judge’s order for possession on various grounds. It rejected the appellant’s submission that the house was in multiple occupation and that she had obtained a possessory title of the part of the house that she occupied. The court held that possessory title “went to the land” and that no authority existed that a person could acquire possessory title that included only the lower part of a building. The appellant appealed to the Privy Council.
Held: The appeal was dismissed.
As a matter of principle, land could be owned in horizontal layers, as residential flats illustrated. The important issue, in the context of adverse possession, was whether the claimant was in de facto possession of the property in question to the exclusion of other persons, except in so far as those other persons were family, visitors or other licensees.
The English Court of Appeal had accepted in Simpson v Fergus (2000) 79 P&CR 398 that possession of a flat with a front door that could be locked differed from possession of part of an unfenced moor or hillside. The Privy Council could not therefore agree with the proposition accepted by the Court of Appeal that a person could not acquire a possessory title that included only the lower part of a building. However, should a claimant establish title by adverse possession to part only of a building, the pleadings should define the part of the building claimed to have been in the claimant’s possession, credible evidence should show that the claimant could possess that part of the building to the exclusion of others (apart from the claimant’s licensees) and the claimant should enjoy such possession throughout the limitation period. Such a case might be easy to prove if the property in question was a self-contained residential flat in a purpose-built block. It might be more difficult in a building that had slipped into informal multiple occupation with shared facilities. In the instant case, the appellant’s claim met none of those requirements.
Per curiam: The appellant came from a humble background and had no educational advantages. Courts would always try to show indulgence to litigants from such backgrounds, especially if they were acting as litigants in person. However, in the instant case, the appellant had had the benefit of legal representation. Moreover, she had put before the court a case that was false both in its original pleaded form and in the evidence at trial. It gradually attained more plausibility as its false elements were exposed and abandoned. If her final attempt had been based on an amended pleading that put her reformulated case precisely and her evidence had provided credible support to the amended pleading, her case based on multiple occupation, even though it was an afterthought, might have succeeded. However, a case on multiple occupation had neither been pleaded not proved.
Sir Fenton Ramsahoye (instructed by Bankside Law Ltd) appeared for the appellant; The respondents did not appear and were not represented.
Eileen O’Grady, barrister
