Rating – Non-domestic rates – Completion notice – Validity – Local Government Finance Act 1988 – Local authority delivering completion notice to bring redeveloped building into rating list with effect from specified date – Notice addressed to “Owner” of building rather than giving building owner’s actual name – Notice handed to building receptionist and then scanned and forwarded electronically to building owner – Schedule 4A to 1988 Act – Whether notice invalidated by failure to give name of building owner – Whether notice validly served – Appeal allowed
The appellant owned a building on Kingsway, London WC2B, which it had redeveloped to provide 130,000 square feet of office space behind the original building façade. In March 2012, the respondent local authority issued a completion notice, under Schedule 4A to the Local Government Finance Act 1988, to bring the building into the 2010 rating list with effect from June 2012.
The notice was addressed simply to the “Owner” of the building and was delivered there by hand; it was given to a receptionist employed by the company which managed the building on the appellant’s behalf. Neither that company nor its receptionist had any authority to accept the service of legal documents on behalf of the appellant. The receptionist scanned the completion notice and transmitted it electronically to the appellant.
The appellant appealed against the completion notice and also submitted a proposal that the building’s entry in the rating list, with a rateable value of £2.75m, be deleted on the grounds that the completion notice had been invalid. The proposal was not accepted but the appellant’s appeal against that decision was allowed by the Valuation Tribunal for England (VTE) along with the completion notice appeal. The VTE held that the omission of the building owner’s name did not invalidate the notice itself but did mean that it had not been validly served, since the provisions for service of a completion notice in para 8 of Schedule 4A required it to be addressed to the owner in all cases save those to which para 8(c) applied, namely where the name or address of the owner could not be ascertained after reasonable enquiry. The Upper Tribunal reversed the VTE’s decision that the completion notice had not been validly served: [2015] UKUT 301 (LC); [2016] EGLR 2.
The appellants appealed contending that the Upper Tribunal had been wrong: (i) to decide that valid service had taken place when none of the modes of services contained in para 8 or any other enactment had been used by the respondent; (ii) to extend the notion of indirect giving of notice derived from the obiter dictum of Sir Robert Megarry V-C in Townsend Carriers v Pfizer [1977] 1 EGLR 37 to the service of a completion notice by a billing authority; and (iii) in any event, to determine that eventual receipt of a scanned copy via an unauthorised agent amounted to effective service.
Held: The appeal was allowed.
The relevant statutory requirements of section 46A and para 1 of Schedule 4A of the 1988 Act for present purposes were: (a) that “the billing authority” (b) “shall serve” the required completion notice (c) “on the owner of the building”. For the billing authority merely to leave the notice with a third party, not authorised to accept service of the notice on the owner’s behalf, or effect service on the authority’s behalf, in the hope, or with the intention, that the notice would somehow be brought to the attention of the owner, and where a copy of the notice or its contents were in fact subsequently communicated to the owner by the third party, did not, on any natural or normal usage of the words “serve” and “on”, constitute “service” on “the owner” “by the authority”. The concept of “service on the owner by the authority” in para 1 of Schedule 4A of the 1988 Act could not be construed as including effectively all methods of communication or transmission, which ultimately result in the information in the notice (or the notice itself) being brought to the attention of, or delivered to, the owner, in circumstances where the information in the document, or the document itself, had been communicated to the owner by a third party who was not authorised either to accept, or effect, service. The issue was one which for its determination depended on the construction of the relevant statutory provisions in the context of the scheme of the 1988 Act relating to the rating of new buildings. There was nothing in those provisions, construed in that context, which would justify construing “service” so broadly as to characterise the events of the present case as constituting service by the authority on the building owner: Saffron Walden Second Benefit Building Society v Rayner (1880) 14 (Ch) 406, Townsend Carriers v Pfizer [1977] 1 EGLR 37, Fagan v Knowsley Metropolitan Borough Council (1985) 50 P & CR 363, Galinski v McHugh [1989] 1 EGLR 109, Glen International Ltd v Triplerose Ltd [2007] 2 EGLR 81 and Lantic Sugar Ltd v Baffin Investment Ltd [2009] EWHC 3325 considered.
Daniel Kolinsky QC (instructed by the In-house Solicitor) appeared for the appellant; Sebastian Kokelaar (instructed by Tri-Borough Shared Legal Services) appeared for the respondents.
Eileen O’Grady, barrister
Click here to read transcript: UKI (Kingsway) Ltd v Westminster City Council
