Property – Joint tenancy – Succession – Appellant council granting joint weekly tenancy to parents – Respondent daughter continuing to live with mother in property after father leaving – Mother dying – County court holding that respondent remaining secure tenant of property after mother’s death – Appellants contending that tenancy not secure and brought to end by notice – Appeal allowed
In 1980, the appellant council let a house to the respondent’s parents on a weekly tenancy. The three of them initially lived there but, in 2001, the marriage failed and the father left. Thereafter, the respondent continued to share the house with her mother until August 2007, when the mother died.
Following the mother’s death, the appellants served a notice to quit on the father and issued possession proceedings against the respondent. They contended that the tenancy, because it had been jointly held by the parents, became vested on the death of the mother in the father alone by virtue of the doctrine of survivorship. However, because he did not live in the house, the tenancy was not a secure tenancy and therefore could be, and had been, terminated by the notice.
The respondent contended that since her mother had been a secure tenant under Part IV of the Housing Act 1985, and that she had been the only person residing with her mother at the date of her death, she was entitled to succeed to the secure tenancy, such that she was a secure tenant entitled to remain in the house.
At first instance, the district judge accepted the appellants’ argument. However, on appeal, the judge ruled that the respondent was a secure tenant of the house. The appellants brought a second appeal.
Held: The appeal was allowed.
Following the mother’s death, the tenancy of the house had vested in the father by virtue of the doctrine of survivorship. He did not live in the property and the tenancy consequently ceased to be secure. It had therefore been effectively determined by the notice and the respondent was neither entitled to succeed to the tenancy nor to remain in the house once the notice had expired.
When construing the succession provisions of the 1985 Act, one had to begin with section 87 as the introductory and governing provision. That referred to a person being qualified to succeed “the tenant” under a secure tenancy and referred to the successor as having to have occupied the property in question at the time of the tenant’s death. That required a consideration of who was the tenant. In the instant case, although the father might have ceased to have any connection with the house, he remained a co-tenant with the mother until her death. In those circumstances, only one of the people comprising “the tenant” had died: Lloyd v Sadler [1978] 1 EGLR 76; (1978) 246 EG 479 distinguished.
Departing from the strict application of the doctrine of joint tenancy when construing the succession provisions of Part IV of the 1985 Act would produce an unreasonable result. Joint tenancies were specifically contemplated in section 88(1)(b) and the legislature considered the possibility of a secure tenancy becoming vested in one of two joint tenants, presumably as a result of the doctrine of survivorship.
It was not appropriate to accord a particular meaning to a statutory provision merely because it produced a just result in a particular case. Weight should be given to that sort of argument only if a particular interpretation would produce a fair and workable result in the great majority of cases in which the provision fell to be applied, but not if the interpretation could produce capricious results.
Furthermore, the fact that section 79(3) of the 1985 Act provided that the secure tenancy regime applied to licences as well as tenancies did not mean that the interpretation favoured by the respondent was to be preferred because it produced a consistent result whether the joint interest granted was a licence or a tenancy.
On one view, the effect of section 79(3) was to require the outcome in respect of a case involving a licence to be identical to one dealing with a tenancy, in which case that argument failed in limine. In the alternative, because many of the legal principles relating to licences (which were simply personal contracts) and tenancies (which were interests in land) were different, it was unsurprising if the incidence of the statutory provision sometimes produced different results when applied to licences from those produced when applied to tenancies.
Catherine Rowlands (instructed by the legal department of Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council) appeared for the appellants; Nicholas Nicol (instructed by Evans Derry Binnion, of Birmingham) appeared for the respondent.
Eileen O’Grady, barrister
