A property development firm has been ordered to “repair” a house it rendered without permission by demolishing two external walls, and then rebuilding them.
The case examines the extent of the meaning of the word “repair” in enforcement notices (EN).
It arises from an EN issued against property development company Hargrave House in 2015.
According to a High Court judgment, in 2014 the company bought a terraced house in a conservation area in Islington to renovate and resell it. As part of the renovation, it rendered and repainted the exterior of the building without permission.
Islington Borough Council subsequently issued an EN ordering the company to remove the render and “repair” the damage caused.
However, it transpired that the only way to remove the concrete and comply with the EN was to demolish the rendered walls and rebuild them with secondhand bricks.
The company challenged the EN arguing that they had done everything reasonably possible to comply with the notice. However in April last year, a district judge ruled that they did, indeed, need to demolish and rebuild the front and back walls of the property.
The company challenged the decision in the High Court, arguing that the district judge had erred in his application of the word “repair”.
However, in a ruling this week Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb, the High Court judge who heard the case, ruled against the company, and agreed the walls should be rebuilt. She said the case was “straightforward”.
“The narrow issue for me to consider is whether the EN which required the claimants to repair the property could properly be understood to encompass demolition and rebuilding of the front and rear walls which had been rendered, particularly in light of the location of the property within a conservation area so that in normal circumstances such work would require planning permission,” she wrote.
“The planning controls regime is well-trodden and comprehensive. The point raised in this claim is straightforward. I have no hesitation in concluding that the meaning of the word ‘repair’ in the EN is sufficiently clear for the purposes of a criminal enactment and that the [District judge’s] interpretation of it is one that was reasonably open to him.”
“Equally,” she wrote “it was for the claimants themselves to comply with the notice and its requirements were clear … It is hard to see how the claimants could have succeeded in challenging the notice on the basis that it was too onerous. Again, the question is a simple one, as the breach encompassed the total exterior elevations the remedy for the breach had to encompass the same area.”
Hargrave House Ltd and another v Highbury Corner Magistrates Court, Administrative Court (Cheema-Grubb J) 16 February 2018
Melissa Murphy (instructed by Sonn Macmillan Walker) for the claimant
Richard Drabble QC (instructed by London Borough of Islington) for the defendant
