Headmaster occupying house within school grounds as tenant — Tenant leaving employment — Whether term should be implied into contract of employment requiring tenant to occupy house for better performance of duties — Court of Appeal held that no such term to be implied — Tenant entitled to buy house — House of Lords upholding that decision
H was the headmaster of Staplefield Place School near Haywards Heath, Sussex, from July 1958 until December 1989, when he retired. During that time he occupied various houses within the school grounds. From 1963 he lived at “Cedars”, which was built within the school grounds, but not within the curtillage of the school buildings. It was owned by the local authority. When H retired he claimed the right to buy the freehold of Cedars by virtue of Part V of the Housing Act 1985.
It appeared that he was a secure tenant entitled to that right unless “his contract of employment requires him to occupy the dwelling-house for the better performance of his duties”. The local authority argued that such a term should be implied into his contract. The Court of Appeal held that on the facts he did not have to occupy that particular house: see [1992] EGCS 76. The local authority appealed.
Held The appeal was dismissed.
1. The only way in which the term which the local authority needed to imply here could be implied would be to show that, unless he lived at Cedars, H could not perform his duties as headmaster.
2. For a term to be implied into a contract there had to be a compelling reason for deeming that term to form part of the contract and that compelling reason was missing in this case unless it was essential that H should live in the house in order to do his job. However, the facts found contradicted that proposition. It was not enough for the court to conclude that such a term would have made the contract more reasonable; terms would be implied not in order to make a contract which the court considered fair, but only to make effective the contract which the parties had made themselves.
3. It was impossible to contend that “it goes without saying” that H was obliged to live at Cedars when it was not necessary for him to live there to do his job. In the absence of necessity it could not be argued tenably that there was a presumed intention that he must live there. Furthermore, there was no gap in the completeness in the contract and accordingly no room to imply the term for which the local authority contended.
4. The court was satisfied that H was not by implication required to occupy Cedars. But even if he had been, he was not required to occupy that house for the better performance of his duties. It was clear that the employer was providing a facility, but not imposing an obligation. Even if the employer had been imposing an obligation, it could have been attributed simply to the expectation that the headmaster would live in the employer’s house as the designated way of enjoying the free lodging to which he was entitled. The local authority were in reality contending that when an employer provided a house in which the employee could in fact better perform his duties, that meant that the employee was required to live there; a conclusion which did not follow from that premise.
Frederic Reynold QC and Paul Stewart (instructed by the solicitor to Greenwich London Borough Council) appeared for the local authority; Michael Hart QC and Christopher Tidmarsh (instructed by the solicitor to the National Association of Headteachers) appeared for H.
