Town and country planning – Notices – Service – Appellant council serving notices on respondent under section 215 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 in respect of derelict and unoccupied property – Notice served at address given for respondent on proprietorship register and further notice affixed to property – Notice addressed to “The Owner” – Whether use of address on register validly effecting service at “last known address” of respondent – Whether notice affixed to property invalidated by failure to address it also to “the occupiers” – Appeal allowed
The respondent was the registered proprietor of an unoccupied and derelict former nursing home in Oldham. The appellant council decided to serve a notice on the respondent, under section 215 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, paving the way for them to demolish the property and recover the cost of doing so from the respondent.
The section 215 notice was served at the address given in the proprietorship register of the registered title at HM Land Registry by being placed through the letter box at that address. The notice did not give the respondent’s name but was simply addressed to “The Owner” of the nursing home property.
The appellants also affixed a second copy of the notice, similarly addressed, to part of the land at the nursing home property, and served a further copy at an address which the appellants’ credit control department held for correspondence with the respondent.
At the date of service, the respondent no longer lived at the address given in the proprietorship register but had moved to an address in Brentford of which the appellants’ planning department had no knowledge. He had never lived at the address held by the credit control department. Although another department had an email address for communicating with, the planning department was unaware of that email address.
The respondent contended that the notices were invalid since they had not been properly served on him. Ruling in favour of the respondent, the county court judge found that the notices had not been properly served at the respondent’s “last known address” for the purposes of section 233 of the 1990 Act or his “last known place of abode” within section 329(1). He held that the appellants were to be imputed with constructive knowledge of the respondent’s current address since they could have discovered it by making reasonable enquiries; he considered that the planning department should have contacted all other departments with a request for the respondent’s contact details, which would have produced an email address at which they could have contacted the respondent to ask him for his postal address.
The judge also held that the notice affixed to the nursing home property was not properly served under section 329(1) of the 1990 Act because a notice served in that way had to be addressed to the owner and any occupiers of the property, whereas the appellants’ notice was addressed only to “The Owner”. The appellants appealed.
Held: The appeal was allowed.
(1) Service of the section 215 notice had been validly effected at the address given for the respondent in the proprietorship register of the registered title. That was a proper address for service on which the appellants were entitled to rely. As a general rule, unless there was a statutory requirement to the contrary, then in a case where a person wishes to serve notice relating to a particular property on the owner of that property, and where title to that property was registered at HM Land Registry, then the person’s obligation to make reasonable inquiries went no further than to search the proprietorship register to ascertain the address of the registered proprietor. It was the responsibility of the registered proprietor to keep the address up to date.
If the person serving the notice had actually been given a more recent address than that shown in the proprietorship register, as the address or place of abode of the intended recipient, then the notice should be served at that address also. However, where a local council proposed to serve a notice under section 215, the relevant function belonged to the local planning authority rather than the council as a whole. Therefore, knowledge possessed by a department other than the planning department was not relevant for the purposes of proper service. It followed that the appellants had properly served the notice at the address given on the registered title: Newham London Borough Council v Ahmed [2016] EWHC 679 (Admin) and Newham London Borough Council v Miah [2016] EWHC 1043 (Admin); [2016] PTSR 1082; [2016] EGLR 47 applied.
(2) That conclusion was reinforced by a consideration of the Land Registration Rules 1925, which were the rules in force at the time of service. The 1925 Rules provided that a person’s address for service would be the address given in the register unless he directed otherwise. That rule was very generally expressed and was not, on its face, confined to service of notices and documents under the Land Registration Act 2002. Further, the rules currently in force, namely the Land Registration Rules 2003, stated in terms that the address stated in the proprietorship register was an “address for service”. While the requirement for a registered proprietor to give an address for service had the primary purpose, under both sets of rules, of facilitating the service of notices and other documents under the Land Registration Act itself, the fact that the address thus given appeared in a public part of the register indicated that its use was not necessarily confined to internal administrative purposes.
(3) The section 215 notice was also properly served at the nursing home property. While the appellants had failed to comply with the statutorily prescribed form of words, and Acts of Parliament ought to be complied with, the fact of non-compliance was not the end of the inquiry. It was also necessary to ask whether parliament could fairly be taken to have intended total invalidity in the event of a non-compliance on the scale of that in the appellants’ notice.
It was a fundamental principle of the interpretation of statutes that parliament did not intend an absurd or futile result. If there were no occupiers of the land in question, and that fact was well known, then it would be futile to require the server of a notice to address a notice to “the occupiers”, knowing full well that there were none. In such circumstances, parliament could not have intended that the omission to include “the occupiers” as addressees of the notice invalidated service on the owner, to whom it was addressed.
Heather Sargent (instructed by the legal department of Oldham Metropolitan Borough Council) appeared for the appellants; Huw Shepheard (instructed by direct access) appeared for the respondent.
Sally Dobson, barrister
Click here to read a transcript of Oldham Metropolitan Borough Council v Tanna.
