A property lawyer has warned landlords to check their spam email to ensure they don’t miss council notices after two significant court cases.

In the first case, Maidstone Council sought to revoke a taxi driver’s licence, so emailed him a notice which went into his spam folder, meaning that he missed the strict 21-day time limit for appeal. It was argued that the time limit hadn’t stared to run until the email was seen by the taxi driver because it had not been properly served.

However, the High Court ruled that the sorting of an email into a spam folder is not the fault of the local authority and is something done by the recipient’s email service over which the local authority has not control, explains David Smith (pictured), at Spector Constant & Williams.

Email

“I am not suggesting that local authorities should use email instead of post to send notices,” says Smith. “However, if notices are being sent by email and by post, as they often are, then the emailed notice, if sent first, will be the one that is the effective date the notice is served.”

He says agents and landlords should ensure that council emails are not in their spam by placing those addresses on approved senders’ lists. “If a notice is sent by email from a local authority, then the courts are very likely to find that an agent or landlord got that notice, notwithstanding which folder it ended up in,” he adds.

In another recent case, an improvement notice penalty sent by Manchester City Council to landlord Naila Tabbasam was set aside after she argued she had never received it. The authority had sent the notice about disrepair to her address given on the Land Registry, but she had failed to keep it up to date.

Receive

Tabbasam didn’t receive subsequent letters and notification of a £22,500 penalty. While the First Tier Property Tribunal said this did not amount to a reasonable excuse, the Upper Tribunal and Appeal Court disagreed. The appeal judges ruled: “While a landlord is not entitled to assert that the non-receipt meant that there was no service of the improvement notice, there is no rule which prevents a landlord from relying on the fact that the notice was not in fact received in support of a reasonable excuse defence.”

“This shows the importance for local authority officers of using multiple means of service for important notices,” notes Smith. “A judgment from the Court of Appeal might make local authorities even more likely to use email in future.”

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