Property Law Updates

In a warning to hoteliers and other commercial property owners that breaches of fire safety rules can lead to imprisonment, a businessman whose hotel was described as a ‘death trap’ which put the lives of

In the week of the Wimbledon tennis finals, a homeowner has failed to convince the High Court that he was irrationally refused planning permission to lay down a hard-surfaced tennis court in his rural back

In a case with important implications for public procurement, a local authority which failed to publicly advertise contracts for a regeneration project will have to pay back almost £160,000 in European grants it received in

A businessman who was hit with a record £250,000 fine for his repeated defiance of planning laws in making unauthorised use of farmland for non-agricultural purposes has had his ‘too severe’ penalty more than halved

In a warning to developers who flout planning laws that they will be stripped of their ill-gotten gains, a man who converted a single home into flats without permission has been ordered to pay more

When a landlord decided to change the address of a building (by changing the name to that of an incoming and significant tenant), the other tenants reacted badly. Faced with the costs of reprinting stationery

A man who says that he has lived for more than a decade in a converted British Telecom repeater station has failed in a High Court challenge to a planning inspector’s order that his residential

A company which wants to build an enormous solar energy farm on a site in Suffolk, equivalent in size to almost 65 football pitches, has had its hopes of winning planning permission for the scheme

In a case which illustrates that country living is not always an idyll, a homeowner who objected on noise and odour grounds to his neighbour’s plans to keep chickens and goats in a new agricultural

Thirteen years of heated debate over the rateable value of New Scotland Yard, the iconic headquarters of the Metropolitan Police, has resulted in a tribunal ruling which is unlikely to satisfy the force and will