[2023] UKUT 118 (LC)

The appellant was granted permission to appeal on six grounds, not all of which were pursued at the hearing. The most important of those grounds concerned the requirement in section 16(4)(a), 2016 Act, that in deciding whether to make a banning order against a person, and what order to make, the FTT must consider the seriousness of the offence of which the person has been convicted. The appellant submitted that the FTT had not complied with this requirement but instead had referred simply to the fine imposed by the magistrates (which it assessed as being at the high end of the available range of sanctions) and took that as a measure of the seriousness of the offence. What it should have done, according to the appellant, was to disregard the fine and make an assessment of its own of the seriousness of the offence based on the evidence presented to it.

The other issue of general significance raised by the appeal is one of statutory interpretation. The appellant’s case is that the ban on “letting housing” contemplated by section 14(1), 2016 Act is no more than a prohibition on the act of letting itself and is not a prohibition on being a landlord, and that it therefore extends only to the creation of new tenancies and not to the continuation of existing relationships.

The appellant’s other grounds of appeal suggest a miscellaneous catalogue of errors by the FTT. These raise no issues of wider importance so I will describe them later in this decision.