Lease or licence

Lease or licence

Bruton v. Quadrant Housing Trust [1997] 50 EG 87

Cases on the lease/licence distinction, once commonplace, appear these days to be relatively few and far between. In this case, Lambeth LBC granted a licence to the Housing Trust to use a building for short-term housing purposes pending redevelopment. The Housing Trust then granted a licence to occupy to the plaintiff. Subsequently, the plaintiff claimed that he in fact had a tenancy, and a tenancy therefore to which statutory repairing obligations contained in s.11 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 would apply. Not so, said the Court of Appeal (Sir Brian Neill dissenting): if the Housing Trust only had a licence itself then it could only grant a licence to others (a principle normally rendered by the Latin tag "nemo dat quod non habet", "no one can give that which is not theirs to give").