Dwelling House in UK Law

The damages recoverable include all those which foreseeably arise from the breach of the duty of care which, as regards the council, I have held to be a duty to take reasonable care to secure compliance with the byelaws.

To allow recovery for such damage to the house follows, in my opinion, from normal principle. If classification is required, the relevant damage is in my opinion material, physical damage, and what is recoverable is the amount of expenditure necessary to restore the dwelling to a condition in which it is no longer a danger to the health or safety of persons occupying and possibly (depending on the circumstances) expenses arising from necessary displacement.

Under the Rent Acts, in order to create a letting of part of a house as a separate dwelling there must be an agreement by which the occupier has exclusive possession of essential living rooms of a separate dwelling house. Essential living rooms provide the necessary facilities for living, sleeping and cooking.

The letting in each case was of a house comprising more dwellings than one. But I agree with the county court judge in thinking that Parliament when it enacted Section 1 (1) used the singular diliberately, and in this instance did not intend the singular to include the plural. The policy of the Rent Acts was and is to protect the tenant in his home, whether the threat be to extorta premium for the grant or renewal of his tenancy, to increase his rent, or to evict him.

Anything which, in the ordinary use of words, would be regarded as a part of the structure, or of the exterior, of the particular "dwelling-house", regarded as a separate part of the building, would be within the scope of paragraph (a).

The starting point must be that "dwelling-house" is not a term of art. While I accept that dictionaries cannot solve issues of interpretation, it nevertheless is helpful to bear in mind that dwelling-house has for centuries been a word of wide import. In ordinary parlance a bed-sitting room where somebody habitually stays is therefore capable of being described as a dwelling-house. The setting in which the word appears in the statute is important.

The words "dwell" and "dwelling" are not terms of art with a specialised legal meaning. They are ordinary English words, even if they are perhaps no longer in common use. They mean the same as "inhabit" and "habitation" or more precisely "abide" and "abode", and refer to the place where one lives and makes one's home.