Cases - Clear Channel UK Ltd v Manchester City Council
Record details
- Name
- Clear Channel UK Ltd v Manchester City Council
- Date
- [2004]; [2005]
- Citation
- EWHC 2873 (Ch); EWCA Civ 1304
- Legislation
- Keywords
- Landlord and Tenant - business premises – agreement for erection and maintenance of advertising displays – exclusive possession - whether licence or tenancy
- Summary
-
The dispute was about whether an agreement had the status of a lease or a licence. C operated advertising hoardings which were built on concrete bases. A draft agreement of March 2001 specified 13 sites, each identified by an address. The agreement provided for payment of 'rent' and said it expired at the end of October 2002. The agreement was never executed but C paid rent on the basis of the draft.
In December 2002, D, the landowner, told C that they were terminating the existing arrangements. C objected, saying that it had business tenancies of the sites, protected by the 1954 Act. C argued that it enjoyed exclusive possession of all the sites and that it therefore had a tenancy of each site as occupied by the concrete base. D argued that C had licences, all of which had been terminated.
C was partly successful. The court said that the starting point was to ask whether the intention had been to grant exclusive possession for a term at a rent. There had been no intention to grant a tenancy of the areas occupied by the concrete bases. The 13 sites set out in the 2001 draft did not just comprise the areas covered by the concrete bases of the sites, but included larger, undefined areas of land owned by D, somewhere upon which the concrete bases had been placed. C had not been granted exclusive possession of those sites.
The decision in the previous paragraph was upheld by the Court of Appeal in November 2005 - [2005] EWCA Civ 1304.
However, the court held that C did hold an annual tenancy of one site. The draft agreement for that site showed a clear intention to grant a lease over the land occupied by the hoarding, rather than over some wider and ill-defined area of land. C's erection and maintenance of the hoarding, coupled with payment of rent, gave rise to a tenancy. It was not a tenancy at will and D received a substantial rental for it that was intended to be a periodic annual payment rather than for a one-off fixed term. There was nothing to indicate that D had intended to exclude any tenancy from the 1954 Act. C's use of the site was sufficient to amount to occupation for the purposes of section 23 of the 1954 Act.