When a social housing tenant dies, loved ones who lived under the same roof all too often have their grief compounded by the threat of eviction. Their position is far from hopeless, however, and in one case the High Court came to the aid of a devoted daughter who was her ailing mother’s live-in carer for the last 13 years of her life.
For 30 years prior to her death, the mother was the tenant of a three- or four-bedroom house. Her housing association landlord wished to reallocate the house to another tenant and refused her grieving daughter’s requests to either purchase the property or succeed to her mother’s tenancy. The landlord ultimately launched possession proceedings against the daughter with a view to her eviction.
The landlord said that permitting the daughter to remain living in the house would not be the best use of its housing stock. Its claim was, however, rejected by a judge who criticised its handling of the matter. One of its employees admitted that it had failed to follow its own policy, that the daughter’s rights had not been communicated to her and that her applications to succeed to the tenancy had in some respects been approached with a closed mind.
In dismissing the landlord’s challenge to the judge’s decision, the Court noted that the terms of the mother’s tenancy provided that family members who lived with her in her property as their only or main home for a year or more prior to her death were entitled either to obtain a new tenancy of the property, or to a tenancy of a different property considered suitable by the landlord.
Although the daughter was not a party to the tenancy, she was entitled to rely on that provision and had complied with all the contractual conditions required for her to do so. The judge was unquestionably right to find that, had the landlord applied its own policy correctly, it was highly likely that it would have recognised the daughter’s succession rights.