The agreement granted a tenancy to ‘hold for the term of one year . . at the inclusive weekly rent of andpound;3 payable weekly in advance on Monday in each week during the whole of the tenancy’. The question was whether a week’s notice was adequate to terminate the tenancy after the term expired. The tenant relied on the rebuttable presumption that when there has been a yearly tenancy and the tenant holds on and rent is accepted, it is a yearly tenancy.
Held: Somervell LJ said: ‘I think that when, as here, a term comes to an end one has, of course, to consider what inferences are properly to be drawn from the payment and acceptance of rent. That is the basis of the presumption. In the cases in the books the rent is expressed to be so much per year and if one takes the extreme case in which the rent being so expressed is to be payable weekly, when the landlord accepts a weekly sum, what he is accepting is an instalment of the agreed figure for a yearly rent. One, therefore, sees from that the force of the line of argument which has led the courts in those cases to presume a tenancy for a further year. But in a case like the present, where rent is expressed to be per week, I think that when the fixed period has come to an end one should not presume anything but a weekly tenancy, namely a tenancy for the period in respect of which the rent is expressed.’
Jenkins LJ: ‘With exceptions to which I will later refer, I think all the cases in which an implication of a yearly tenancy taking effect after the termination of a letting for one year, or a term of years, has been held to have been raised had been cases where the original letting, from which the implication was deduced, was a letting for a year or for a term of years at an annual rent, that is to say, a rent expressed as an annual sum, by whatever instalments it may have been made payable.’
Judges:
Somervell LJ, Jenkins LJ
Citations:
[1953] 1 QB 146
Jurisdiction:
England and Wales
Cited by:
Cited – Church Commissioners for England v Meya CA 21-Jun-2006
The commissioners let a flat to the tenant on an assured shorthold tenancy for a year less one day with the rent payable quarterly. The tenancy continued as a statutory periodic tenancy. The court was asked whether the statutory tenancy was an . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Landlord and Tenant
Updated: 20 April 2022; Ref: scu.242682
