Cases - Curo Places Limited v Anthony Pimlett

Record details

Name

Curo Places Limited v Anthony Pimlett

Date

[2019]

Citation

UKUT 130 (LC)

Keywords

Service charges – reasonableness – meaning of ‘extra services’

Summary

The respondent tenant held a weekly assured shorthold tenancy (AST) of a 1-bedroom bungalow in a sheltered housing scheme. The appellant landlord was a housing association.

A dispute arose between the parties as to whether the landlord was able to recover through the service charge the costs of providing ground maintenance. The landlord’s case was that at all material times it had provided ground maintenance services although there was no obligation on it to do so. Further, it had no contractual right to charge the cost of ground maintenance through the service charge. Following a consultation in 2016, the landlord sought to recover the costs of ground maintenance through the service charge by relying on clause 2.10.1(iii), which permitted the landlord to ‘provide extra Services if it believes this would be useful’. The tenant contended that, as ground maintenance services were already provided by the landlord, it could not be deemed as an ‘extra service.

The First-tier Tribunal (FTT) agreed with the tenant. It found that ‘extra service’ meant a service from which the respondent had not previously benefited. The FTT stated that a reasonable person would struggle with the notion that a service that had been provided for years without charge was somehow an extra service because the same service had been added to list of services in the agreement for which there was a charge.

The landlord appealed, arguing that the FTT erred in its interpretation of the word ‘extra’ by focusing on what was occurring at the date of the grant of the tenancy rather than the contractual provisions for services under the terms of the tenancy agreement. The tenancy agreement made no provision for the landlord to maintain the grounds and charge for that provision. It was extra to what the tenant was entitled and what the landlord was required to provide.

The Upper Tribunal (Lands Chamber) (UT) in dismissing the appeal found that under clause 2.10.1(iii) of the tenancy agreement, the landlord could only charge for ground maintenance if ground maintenance was an extra service it believed would be useful.

The UT found that ‘extra’ in clause 2.10.1 meant extra to services that were being provided to the landlord before its purported reliance on clause 2.10.1(iii). This was the natural meaning of the words. The inclusion of the words 'if it believes this would be useful' meant that the extra service must be something of use or benefit to make its post-addition position on the estate better than its pre-addition position. The provision of ground maintenance service was exactly the same before the purported exercise of clause 2.10.1(iii) by the landlord. The only way the operation of clause 2.10.1(iii) could be said to be of use to the landlord was that it could now charge for a service it could not previously do before. The UT found that this kind of financial benefit was not what was contemplated by the word ‘useful’.