Cases - Niazi Services Ltd v Van der Loo
Record details
- Name
- Niazi Services Ltd v Van der Loo
- Date
- [2004]
- Citation
- EWCA Civ 53
- Legislation
- Keywords
- Dilapidations case law
- Summary
-
The liability of the landlord will only arise if the defect complained of is within part of the property belonging to the landlord. The landlord in this case was the long leaseholder of a top-floor flat in Chelsea. The tenant was the subtenant, who had held the property under a series of annual tenancies. Following a long-running dispute between them over items of disrepair, the tenant withheld his rent. When sued for arrears, he counterclaimed for damages in respect of the landlord's breach of its repairing obligations under section 11.
The question was whether the landlord could be held liable in respect of the inadequate water pressure in the flat, which, over a period of almost 3 years, had reduced the supply to a mere trickle during certain hours of the day. This had been caused by works to the restaurant premises that were located on the ground floor and in the basement of the building. A larger take-off water pipe had been installed as part of the works to the restaurant, which had resulted in the supply problems to the upper floors whenever water was being drawn off in the restaurant.
The installation for the supply of water to the tenant's flat was not in proper working order and if he had been the direct tenant of the owner of the building, he would have had a claim under the amended section 11. However, he held a subtenancy from a landlord whose own tenancy related only to the flat itself. His landlord clearly did not own or control the water pipes in the remainder of the building.
Therefore, the issue was whether the water pipe formed 'part of any part of a building' in which the landlord had 'an estate or interest'. The court was satisfied that the above limb of the statutory definition required the landlord, not simply to have an estate or interest in any part of the property (which the landlord did - it held a tenancy of the top-floor flat), but to have an estate or interest in that part of the property of which the defective installation formed part (which Niazi did not). This meant that the landlord could not be held legally liable for the poor water supply to the flat.