Trinity Housing Barrister Summary of Minott v Cambridge City Council [2022]

Trinity Social Housing Law barrister, Henry Percy-Raine has prepared the following summary of the recent case of Minott v Cambridge City Council [2022] EWCA Civ 159 featured in Housing Law Week. 

Facts

Mr Minott applied to Cambridge City Council (“Cambridge”) for assistance with homelessness on 26th March 2019. From that day Cambridge provided him with temporary accommodation under section 188 of the Housing Act 1996. In August 2019 having made enquiries, Cambridge decided that Mr Minott’s local connection was with Sandwell MBC who accepted the referral.

Mr Minott asked for a review of that decision. Cambridge refused to continue to provide him with temporary accommodation and served a notice to quit with effect from 2nd September 2019. Mr Minott thereafter refused to vacate the property. Cambridge reviewed their decision on 25th September 2019 and upheld the decision that he did not have a local connection on the basis he started to reside in Cambridge on 26th March 2019 and he had not accrued six months’ residency in the area.

Mr Minott made a fresh homelessness application to Cambridge on 17th October 2019 on grounds that he now had a local connection having lived there now for more than six months. Cambridge refused to consider that application on the ground that it did not provide any new information. Cambridge’s rationale was that from 2nd September Mr Minott’s unlawful possession of the property did not count towards ‘normal residence’ in the district. He did not, therefore, have more than six months’ residence and accordingly the facts relied upon in his fresh application were the same as those already determined.

Mr Minott unsuccessfully challenged Cambridge’s decision in the High Court.

The decision of the Court of Appeal

Having considered the earlier authorities – principally R v Harrow LBC ex p Fahia [1988] 1 WLR 1396 and Rikha Begum v Tower Hamlets LBC  [2005] EWCA Civ 340 – the Court of Appeal outlined that when presented with a fresh application, a local authority cannot avoid the necessity of going through the full statutory inquiries pursuant to Part 7 of Housing Act 1996 unless the second application is identical to the facts found in the initial application [at 21,70]. When a housing authority receives a subsequent application, their inquiry falls into two quite separate stages:

i) Stage 1: is it an application at all? The answer will only be no if it is based on precisely the same facts as an earlier application (disregarding fanciful allegations and trivial facts);

ii) Stage 2: if it is an application, is it well-founded? That will require the housing authority to carry out the inquiries required by section 184. If an application passes stage 1, there is no available short cut [at 76].

Given that the fresh application by Mr Minott in October 2019 asserted a new factual basis that he had now accrued six months’ residence and such a fact was neither fanciful nor trivial, that was sufficient for the first stage and, accordingly, the new application should have been accepted and investigated. Cambridge had fallen into error by going straight to the second stage by considering the merits of his residence and thereafter reasoning backwards to arrive at the answer to the first stage. That was the wrong approach and the same error the court at first instance had fallen into.

Accordingly, the appeal was allowed.