The Landlord and Tenant Act 1987 gives tenants the right to know who their landlords are and where to serve notices or proceedings on them. It provides that demands for payment must contain the name and address of the landlord and, if that address is not in England and Wales, an address in England and Wales at which tenants can contact their landlord. Failure to comply with these requirement means that rent and service charges are not lawfully due: section 47 Landlord and Tenant Act 1987.
Tedla v Cameret Court Residents Association Ltd [2015] UKUT 221 (LC); [2015] PLSCS 165 concerned invoices for service charges, which were headed: “Landlord and Tenant Act 1987, sections 47 and 48: Cameret Court Limited c/o Quastel Midgen, 74 Wigmore Street”. The invoices stated that the address for service of notices was: “c/o Quastel Midgen” and included the following words: “Acting as agent for: Cameret Court Residents Association Limited, Cameret Court, Lorne Gardens, London W11”.
Did the invoices comply with the requirements laid down in section 47? The Upper Tribunal decided that they did not and that the service charges demanded from the tenants had not yet become due to the landlord because the invoices did not identify the landlord and provide its name and address.
Section 60(1) stipulates that, for parts of the 1987 Act, including section 47, “landlord” means the immediate landlord. However, the invoices contained the names and addresses of Cameret Court Limited, the head landlord, and of Cameret Court Residents Association Limited, which had stepped into the head landlord’s shoes when it took a lease of the reversion subject to the occupational underleases granted by the head landlord. It was not clear from the invoices which of these companies was being identified as the landlord. Indeed recipients might have been led to believe by the information in the invoices that the landlord was Cameret Court Limited.
The statutory requirement is not simply that the name and address of the landlord must appear on any written demand. Tenants must be informed of the name and address of the landlord – and a demand that provided the name and address of two or more different companies without identifying which of them was the landlord did not provide the requisite information. Tenants should not be left to guess which of two or more parties is the landlord; they must be informed of its identity. However, compliance with section 47 – by serving a notice stating the landlord’s name and address – would enable the landlord to require the tenant to pay up.
During the discussion, the tribunal was referred to Pendra Loweth Management Limited v North [2015] UKUT 91 (LC); [2015] PLSCS 105. In that case, the tribunal held that section 47 does not apply to demands for sums due to parties to leases who are not landlords within the meaning of section 60 of the 1987 Act. In Pendra Loweth the service charges were demanded by a management company, which was responsible for the delivery of services, and the demands were upheld despite the omission of the management company’s name and address.
Cameret Court Residents Association Limited was originally a party to the underleases granted to the occupational tenants in its capacity as the management company, but became the tenants’ immediate landlord when it accepted a lease of the reversion. Therefore, Pendra Loweth was not applicable.
Allyson Colby is a property law consultant
