[2025] UKUT 56 (LC)

The second category of agreements contains those to which the screenshot showing the makeup of the original service charge was attached. The disputed charge is referred to in the screen shot as PSCTP. As far as I am aware, and the contrary was not suggested, PSCTP is not an acronym with a recognised meaning. Nor is it an acronym which someone would be able to work out for themselves given only the very limited knowledge of the background which was shared between the parties. Unlike the reference to “management fee” in the printed schedule, the category of expenditure under which NHG seeks to recover the cost of services provided by the head landlord is ambiguous.

Although the entry is ambiguous, someone trying to interpret it would not be totally dependent on their own imagination. The body of the agreement refers to the service charge and the landlord’s agreement to provide the services listed in the appendix attached to the agreement in return for the charge. The screen shot page is headed “Property Charge Details” and the list itself is headed “Service”. In those circumstances I do not think there would be doubt in the mind of a reasonable person that the acronym PSC which precedes each entry in the list stands for “Property Service Charge” and that the charge referred to as PSCTP was a charge for a service of some sort which PCHA had agreed to supply.

There are two flats for which the screenshot includes an additional piece of information. In each screenshot the standard list of services is followed by a box marked “description”. Ms Conlan explained that if one clicks on a particular service in the list, an explanation of what it is for is displayed in the description box. The screenshots attached to the agreements for flats 16 and 17, Endeavour House, were taken when the entry for PSCTP was highlighted and the description box reads “3^rd party service charges/Charge”. Someone who studied the screenshot for long enough might make the connection that PSCTP might be a reference to a third-party service charge but I think it more likely that they would give up the effort before they deciphered that piece of information.

But anyone signing the agreement as tenant would also appreciate that by doing so they were agreeing to pay £2.57 a week for whatever service PSCTP was intended to refer to. As with the blank list of services in the Cardiff case, the ambiguity in the agreement could be cured by evidence of the services which were already being supplied or which were intended to be supplied and which had been costed and apportioned to make up the sum inserted into the agreement as part of the service charge.

The second category therefore seems to me to be analogous to the Cardiff case. The FTT did not think so, giving as its reason that there had been no consistent course of dealing on the basis of which the parties could be taken to have agreed what the charge was for. On behalf of the respondents, Mr Bowker supported that approach, saying that it was not until the charge under this heading shot up in 2016 that anyone was alerted to it. But that seems to me to miss the main point on which the Cardiff decision depended. The Tribunal’s reasoning in that case was in three stages. The first was that the tenant had agreed in 2006 to pay for services which had been costed and which could then have been ascertained if anyone had bothered to ask. The second was that it could be established by evidence whether those original services had changed and, on the evidence, they had not. Finally, when the tenancy was assigned, the incoming tenant agreed to be bound by the terms of the original agreement. The Tribunal’s decision was not based on the proposition that the liability to pay was the result of a course of dealing between the parties. The original tenant’s liability did not depend on her having paid for services over the period of her tenure; it depended only on what she had agreed in 2006. The significance of the parties’ course of dealings was evidential; what they had continued to do consistently since the start of the tenancy provided evidence of what they had intended when the tenancy had been granted.

I am therefore satisfied that any item which was taken into account in calculating the PSCTP charge in 2009 or 2010 when each tenancy agreement was granted, is a service for which the tenants with category 2 agreements are liable to pay. What those items were is a matter of evidence but, subject to the provision of the necessary evidence, the principle that each tenant is liable to contribute to charges for the same services notwithstanding the obscurity of the expression used to identify them. The corollary of that proposition is that any service which was not costed in 2009 or 2010 and included in the calculation of the original PSCTP figure cannot be treated as payable under the PSCTP label.