© 2025 News On The Block. All rights reserved.
News on the Block is a trading name of Premier Property Media Ltd.
© 2025 News On The Block. All rights reserved.
News on the Block is a trading name of Premier Property Media Ltd.
The Court of Appeal has again considered the question of “what is a house” for enfranchisement purposes. The ruling clarifies whether tenants of a residential apartment above a ground floor retail store can enfranchise.
By law, the tenant of a house has the right to acquire the freehold of a property providing certain criteria are met (Leasehold Reform Act 1967). In that Act, a house is defined as: “...any building designed or adapted for living in and reasonably so called, notwithstanding that the building is not structurally detached, or was or is not solely designed or adapted for living in...”.
Whether a ground floor retail property with an apartment upstairs can be enfranchised has now been considered by the courts on three separate occasions since 1982. Originally, in Tandon v Trustees of Spurgeon’s Homes the House of Lords decided that a property in such a situation can be enfranchised. However, in Henley v Cohen the Court of Appeal decided that such a property could not be enfranchised.
The latest ruling now confirms that Henley v Cohen can be distinguished and confined to its particular facts, namely that there the property had been in non-residential use for a considerable period of time until it was converted shortly before the enfranchisement claim was made and in breach of the lease.
In the present case, even though some structural alterations had taken place to remove the internal staircase and replace it with an external one, the Court of Appeal were persuaded by the arguments of Stephen Jourdan QC and Thomas Jefferies decided and ruled that the property was still a ‘house’ for enfranchisement purposes.