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The Upper Tribunal (Lands Chamber) has allowed an appeal by Westminster City Council and has determined that a Completion Notice, issued by the Council to enable an unoccupied new building to be included in the rating list, was valid and was correctly served. The decision in Westminster City Council v UKI (Kingsway) Limited and Dunlevey (VO) (2015) UKUT 0301 LC will be of concern to owners of new buildings that are not yet complete and occupied.
Where a local authority considers that a new building is not yet complete, but could be completed within three months, it may serve on the owner of the building a “Completion Notice” specifying a completion date. The effect of such a notice is to deem the building complete from that date and to require the Valuation Officer to include it in the rating list from that date.
In this case Westminster City Council served such a notice in respect of three floors of a new building 1 Kingsway, London WC2. These floors were then included in the rating list at a Rateable Value of £2,750,000. The notice was delivered by hand to the building and addressed simply to “Owner, 1 Kingsway” rather than to a particular person or company. The owner of the building did ultimately receive a copy of the notice but appealed against it saying that the notice was invalid as there was no named addressee and that it had not been properly served. The Valuation Tribunal for England found that the failure to identify the owner by name meant that the notice had not been properly served and that, as a consequence, the property should not be included in the rating list. The City Council appealed to the Upper Tribunal (Lands Chamber).
The Upper Tribunal (Lands Chamber has allowed the appeal and determined that the Completion Notice was valid, despite being addressed only to the owner and not to a named party, and was correctly served despite not specifically identifying the person for whom it was intended. The Deputy President of the Upper Tribunal said that the notice was valid because the document satisfied the statutory requirements, which did not include the name of the owner. The Upper Tribunal also found that it had been properly served because an electronic copy of the document ultimately “arrived in the hands of the owner” despite being handed to a person who was not an employee of the owner and was not authorised to receive service of documents.
The decision will cause concern to property owners that documents addressed generically to “The Owner”, without identifying a named party, can be both valid and correctly served. Local authorities may be tempted to use this decision to adopt a short-cut approach to service of Completion Notices, but they would be unwise to do so as the Upper Tribunal made clear that its decision “should not be taken to condone sloppy procedure in the addressing or delivery of completion notices or any other important document”.
Owners of unoccupied new buildings will need to scrutinise carefully documents that, on their face, may or may not be intended for them.
