Permissive Waste: Tenant for Life / Remainderman
A tenant for life is not liable in damages for permissive waste. ‘Since the Statutes of Marlbridge and of Gloucester there must have been hundreds of thousands of tenants for life who have died leaving their estates in a condition of great dilapidation. Not once, so far as legal records go, have damages been recovered against the estate of a tenant for life on that ground. To ask me in that state of the authorities to hold that a tenant for life is liable for permissive waste to a remainderman is to my mind a proposition altogether startling. I should not think of coming to such a decision without direct authority upon the point. Such authority as there is seems to me to be against the contention, and in opposition to the positive decisions in Gibson v. Wells, Herne v. Bembow, and Jones v. Hill 7 Taunt. 392, there are only to be found certain dicta of Baron Parke and the late Lord Justice Lush which seem to amount to this, that the words of the Statutes of Marlbridge and Gloucester are sufficient to include the case of permissive waste, at any rate where there is an obligation on the person who has the particular estate not to permit waste, whether that obligation does or does not exist at the common law in the case of a tenant for life. But at the present day it would certainly require either an Act of Parliament or a very deliberate decision of a Court of great authority to establish the law that a tenant for life is liable to a remainderman in case he should have permitted the buildings on the land to fall into a state of dilapidation. I therefore think that this claim must be disallowed.’
Kay J
(1889) 41 Ch D 532, [1889] UKLawRpCh 89
Commonlii
England and Wales
Citing:
Cited – Powys v Blagrave 24-Mar-1854
Tenant for Life. Permissive Waste
Courts of Equity have no means of interfering in cases of permissive waste by a tenant for life of real property.
There is no implied trust to keep the property in repair imposed upon a tenant for life under a will; for, if there were, he . .
Cited by:
Cited – Dayani v London Borough of Bromley TCC 25-Nov-1999
LA Tenant liable for permissive waste
The local authority was tenant of properties which it sub-licensed to homeless persons for three years was liable for having allowed the properties to deteriorate. It was claimed that they were liable for permissive waste as tenants for a fixed . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Updated: 17 September 2021; Ref: scu.196731
