Rent

Rent

Rent is not required for a tenancy to exist, although it is a strong indicator that the parties intended to create a tenancy. If the other ‘hallmarks’ identified in Street v Mountford are present (ie exclusive possession of defined premises for a term), then a tenancy can exist even if no rent is reserved or payable.

The amount of rent must be ‘certain’. This does not mean that the lease must state the actual figures for the whole of the term, however, there must be a mechanism (usually a rent review clause) allowing the rent throughout the term to be ascertained with certainty.

No particular form of words is required to reserve rent, although the formula ‘yielding and paying during the term’ is widely used.

Commercial rents are usually paid in advance by equal instalments on the quarter days (25 December, 25 March, 24 June and 29 September) or on other dates specified as rent payment days. In the absence of an express agreement that rent is payable in advance, it will be payable in arrears.

Where rent is payable quarterly in advance, the

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PI & Clinical Negligence analysis: Upon appeal, the High Court found that a claimant casual footballer paying to play a ‘knockabout’ game at school premises where there were no arrangements in place to retrieve a ball kicked out of play into another part of the defendant’s sports facilities (adjacent sports playing fields) caused his own injury when he climbed a 2.1m gate and severely lacerated his hand. The claimant was a trespasser while climbing the gate between two adjacent parts of the premises where he was not a trespasser. The defendant’s duty of care did not extend to providing any system or facilities to aid ball retrievable, despite the trial judge’s findings that doing nothing and waiting was ‘not what football players would do’. The threshold test imposing a duty of care was not met because the claimant decided to climb the locked gate to gain access to adjacent playing fields. What amounts to ‘reasonable’ safety of visitors under section 2(2) and (5) of the Occupiers’ Liability Act 1957 (OLA 1957) appears to fall firmly within the characteristics equating to a definition of ‘reasonable’ amounting to ‘adequate’, rather than equating to the dictionary definition of reasonable ‘based on or using good judgment and therefore fair and practical’. On the facts and circumstances of this case the sports premises were safe, despite there being no facility for ball retrieval. The danger to the claimant only arose because the claimant decided to take a risk to climb a gate that was an obvious danger. Written by Abigail Holt, barrister at Garden Court Chambers.

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