Rent Officers Must Not Consider Too Wide an Area

When assessing rent on a property, local authority rent officers should not use an area of reference that is too broad. This ruling, by the House of Lords, will help guide future assessments by local rent officers.

The case concerned a tenant living in private rented accommodation in Sheffield. The property was the subject of two rent assessments, conducted in 2004 and 2005. These assessments compared rents for a mix of property types in ‘the locality’ – defined for the purposes of the assessments as ‘a broad geographical area made up of a number of neighbourhoods’. The rent officers ended up basing their assessments on an area that included the whole of the city of Sheffield and some of its surroundings.

The assessments were challenged, first in the High Court and, more recently, in the House of Lords, following an appeal that reversed the original High Court judgment.

Argument at the various court hearings centred on the question of how terms such as ‘locality’ and ‘neighbourhood’ should be defined for the purposes of the relevant legislation and guidelines. It was decided at the first hearing that the meaning of locality could not be thought to include an area as large as Sheffield. This view was reversed on appeal and was part of the reason for the final appeal to the House of Lords.

The House of Lords concluded that, when comparing rent charged in a locality, rent officers should not normally include an area as large as a city, although there might be situations where such an extensive area might be justified. Once the rent officer had assembled information from enough neighbourhoods to satisfy, in his judgment, the requirements of the legislation, he was required to stop looking for, or including, any further neighbourhoods.

Regina (Heffernan) v Rent Service, House of Lords [2008] WLR (D) 279. See http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/reports/article4567918.ece.

See also http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/2006/2478.html,
http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2007/544.html and
http://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKHL/2008/58.html.

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