Landlord who delegated to husband loses appeal in enforcement notice case

A landlord has failed in an appeal against a claim by the London Borough of Newham that she ignored enforcement notices related to her property, having argued that she had delegated all responsibility for the property concerned to her husband.

A judge said this arrangement did not mean that she as owner could escape responsibility for failing to comply with Newham’s order that a house split into four small flats should be restored to a single unit and then failing to grant the council entry to inspect the house.

Nuzhat Mirza had been told by Newham to effect the changes as the four flats were unacceptably small.

Ms Mirza said she had made her husband responsible for everything concerning the house but he said he had no knowledge of the subsequent letters from the council.

At the original trial of the matter the judge had concluded that Mr Mirza's evidence was not relevant to the defence being made as Ms Mirza was the appellant.

The grounds of appeal were that the judge erred in directing the jury that they could not consider Mr Mirza’s evidence in Ms Mirza’s argument that she had a valid defence of having sought to comply with the note by asking her husband to undertake the required works.

But in the Court of Appeal Hamblen LJ said in Mirza v London Borough of Newham [2017] EWCA Crim 924: “Although it was her property her husband took full responsibility for managing it; she was aware of the notice issued in 2014; her husband took responsibility for dealing with it; he was an experienced landlord and she trusted him.”

He went on: “In these somewhat unusual circumstances in our judgment the judge was correct to direct the jury to focus on what the appellant did or did not do. She had no knowledge beyond that. The duty to comply rested on her as the owner of the property. She knew nothing about what had or had not been done to comply with the notice. She left everything to her husband. In those circumstances all she could rely upon to show that she had done all that could reasonably be expected of her to secure compliance with the notice was the reasonableness of her decision to entrust everything to her husband because that was all she had done and she knew nothing further.”

Mark Smulian