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Test for ‘house in multiple occupation’ Rogers v Islington London Borough Court of Appeal (Lord Justice Nourse, Lord Justice Swinton Thomas and Lord Justice Mummery) 30 July 1999
FURTHER CLARIFICATION was given by the Court of Appeal to the definition of a "house in multiple occupation" in section 345 of the Housing Act 1985. The Court of Appeal allowed the appeal of a local council against a decision that a house owned by the respondent was not a "house in multiple occupation" within the meaning of section 345 of the Housing Act 1985. The respondent was the owner of a house in London which had 10 bedrooms, a kitchen, two bathrooms and a living room. He lived mostly in France, but kept one of the bedrooms for his occupation when he was in England. He let out the property under individual oral agreements for unspecified periods to up to nine single adults at a time, each of whom had his or her own bedroom and was entitled to share the living room, the kitchen and the bathrooms with the other occupants. On 25 March 1997 the council, claiming that the property was a "house in multiple occupation" ("HMCT) within the meaning of Pt XI of the Housing Act 1985 as amended, served I a notice on the respondent to execute works pursuant to sec tion 352 of the Act. By section 345(1) of the Act an HMO was defined as "a house which is occupied by persons who do not form a single household". The respondent appealed to the county court against the notice. He described the property as having been "set up progressively as a private residential club". Although new occupants came in answer to newspaper advertisements, the current occupants decided whether or not they should join them. The appeal was allowed on the grounds that the property was not an HMO. The recorder considered the factors set out in Barnes v Sheffield City Council (1995) 27 HLR 719, which was a case involving a property let to a group of university students, and other matters to which he referred, and concluded that at the material time the occupants comprised a single household. The council appealed. The respondent in person; Robert Jay QC and Kelvin Rutledge (instructed by solicitor to Islington London Borough Council) for the council. Lord Justice Nourse said that although Barnes v Sheffield City Council had been correctly decided, it had been said that "the Barnes factors" had caused serious problems for local housing authorities, and some further attempt at clarification was desirable. Where a house was occupied by more than one person, the occupants could not be said to form a single household unless there was between them a relationship which provided a particular reason for their living in the same house. Obvious examples of such relationships were family, employment and long-standing friendship. The difficulty came when there was no such relationship. If a good working test were to be deduced from Barnes, it should be as follows. Where a small group of students at the same university joined together to occupy a house or flat for the period of an academic year they would usually form a single household, notwithstanding that they might not all have known each other beforehand and that they might pay rent individually for their occupation. Their reason for living together might be taken to be a sharing in the comradeship, no less than the expenses, of university life. There was from the start a sufficient relationship between them for them to form a single household. The recorder in the present case, through too close an adherence to the factors set out in Barnes, had been led to overlook two crucial distinctions between that case and the instant case. First, in Barnes the occupants were only four or five in number, whereas there were nine or ten in the instant case. Secondly, the students, broadly speaking, had come to the house as a preformed group for a predetermined period, whereas in the present case the occupants came one by one, mostly for in definite and necessarily for dissimilar periods. Accordingly, in the present case, the house was an HMO within the meaning
of s 345(1) of the Housing Act 1985. KATE O'HANLON,
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