Court of Appeal Hands Down Judgment in Important Improvement Notice Appeal
Richard Miller acted, unled, for the Appellant in the Court of Appeal case of Manaquel Company Ltd v London Borough of Lambeth [2026] EWCA Civ 972.
In Manaquel v Lambeth, the Court of Appeal determined the proper legal framework governing appeals against improvement notices served under Part 1, Chapter 1 of the Housing Act 2004 (“the 2004 Act”), and the implications for Manaquel’s application for rule 13 costs against Lambeth concerning what the First-Tier Tribunal had called its “incompetent” conduct of the proceedings. The decision will have far-reaching consequences not just for improvement notice appeals, but for all appeals under the 2004 Act.
Nugee LJ began by identifying the central question as one of statutory construction. Schedule 1, paragraph 15 to the Housing Act 2004 provides that an appeal against an improvement notice is “(a) to be by way of a re-hearing, but (b) may be determined having regard to matters of which the authority were unaware”.
The same wording had previously been interpreted by the Court of Appeal in Waltham Forest LBC v Hussain [2024] K.B. 154 concerning licensing appeals under Chapter 1, Parts 2 and 3 of the 2004 Act as to whether a proposed licence holder was a “fit and proper person”. In Hussain, the Court of Appeal held that a rehearing does not involve deciding the matter afresh according to the circumstances existing at the date of the appeal. Instead, the First-Tier Tribunal’s function is to determine whether the local authority’s original decision was wrong when it was made, and in doing so to afford deference to the local authority’s assessment process. While there was potentially scope for considering evidence postdating the decision, it was limited to matters which had a bearing on whether a person was fit and proper at the date the decision was made, e.g. a conviction for an offence of dishonesty committed before the decision was made.
It was argued on behalf of Manaquel that Hussain should not govern appeals against improvement notices because the statutory context differed; licensing decisions concern whether a person is fit and proper to hold a licence, which is inherently subjective, whereas improvement notices concern the presence of hazards in a building and the estimated chance, calculated by a detailed statutory formula, of harm occurring in the twelve months following a local authority’s inspection, which is objective and more susceptible to challenge based on what happened in the future.
Nugee LJ reviewed the 2004 Act and noted that the phrase in Schedule 1, paragraph 15 invariably appeared in its appeal provisions concerning improvement notices, prohibition orders, licensing decisions, management orders, and other powers. While the presumption that the same words in an Act of Parliament have the same meaning is rebuttable, he considered that the purpose and scheme of Chapter 1 of the 2004 Act was “to confer a wide range of new statutory powers on local housing authorities in connection with housing with a view (expressed at the highest level of generality) to improving the standard of residential accommodation in their area” and that the context was to strengthen, not weaken, the presumption. Accordingly, appeals against improvement notices are to be assessed at the date of service and not the date of appeal.
Nugee LJ then considered Manaquel’s second ground of appeal, that, the First-Tier Tribunal having decided that Lambeth had acted incompetently by, inter alia, failing to adduce updated evidence of the condition of Dorchester Court at the date of the hearing, the Upper Tribunal should not have rejected Manaquel’s appeal against the refusal to award rule 13 costs on the basis of a different interpretation of the law. Noting that this was “a short but not entirely easy point”, he concluded that, because the application for rule 13 costs concerned the issue of Lambeth’s behaviour while the improvement notice appeal concerned the merits of the improvement notice, no res judicata applied between the substantive decision and the costs decision. It was open for the Upper Tribunal to reach a different interpretation of the substantive law and apply that in the context of rule 13 costs. The appeal was therefore dismissed.
A full copy of the judgment can be found here.
Download DocumentBack to news listing
