Housing

Housing

Housing - housing in multiple occupation - eligibility for grant - whole house must be occupied by persons unconnected with ownerBrent London Borough Council v Patel and Another: ChD (Patten J): 15 November 2000In September 1994 the claimant local authority awarded a Housing in Multiple Occupation (HMO) grant to the defendants certified in the sum of 4,962.49 in respect of works which the local authority required the defendants to carry out at their premises in Sudbury Hill pursuant to a s.352 notice served on the defendants in December 1993.

This grant was subject to the usual conditions set out at s.122 of the Housing and Local Government Act 1989.

In July 1999 the local authority served a demand for the repayment of the HMO grant, with interest, on the defendants, whom it contended had breached the conditions as to the occupation of the property imposed by s.122(2) of the Act of 1989.

The defendants denied that the first defendant had occupied the premises during the relevant period but admitted that the second defendant, who had previously been living in a council flat with her father, had moved back into the premises during 1998 in order to resolve problems that she was having with her tenants.

The master dismissed the local authority's claim to repayment of the grant on the basis that s.122(2) of the Act, as with s.106(7), only required that part of the house be in or available for residential occupation.

The claimant appealed.Anthony Cheshire (instructed by Kingsford Stacey Blackwell) for the local authority; the defendants in person.Held, allowing the appeal, that whilst the defendants' application for an HMO grant required them, pursuant to s.106(7) of the 1989 Act, to certify their future intention to 'let part of the house as a residence to someone who is not a member of my family and on a tenancy which is not a long tenancy', the HMO grant to them was in fact made subject to the conditions of s.122 of that Act, in particular that the house had to be occupied and/or available for residential occupation by persons who were not connected with the owner of the house; that on the true construction of s.122(2) 'house' meant the house in respect of which the works were to be carried out; that it was not possible, either by incorporation or implication, to construe the subsection as referring to only part of the house; that the court therefore had no option but to allow the appeal and enter judgment for the local authority in the sum claimed; but that if the defendants had applied for a renovation grant instead of an HMO grant, the second defendant's occupation of the premises would not have affected her eligibility for the grant; and that as the second defendant had left the security of her local authority accommodation on the mistaken belief that the terms of her certificate of intended letting alone governed the conditions of occupation to which the HMO grant was subject, the local authority should seriously consider whether further proceedings to enforce this judgment were appropriate.