Hi,

Am looking for a bit of advice if possible.

I'm attempting to sort out a bit of a mess. Here's the background - an elderly tenant entered a residential care home on a temporary basis due to ill health. Whilst in there, she was diagnosed with dementia. Her daughter is her appointee and when the diagnosis was made, the daughter decided that she wasn't able to return home so gave notice on the rented property. The housing association subsequently ended the tenancy on this basis. HB was cancelled as there was no intention to return to the property. The tenancy was only in the name of the mother. The adult son (29 years old) was also living in the property and he is refusing to leave saying that the housing association shouldn't have accepted notice from the daughter as she was only the appointee and did not have power of attorney and he feels the tenancy should have been transferred to him and should not have been ended as by ending the tenancy he is being made homeless. Obviously HB are refusing to pay HB, they have ended the mothers claim as she has no intention to return which is correct. They are refusing to accept a claim from the son as they say he is not the tenant, which is also correct.

A couple of questions that I would welcome views on:

1. Should the housing association have accepted the notice to terminate the tenancy from the daughter, who is the appointee?
2. Does the housing association have a duty to offer the tenancy to the son, who was a non-dependant?

Any help / advice / suggestions anyone could give would be very much appreciated.

Cheers

John

John
Have a look at the discussion thread just below this one, which concerns a similar scenario - may be of help.

Unless there is a right of succession written into an agreement, then the HA didn't have a duty to offer him the tenancy. Whether or not the HA should have accepted the notice to vacate from the daughter is arguable methinks: on the face of it she didn't have the authority to speak on her Mother's behalf..........

Thanks Mike,

There is no right of succession written into the tenancy agreement. My real concern is that, in my opinion, the HA have accepted notice to end a tenancy from someone, albeit a family member, who doesn't have the proper authority to make that decision. I think the HA has got confused between appointee and power of attorney, which potentially isn't going to reflect too well on the HA if the son takes the HA to court, which he is planning on doing. Not sure what it says about the relationships in the family either......

Have a good Christmas

Cheers

John