Miss Dyson gave up her flat in Huntingdon and went to live in Cornwall. But the only accommodation which she had arranged for herself was a three month winter let of a cottage in Helston. She knew that the tenancy was not protected and that she would have to leave. When she was finally evicted, she applied to the local council for accommodation on the ground that she was now homeless. The council said that she was intentionally homeless because she had given up the Huntingdon flat knowing that after the expiry of the winter let she would have nowhere to live. She argued that was concerned only with the accommodation one had been occupying at the time when one became homeless. This was the cottage in Cornwall and it was not reasonable to expect her to continue to occupy that accommodation because the court had ordered her to leave it.
Held: Such a construction would enable people to jump the housing queues by making themselves intentionally homeless at one remove. They would only have to move into temporary accommodation and wait until evicted. The Court therefore held that one was not confined to asking whether it would have been reasonable to continue to occupy the cottage in Cornwall. If it would have been reasonable to continue to occupy the flat in Huntingdon and there was a causal link between deliberately leaving that flat and her subsequent homelessness in Cornwall, then she was intentionally homeless.
Judges:
Brightman LJ
Citations:
[1980] 1 WLR 1205, [1980] 3 All ER 313
Jurisdiction:
England and Wales
Cited by:
Cited – Regina (on the application of) Awua v Brent London Borough Council HL 6-Jul-1995
Tower Hamlets, having determined the applicant to be homeless, in priority need and not intentionally homeless. After she occupied temporary accomodation she was offered an alternative being told it was the council’s policy only to make one such . .
Cited – Haile v London Borough of Waltham Forest SC 20-May-2015
‘The question in this case is whether the appellant falls within the scope of section 193 of the Housing Act 1996 as amended, which applies, by virtue of subsection (1), where the local housing authority are satisfied that ‘an applicant is homeless, . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Housing
Updated: 07 October 2022; Ref: scu.443223