Sefton Holdings Ltd v Cairns
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | LORD JUSTICE LLOYD,SIR ROUALEYN CUMMING-BRUCE |
| Judgment Date | 02 November 1987 |
| Judgment citation (vLex) | [1987] EWCA Civ J1102-3 |
| Docket Number | 87/1072 |
| Court | Court of Appeal (Civil Division) |
| Date | 02 November 1987 |
[1987] EWCA Civ J1102-3
IN THE SUPREME COURT OF JUDICATURE
COURT OF APPEAL (CIVIL DIVISION)
ON APPEAL FROM THE LIVERPOOL COUNTY COURT
(HER HONOUR JUDGE DOWNEY)
Royal Courts of Justice
Lord Justice Lloyd
Sir Roualeyn Cumming-Bruce
87/1072
MISS BERNADETTE GOODMAN, instructed by Messrs Redferns (Agents for Messrs R.H. Vyner-Brooks & Co. of Liverpool), appeared for the Appellants (Plaintiffs).
MISS LINDA PEARCE, instructed by Messrs Ashby Cornforth & Co. (Liverpool), appeared for the Respondent (Defendant).
This is an appeal from a decision of Her Honour Judge Downey sitting in the Liverpool County Court on 11th August 1987. It concerns a house at No. 49, Cherry Avenue, Liverpool. The question is whether the defendant, Miss Florence Cairns, is entitled to protection under the Rent Acts, that is to say, whether she is a statutory tenant under section 2 of the Rent Act 1977. The answer depends on the meaning to be given to the word "family" in paragraph 7 of Part I of Schedule 1 of that Act.
The facts are that the plaintiffs, Sefton Holdings Limited, are the landlords of the premises in question. They let it to a Mr Richard Gamble some time between 1939 and 1941 when the house was built. Mr Gamble died in 1965. His daughter, Ada, then succeeded to the tenancy. Miss Ada Gamble died in 1986. The defendant came to live with Mr and Mrs Gamble and their daughter Ada in 1941. She was then 23 and single. Both her parents had died. Her boyfriend had just been killed in the war. Miss Ada Gamble asked her parents if they would take the defendant in, which they did. They treated her as their own daughter. She called them "Mom and Pop". She has lived in the same house ever since. She is now some 70 years of age.
On 6th June 1986, shortly after Miss Ada Gamble died, the plaintiffs served on the defendant a notice to quit. The defendant claims that she is entitled to remain on in the house as a statutory tenant under paragraph 7 of Part I of the first schedule, which provides as follows:
"Where paragraph 6 above does not apply but a person who was a member of the first successor's family was residing with him at the time of and for the period of 6 months immediately before his death then, after his death, that person or if there is more than one such person such one of them as may be decided by agreement, or in default of agreement by the county court, shall be the statutory tenant if and so long as he occupies the dwelling-house as his residence."
Miss Ada Gamble was the first successor within the meaning of that paragraph. So what we have to decide in this case is whether the defendant is a member of her family who was residing with her at the time of, and for the period of six months immediately before, her death. The defendant was clearly residing with Miss Ada Gamble at the time of Miss Ada Gamble's death. But was she a member of Miss Ada Gamble's family? That is the question. The county court judge has decided that she was, and there is now an appeal to this court.
No court could help feeling sympathy for an elderly lady of 70 who is in danger of being turned out of the house in which she has lived for nearly 50 years. But it goes without saying that we have to put sympathy on one side and apply the law to the best of our ability. It has been held over and over again that, in deciding whether a person is a member of another person's family, we must give the word "family" its ordinary everyday meaning. We cannot extend that meaning in order to cover what might appear to be a hard case; we must not let affection press upon judgment.
If the judge has given the word too wide a meaning, then she has erred in law and we are obliged in this court to correct her, however much we might like to agree.
We have been referred to a number of cases as to what is meant by saying that a person is a member of another person's family. The cases go back at least 60 years. Not all the cases are, at first sight at any rate, easy to reconcile. That may be because, as has been suggested, the meaning of the word "family" has broadened over the years. But we do not have to go into that question now.
The most useful passage from among the decided cases is to be found in the judgment of Lord Justice Russell in the case of Ross v. Collins [1964] 1 W.L.R. 425, 432. In that case Lord Justice Russell said this:
"Granted that 'family' is not limited to cases of a strict legal familial nexus, I cannot agree that it extends to a case such as this. It still requires, it seems to me, at least a broadly recognisable de facto familial nexus. This may be capable of being found and recognised as such by the ordinary man—where the link would be strictly familial had there been a marriage, or where the link is through adoption of a minor, de jure or de facto, or where the link is 'step—', or where the link is 'in—law' or by marriage. But two strangers cannot, it seems to me, ever establish artificially for the purposes of this section a familial nexus by acting as brothers or as sisters, even if they call each other such and consider their relationship to be tantamount to that. Nor, in my view, can an adult man and woman who establish a platonic relationship establish a familial nexus by acting as a devoted brother and sister or father and daughter would act, even if they address each other as such and even if they refer to each other as such and regard their association as tantamount...
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Fitzpatrick v Sterling Housing Association Ltd
...the problem seems to me to be one of the application of the word rather than its construction. But, as was pointed out in Sefton Holdings Ltd. v. Cairns (1987) 20 H.L.R. 124, the question is whether the person was a member of the family, not whether he was living as a member of the 76Some o......
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Fitzpatrick v Sterling Housing Association Ltd
...the man and the woman that are relevant rather than the appearance that they present to the public." 23 Sefton Holdings v Cairns [1987] 20 HLR 124 concerned a woman statutory tenant whose parents had taken in a 23 year old orphan girl (the claimant) during the last war and ever thereafter t......
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R v Immigration Appeal Tribunal ex parte Tohur Ali
...prior to 1926. In addition it is not entirely unknown in other contexts of the law for de facto adoption to be recognised. (In Sefton Holdings Ltd. v. Cairns, The Times [3rd November 1987], this court accepted for the purposes of the Rent Acts that a de facto adoption of a child could make ......