[2024] UKUT 69 (LC)

19 Somerset Road is a five-bedroomed terraced house which was purchased by TSMB Ltd in August 2010. Mr Shah is the sole shareholder and director of the company and in 2016 he was granted a licence by the local housing authority under its selective licensing scheme under Part 3 of the 2004 Act. The scheme required any property in the Borough of Waltham Forest which was not an HMO but was let for residential purposes to be licensed. The selective licensing scheme was renewed with effect from 1 May 2020.

At some point in the middle of 2020 Mr Shah instructed a letting agent, Empire Lettings London, to find new tenants for the property. The consequences of lockdowns associated with the corona virus pandemic had begun to have an effect on the letting market by that time.

On 23 July 2020 the six respondents, acting through Mr Mortimer, sent an email to Empire Lettings providing contact details for each of them. It is apparent from that email that a letting to the group had already been agreed in principle and a bank statement shows that a holding deposit of £600 was received by the agents on the same day.

The respondents moved into the property on 5 August 2020. The sequence of events is unclear and the FTT made no specific findings of fact about it, but the tenants’ case was that they had attended at the property on 4 August and had collected keys and contracts to sign. They showed the FTT an assured shorthold tenancy agreement prepared by Empire Lettings which was amended in manuscript against one correction with the date 4 August, which tends to support that chronology, although the typed date against which they each signed was 5 August. A signature appears on the same document beneath the name of each of the six respondents although I was told by Mr Hart, who also represented the appellants before the FTT, that it had been acknowledged at the hearing that one of the respondents had signed twice (both times in the presence of the letting agent) once in her own name and once in the name of another tenant who could not attend that day. No mention was made of that detail in the respondent’s witness statements, each of which was supported by a statement of truth, nor did the FTT refer to it.

The copy of the assured shorthold tenancy agreement which the respondents showed the FTT was not signed by Mr Shah. Although they said nothing of this in their witness statements, they explained to the FTT that the first document they signed had contained a number of mistakes, including the amount of the rent (which was overstated by £200) and that for that reason they had signed a second agreement on a later occasion. They said they were not given a copy of the second tenancy agreement by the agents and did not have one. Nevertheless, the FTT recorded that their evidence was that the second agreement had been signed “on behalf of the landlord”.

The appellants’ case to the FTT was that Mr Shah had asked the letting agents to arrange for the property to be let to a family and that it had been his understanding that that was what had happened. Mr Shah claimed never to have seen or to have signed the assured shorthold tenancy bearing his name as landlord which had been signed by the respondents. Instead, he relied on an entirely different document consisting of only two pages. The first page was from an assured shorthold tenancy agreement in the substantially the same form as the version prepared by Empire Lettings and given to the tenants; the main differences were that it identified TSMB Ltd as the landlord, and named only three tenants, Miss Aquino, Miss McLaughlin and Mr Mortimer, making no reference to the other three respondents. The second page relied on by Mr Shah was a signature page signed by the three respondents named as tenants on the first page of the document. That page had been witnessed by Mr Zaman, an employee of the letting agency, and had been signed “by/on behalf of the Landlord” by an unwitnessed signature which Mr Shah was unable to identify, other than that it was not his own. Mr Shah’s case was that he had been provided only with the two-page document by the letting agent. He said that communication with the agent ceased after it was sent to him and that the company was subsequently wound up.

The first three instalments of rent were paid by the respondents to the letting agency. On 3 November 2020 another firm, Provident Management, contacted Miss McLaughlin and explained to her that they had been appointed as managing agents for the property. The rent for all six respondents was then paid to Provident by a single payment from the account of one of them.

In January 2021 concerns about the number of people living at the property and about excessive noise were said to have been raised with the local authority by neighbours. On 25 January, Provident Management sent an email to Miss McLaughlin seeking her comments. On 8 February replying to an email from Miss McLaughlin which is not in evidence, the new agents said they were surprised to learn that six people were living at the property. Other missing communications at around the same time seem to have included a suggestion that a new lease might be entered into (on 9 February the managing agents emailed “with regards to a new lease…”). On 8 March a notice was given under section 21, Housing Act 1988, and in accordance with the terms of the tenancy agreement, that possession of the property would be required on 18 September 2021. On 18 March the agents offered a one-off payment of £1500 if the tenants would vacate the property by 31 March, but this suggestion was not accepted.

The tenants vacated the property on 5 September 2021. By that time they had already commenced their application to the FTT for a rent repayment order. In their application form dated 8 August they stated that Mr Shah was the landlord named on their tenancy agreement. When the appellants submitted their statement of case to the FTT they disputed that Mr Shah had been named on the tenancy agreement and relied instead on the two-paged document which named TSMB Ltd as the landlord.