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The Appeal by a home seller against an order for specific performance of a contract for the sale of a property granted in favour of the respondent purchaser was dismissed. The sale had proceeded by the home seller’s agent acting under oral authority. Until the equitable title in the property was transferred to the buyer from the seller, the contract for sale was nothing more than a contract to which normal rules of agency would apply.

There was no principle of law in adverse possession claims that only acts of possession by the paper owner carried out during a limited period after the claimed ouster that would or might serve to defeat the claim that there had been such an ouster. Such a proposition was contrary to principle.

The Appellant landlord appealed a decision that the Respondent tenant had the right as a tenant under a long lease to acquire the freehold of its building, because the building was at the date of service of notice of the claim a house “reasonably so called” within the Leasehold Reform Act 1967. The judge had applied the proposition that circumstances would have to be such that nobody could reasonably call the building a house for a judge to hold that it was not a house. The appeal was allowed as the judge had applied the proposition without taking full account of all the relevant circumstances and had paid insufficient attention to the exceptional circumstance of prescribed and predominant office use which was the decisive feature of the case, not its design and appearance.

Webb v Wandsworth LBC (Court of Appeal, November 12, 2008, extempore judgment and only noted in Arden Chambers Eflash 328)
Ms Webb was the secure tenant of LB Wandsworth. Between 2005 and 2006 her son was involved in a number of serious criminal and anti-social acts in the local area. In response, Wandsworth issued possession proceedings [...]

While Zalewska v Department for Social Development (Northern Ireland) [2008] UKHL 67 is not a housing case as such, I hope that many of our readers will still find this useful and interesting. It is the second time in a fortnight (after RJM) that the House of Lords has had to consider whether UK legislation preventing someone [...]