Court of Appeal allows selective licence appeal by Waltham Forest Council in important 'Fit and Proper Person' case

We previously covered this case in 2022 when it was before the Upper Tier Tribunal (UTT) deciding on the council's decision to revoke a landlord's licences and refuse to grant new licences due to fraudulent licence applications.
The fraud issue arose in 2016 because members of the landlord's family had been found guilty of submitting backdated gas safety certificates (provided by a fraudulent gas safety engineer) in support of a selective licence application. This was after being found to have falsely claimed, in 2015, that there were no gas appliances at the properties to be licensed. The licences applied for were revoked and a fine of £40,000 was imposed
The landlord herself then applied for new licences under Waltham Forest's renewed selective licensing scheme but the council refused to grant the new licences on the basis that neither the landlord nor her company were fit and proper persons at the time of the licence applications by association with her family members (her property company also had no cash reserves, no staff and no property management experience).
The landlord appealed to the First Tier Tribunal (FTT), an appeal which went all the way through the UTT to the Court of Appeal on the issue of councils' approaches to an individual's spent convictions when considering 'fit and proper person' requirements before being remitted back to the FTT to deal with the remaining issues.
The FTT at the remitted hearing dismissed the landlord's mother's appeal (she had been guilty of the earlier fraud) but allowed the landlord's appeal. This was on the basis that though she was inexperienced at the time of the council's decision to refuse a grant of licences, this situation had changed by the time of the FTT remitted appeal and so she could now be regarded as fit and proper to hold a licence. The council then appealed to the UTT saying the FTT had erred in deciding that the circumstances at the time of appeal were to be taken into account and not the circumstances at the time of the council's decision (click the link at the top of this piece for our report of that decision).
The Court of Appeal has now reversed the earlier UTT decision and allowed Waltham Forest's appeal on all grounds in this important case for both local authorities and landlords as regards enforcement decisions by councils in selective licensing (and, by extension, HMO and additional licensing) cases involving the fit and proper person test.
The main decision was by Lord Justice Andrews but the supporting decision of Lord Justice Lewison is illustrative: "The grant or refusal of a licence is a discretionary decision to be exercised by the local housing authority. The authority may only exercise their discretion to grant a licence 'if the authority are satisfied' of the matters mentioned in section 88(3) of the 2004 [Housing] Act: 2004 Act s.88(2). One of those matters is whether the applicant is a 'fit and proper person' to hold a licence, which is itself an evaluative decision .... I conclude, therefore, that on an appeal against an authority's decision to grant a licence, the question before an appellate tribunal is whether the authority's decision was wrong. It follows that the FTT was wrong to decide the different question: namely, whether on the facts as they stood at the date of their own decision,[the landlord or her company] was a fit and proper person.
The conclusion of this case means that, since 2016, the FTT has dealt with this case twice, the UTT has dealt with the case twice and now, the Court of Appeal has dealt with the case twice (along with attendant solicitors and, up to and including Kings Counsel, barristers). All because false information was submitted on some selective licence applications and gas safety certificates were falsified in an attempt to fraudulently rectify the initial falsehoods.
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