Tenants seeking to exercise the right to manage will welcome the Court of Appeal’s recent decision on procedural non-compliance, says Winston Jacob
- The primary objective of the right to manage legislation is to enable an RTM company, simply and cheaply, to acquire the right to manage, and to avoid both duplication of effort and administrative untidiness once it has been acquired.
- Where an RTM company has failed to comply with the statutory notice requirements, the court’s focus must be on whether Parliament intended that a landlord (or other person entitled to serve a counter-notice) could successfully contend that the defect in the relevant notice was fatal to its validity.
- A failure by an RTM company to comply precisely with the requirements for a notice of intention to participate does not automatically invalidate all subsequent steps.
Many statutes lay down a procedure for the exercise or acquisition by a person or body of some right conferred by the statute without specifying the consequences of a failure to comply with the procedure. In such cases, the court must, as a matter of statutory interpretation, determine
