Background
With all the major world-shaking events that are at present going on around us, it is easy to overlook the smaller things, which may, nevertheless, still have an effect upon us. For example, on the Brexit/Trump scale of 0-10, the Tenancy Deposit Schemes (Scotland) Regulations 2011 might, on the face of it, rate at 0.00001. Yet the scheme significantly impacts upon landlords and tenants in Scotland’s private residential rented sector, and could, in the event of failure to comply with the regulations, result in landlords becoming liable to pay over to their tenants a hefty sum (albeit one that cannot exceed three times the amount of the tenancy deposit). In a case where the monthly rent is, say, £1560 (based upon three students sharing a flat, each paying £125 per week), the maximum penalty for non-compliance with the regulations would be £4875, with the money going to the tenants. This sanction is intended to deter non-compliance with a statutory scheme, providing enforceable protections to tenants against non-compliant landlords.
Phoebe Russel-Smith and others v Ijeoma Uchegbu
The case of Phoebe Russel-Smith, Stephanie Dion-Jones and Alexis Herskowit v Ijeoma Uchegbu [2016] SC EDIN 64 (hereinafter Russel-Smith) related to a dispute regarding a landlady’s admitted failure to lodge the deposit in an approved deposit guarantee scheme. Once the court action had commenced this requirement of the Regulations was eventually complied with, but there was another failure on the part of the landlady in relation to the provision of information (under Regulations 3 and 42 of the 2011 Regulations) to the tenants.
This note focusses on the issues arising out of a summary application raised against the landlady by three of her four co-tenants.
Res Judicata
For reasons that were unknown to the sheriff, one of the co-tenants, Marc Fitchett, chose not to participate in the action against the landlady. Notwithstanding this, the court proceeded by assessing the level of the penalty at the top end of that which was available to the claimants collectively (as in, the full monthly rent, as paid by all four tenants, times three).
Given Fitchett’s non-participation in the legal action, a problem was posed for the Sheriff in relation to the quantum of the sanction. As Sheriff Welsh noted (at paragraph 6)
[o]nly three of the four tenants under the tenancy make this application. I do not know if Marc Fitchett has waived his right to apply for sanction. He can apply up to 31 October 2016. However, if he did, the landlady could not, in my opinion, be sanctioned twice. The scheme does not provide for that.
Clearly, this could result in some prejudice to the fourth tenant, as by not being joined in the action raised by the other three – was he even invited to? – the fourth tenant would lose out not only on the financial compensation at the time of the initial claim, but any further right of his to exercise this claim. Such is the nature of the doctrine of res judicata.
Res judicata, broadly stated, concerns circumstances in which pursuers are barred from continuing litigation where there has already been final judgement. The term is synonymous with ‘the matter decided’ and carries an implication, as recently illustrated in Smith v Sabre Insurance [2013] CSIH 28, that all losses arising out of a single incident ought to be raised at the same time (discussed by the Scots law firm Brodies here). The case of Smith set out that this principle is a long-established and highly practical element of Scots law.
The case of Russel-Smith perhaps illuminates – in its particular statutory context – a particular quirk of the res judicata doctrine, whereby in trying to protect the defender from future litigation where a decision has already been made, prejudice actually crystallises instead on one (or more) persons who might have been potential pursuers.
The court’s response in Russel-Smith was robust in terms of addressing the issue of res judicata. The sheriff refused to reduce the award to the three co-litigant co-tenants pro-rata by 25% (so as, it had been submitted, to reflect non-participation in the action by one co-tenant). This was because whatever course of action was taken, including an award made to the three tenants, the effect of that award would be that the fourth tenant would then be prevented from having an exercisable claim against the landlord. The sheriff was therefore moved to award the full amount to the three co-litigants, thereby preserving a right (and surely giving rise to a claim in unjustified enrichment) of the fourth tenant to claim against his former co-tenants for a 25% share of the award (which might be pursued under the new simple procedure, whereas actions under the Tenancy Deposit Scheme Regulations must be raised by way of summary application during or within three months of the termination of the tenancy; note also that such a claim would be subject to statutory prescription and not affected by the time limit for the raising of a claim under the regulations).
In terms of resolving the potential inequities which might result from the blocking any further claim on the ground of res judicata when an otherwise viable claim under the 2011 Regulations is not exercised at the same time as other claims (for example, where one co-tenants takes a month’s holiday following the termination of the tenancy then returns to their family home in Aberystwyth, or wherever, while the other three move on to another shared flat together and do not feel inclined to search out their former flatmate), the judgement in Russel-Smith does assist in granting another opportunity to a party to claim.
However, and as has already been referred to above, a distinct possible downside emerges out of the relative fluidity which the approach of the sheriff in Russel-Smith gives to the tenants in order to achieve a resolution for them collectively. Without knowing the rationale of the fourth tenant for refusing to partake in the initial claim, it could speculatively be said that the judgment in Russel-Smith appears to offer such a tenant the right to ‘piggyback’ on the efforts of his fellow tenants in the initial litigation after he had perhaps refused to be involved in that action.
The policy and statutory agenda behind the Regulations is to address the problem of landlords unfairly misusing tenancy deposits, and to protect against the landlord holding the deposit and then becoming insolvent. It is arguable that the effect of the judgement of Russel-Smith is to create the scope for tenants making claims against one another in the aftermath of a judgement against a landlord, which complicates the horizontal relationship between co-tenants (as well as distorting the vertical relationship between tenant and landlord).
Given that one of the primary aims of the Tenancy Deposit Scheme Regulations is (according to the legal commentator Angus McAllister) to ‘ensure that deposits are returned quickly and fairly, particularly in the event of a dispute’, the judgement of Russel-Smith appears to complicate this approach. The sheriff’s approach adds an extra dimension to the dispute process surrounding the deposit. Whilst it is correct that the matter has been resolved by the case of Russel-Smith, in that all of the losses arising from the incident were raised at the same time, the equity of the approach adopted by the court in Russel-Smith is not unchallengeable. Now we are faced with a question of whether the matter is truly decided if the full losses have been awarded to the claimants, yet there exists a right of another claimant to derive his share of the sum at a later date.
The calculation of the penalty
In calculating the amount of the penalty, Sheriff Welsh (at paragraph 9 in his judgement) adopted a two-stage process. Firstly, he adjusted the full sum of the deposit so as to be pro rata of the number of ‘unprotected’ days out of the term of the tenancy:
In my judgement there are two broad aspects to the sanction […] Firstly, the lease lasted 334 days, for 270 days of which, the deposit was unprotected and the tenants deprived of protection from the scheme and the proper information. In my judgement, to mark the fact that the defender breached the regulations for a sustained period of time which subjected the tenants and the deposit to a risk the regulations are designed to avoid, the proportionate and appropriate starting point for sanction in these circumstances is £1550 divided by 334 multiplied by 270. This produces a figure of £1253.
Then he made an assessment of what might be termed the landlord’s culpa element
Secondly, to that sum I will add a weighting to reflect the fact that the landlady was repeatedly officially informed of her obligations and still failed to comply. I do not accept the suggestion this was wilful defiance of the regulations. I am more inclined, on a balance of equities, even if finely judged in this aspect of the case, to accept the submission that the defender was dilatory in attending to her obligations to protect the deposit and advise the tenants of their rights rather than in wilful defiance of the purpose of the scheme. In assessing this aspect I also weigh in the balance the fact that no actual prejudice occurred and in the final analysis the purpose of the regulations was not defeated and the deposit was returned to the tenants, in full, without dispute. I also take into account the early admission of breach in these proceedings and the responsible way the defender has remedied the situation through her agents. I had the benefit of seeing the defender during the proceedings and while it may be said; ‘There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face’ [Macbeth, Act 1 Scene 4], I am satisfied the assurances given by Mr Wells, that she deeply regrets the position she now finds herself in, are genuine. For all these reasons, I will set the financial penalty to reflect this second factor, at £600.
The maximum possible penalty would have been £4,650, meaning that under Sheriff Welsh’s two step approach – with the first stage ‘deprivation of protection’ element having been set at £1,253 – the maximum ‘stage 2’ culpa element would have been £3,397.
Postscript
On 17 March 2016 the Scottish Parliament passed the Private Housing (Tenancies) (Scotland) Act 2016 (asp 19). It received Royal Assent on 22 April 2016, and is currently subject to commencement. Much necessary infrastructure for the new statutory tenancy regime created by the statute has to be put in place, and full commencement may take some time. One aspect that is of interest here relates to Part 2 of the Act, under which the landlord is required to provide certain specified information to the tenant. In the event of the landlord’s failing to do so, the tenant may make an application to the First-Tier Tribunal, with the tribunal having the power to sanction the landlord’s failure to provide the required information. Section 19 of the 2016 Act allows the Tribunal the power to penalise the landlord by requiring her to pay ‘the person’ who made the application an amount not exceeding, in specified cases, six month’s ‘rent’. Section 16 subsections (6) and (7) specify:
(6) In a case where two or more persons jointly are the tenant under a tenancy, references to the tenant in this section are to any one of those persons.
(7) In subsection (2), “rent” means––
(a) the amount that was payable in rent under the tenancy at the time that notice of the application was given to the landlord, and
(b) in a case where two or more persons jointly are the tenant under the tenancy, the amount mentioned in paragraph (a) divided by the number of those persons.
Section 5 of the 2016 Act has the effect of extending references in other enactments to tenancies and to connected expressions so as to cover private residential tenancies under the 2016 Act (unless it appears from the context that a particular reference is not intended to cover private residential tenancies).
The First-Tier Tribunal for Scotland Housing and Property Chamber is to inherit the jurisdiction of the Sheriff Court in respect of private residential tenancies. The Chamber will take over the functions of the Private Rented Housing Panel and the Homeowner Housing Panel with effect from 1 December 2016, and will begin to hear more private rented sector cases in consequence of the transfer of jurisdiction from the sheriff courts plus actions relating to private residential tenancies under the 2016 Act from December 2017 (https://www.prhpscotland.gov.uk/briefing-stakeholders).
If Sheriff Welsh’s analysis in respect of res judicata in the context of tenancy deposits is to be followed, there will be the situation in which the First-Tier Tribunal will apply one (res judicata) rule in respect of rent deposits and another (non-res judicata) in respect of ‘certain specified information’. The potential for confusion is clear. That being said, in either case, professionalism and best practise are clearly the landlord’s best safeguard.
Finally, it is worth noting that the First-tier Tribunal for Scotland Housing and Property Chamber and Upper Tribunal for Scotland (Composition) Regulations 2016 allow for tribunals of up to three members:
Composition of First-tier Tribunal
2 (1) Subject to paragraph (2) the First-tier Tribunal, when convened to decide any matter in a case, shall consist of—
(a) a legal member;
(b) a legal member and one ordinary member; or
(c) a legal member with two ordinary members.
This introduces scope for differences of opinion in relation to the quantification of statutory penalties, making Sheriff Welsh’s two-step mode of calculation an attractive approach.
This blog post is by the undergraduate LLB (Hons) candidate Matthew Nicol. Matthew is a member of this year’s Scottish Law of Leases Honours class.
