The landlord let the ground floor and four rooms on the first floor to the tenant for one year. The tenant covenanted to keep and deliver up the premises in good and tenantable repair, but was in breach. The landlord redocorated the rooms and relet the premises, and sought the cost of redecoration. The tenant appealed saying that the landlord’s reversion had not been adversely affected under section 18.
Held: There was evidence on which the judge could hold that the cost of executing the repairs was a measure of the damage to the reversion. There had been no change of user or alteration of the premises. The court was prepared to infer the amount of the diminution in value of the reversion after a tenant’s failure to repair from circumstantial evidence.
Jenkins LJ said: ‘ if there is evidence that the repairs done, being repairs within the covenant, were no more than reasonably necessary to make the rooms fit for occupation or reletting for residential purposes, we fail to see why the proper cost of those repairs should not be regarded prima facie as representing a diminution in the value of the reversion due to the tenant’s breach of covenant, being money which the landlord, acting as an ordinary prudent owner, had to spend on the property owing to the breach and would not had to spend but for the breach . .
The evidence of the tenant’s surveyor as to the capital values of the whole house and of the part let to the defendant seems to us to be beside the point . . we do not for a moment intend to cast doubt on its validity as a measure of the damages recoverable under section 18(1) in cases to which it is appropriate. But we certainly deprecate its introduction as a sine qua non into all cases, including a small and simple case like the present concerned with a letting of some of the rooms in a house, where it becomes a purely hypothetical calculation wholly removed from the practical realities of the matter.’
Jenkins LJ
[1950] 2 QB 106
Landlord and Tenant Act 1927 18
England and Wales
Cited by:
Cited – Latimer and Another v Carney and others CA 27-Oct-2006
The landlords appealed disissal of their request for relief against their tenants for non-repair of the premises. The judge had held that the landlord had not provided appropriate evidence of the damage and costs of repair which it claimed.
Landlord and Tenant
Updated: 10 December 2021; Ref: scu.245772