When the Leasehold Valuation Tribunal (LVT) had to decide on a complaint over the charges for insurance levied on tenants by a landlord, decide it did…but it also proceeded to reach a conclusion about other charges that had not been part of the original dispute.
The dispute had started out in the County Court and been transferred to the LVT for determination of ‘the sum charged for insurance’.
Having made its decisions, one or other of the parties was bound to be unhappy, so an appeal to the Upper Tribunal (UT) on whether or not the LVT had been right to consider other charges was almost inevitable.
The landlord argued that provided the LVT did not extend its rulings beyond matters discussed by the County Court, it had authority to rule. However, the UT considered that the LVT had the right to rule only on the matter referred to it and, in the event that there were other issues to be considered, a request should have been made to the Court to permit those other issues to be dealt with also.
Where there are a number of matters in dispute, having them all settled at a single hearing will normally save time and costs. Therefore, if you are in disagreement over a number of issues relating to service charges and cannot resolve them through negotiation, it will normally make sense to try to ensure that they are all dealt with at the same hearing.
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Partner Note
John Lennon v Ground Rents (Regisport) Ltd. [2011] UKUT 330 (LC).