A consultation on ways of making it easier for social housing providers to evict problem tenants has recently closed. It is proposed that landlords be given the right, in appropriate circumstances, to evict tenants who have been proven to have acted in an...
HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) have tasked a new team of 200 investigators and specialists, the ‘Affluent Team’, with identifying wealthy tax avoiders. One of the first targets of the team is wealthy individuals who own land and property abroad....
A grandmother who fractured her hip when she tripped on a Christmas tree decoration in Santa’s grotto in Selfridges in 2009 has won her claim for compensation after the Court of Appeal ruled that Father Christmas and his assistant should have made sure...
HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) will be targeting 6,000 Swiss bank accounts for further enquiry following the completion of the preliminary review resulting from the co-operation agreement in the area of taxation between Switzerland and the UK, which was...
When a woman updated her will in 2003, she had no way of knowing that a simple change to a precedent document could cause problems for her executors several years later. There was no intention to change one of the main provisions of the will, which was that...
There has recently been a further case on long-term sickness and a worker’s right to accrue untaken annual holiday leave ( Fraser v Southwest London St George’s Mental Health Trust ). Mrs Fraser was on long-term sick leave after she injured her...
Although pre-nuptial agreements are persuasive rather than binding in the British courts, a recent ruling of the High Court on a French ‘pre-nup’ illustrates clearly the current approach of the courts. It involved a very wealthy French couple...
A rider who was injured after being thrown from her horse has won compensation of £37,000. The accident happened in 2007 when Ceri Tonkinson was riding in Cosmeston Country Park, near Penarth in Wales. The horse she was riding had only recently been...
Creating a commercial database and keeping it up to date is an expensive business and owners of such databases often take precautions to make sure they are not used without permission. One method of doing this is for the owners of databases to plant...
When a property is owned by two people as joint tenants (where the title to the property is owned by each of them, so that if one dies, the other inherits the property by survivorship), each of them is considered to be the legal owner of the property. A man...
A retired plumber who was diagnosed with mesothelioma after being exposed to asbestos at work has won £115,000 in damages. The man had worked almost exclusively for the same building firm between 1950 and the early 1970s. He was exposed to asbestos...
A North Somerset man has received a six-figure sum in compensation after a mistake during an operation on his heart led to him having to have a pacemaker fitted. Steve Edwards, 51, an NHS manager from Weston-super-Mare, was undergoing treatment for an...
When a supplier to a marquee company was not paid for goods it had supplied, the directors told the supplier that the company was waiting for an insurance claim to be settled, after which payments would be made as usual. In reality, there was no insurance...
The wave of litigation which has followed the turmoil in the financial markets as a result of the credit crunch has led to many decisions that have resulted in those suing financial institutions being left to lick their wounds (and also facing sizeable legal...
After years of litigation, a young woman who suffered life-changing injuries when she was hit by a car as a child has been awarded a compensation settlement worth more than £9 million. Leigh Ann Blinkhorn, now 23, was seven years old when the accident...
The Supreme Court has denied HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) the right of appeal in a tax case involving a series of transactions that were carried out for no commercial purpose but which led to a tax saving by the taxpayer. The decision represents a blow for...
A court ruling that a spouse’s lottery winnings were not ‘matrimonial property’ so were not subject to the usual rule of equal division between the spouses when the marriage broke up received much publicity recently. The normal rule on...
The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has now published its response to the recent consultation on proposals to criminalise squatting. The consultation paper, entitled ‘Options for dealing with squatting’ , received over 2,000 responses. As a first...
A man who was almost blinded after an accident at work has won an undisclosed amount in damages. Trevor Watson, 42, was working as a drainage engineer. He was instructed to take his truck to a hydraulic specialist because of a blockage in its jetting...
Under the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (now superseded by the Equality Act 2010 ), when deciding whether or not an employer took sufficient steps to comply with its duty to make reasonable adjustments to remove a disadvantage faced by a disabled...
When a Jersey multi-millionaire gave most of his assets away to one of his daughters in the months prior to his death, leaving an estate of less than £100,000 to be shared by all three of his children, it was perhaps inevitable that a legal challenge...
HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) have announced that the Mortgage Verification Scheme (MVS), which was developed in co-operation with the Council of Mortgage Lenders and the Building Societies Association and run as a pilot scheme in March 2010, is now fully...
An engineer who was seriously injured when he fell through a roof has won more than £164,000 in damages. The 66-year-old man worked for electronics and electrical engineering company Siemens. He was installing CCTV cameras at Liverpool Lime Street...
The Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) (Amendment) Regulations 2011 , which came into force on 26 May 2011, made changes to the rules that apply to websites using cookies and similar technologies to remember a user’s preferences....
The scheme set up by the Government to assess the value of Northern Rock shares, for the purposes of deciding whether or not compensation was due to shareholders, concluded that without government support the shares would be valueless. A group of...
