Nicholas Dobson analyses a Court of Appeal ruling on proportionality in housing possession proceedings
On 6 June 1842, the Court of Exchequer in Winterbottom v Wright (1842) 10 M & W 109 found no extra-contractual liability for personal injury, Rolfe, B asserting that: “Hard cases...are apt to introduce bad law.”
While negligence law has come on since (after some business about a ginger beer snail cocktail), the essential dictum of Rolfe, B survives. And that was the Court of Appeal’s effective conclusion on 8 November 2012 in Thurrock Borough Council v West [2012] EWCA Civ 1435 which upheld the council’s right to possession of its terraced property.
Background
In 2007, Aaron West (the respondent) began occupying the property with his apparent grandparents who had been council tenants since 1967. West was subsequently joined by his son, on his birth, and by his partner. On the grandfather’s death in 2008 the tenancy automatically vested in the grandmother under succession provisions in Pt IV of the Housing Act 1985 (HA 1985). When
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