‘The Defendant owns the former County Hall opposite the Houses of Parliament on the South Bank. Until March 2019, the Claimant, the well-known “quick service” restaurant chain, ran a restaurant from part of the ground floor and basement of the building pursuant to a lease which had the protection of the 1954 Act. The restaurant was one of the Claimants highest profile sites. At the end of the contractual term, the Defendant landlord served a notice pursuit to section 25 indicating that it would oppose the grant of any new tenancy on the “own occupation” ground in section 30(1)(g). That lead to proceedings in the County Court at Central London in late 2018. The Defendant called two witnesses who attested that the landlord intended to run its own restaurant from the premises serving Japanese food under the trading name “Zen Bento”. It produced a business plan to that effect. The landlord’s principal offered an undertaking to that effect. Despite extensive cross-examination of the landlord’s witnesses, the County Court Judge accepted the landlord’s case, and indeed its undertaking, that it had a firm and settled intention to open a “Zen Bento” restaurant and made an order terminating the tenancy in March 2019. However, the landlord failed to open a restaurant at the site when it said it was going to (by November 2019). It opened a restaurant on the ground floor in March 2020 and, having opened the same restaurant briefly in September 2020 and closed it due to COVID restrictions, it opened a different restaurant, a coffee shop and bakery, in the basement in early 2021. The former tenants sued the Defendant in deceit and for damages under section 37A of the 1954 Act. The landlord accepted that the restaurants which it had in fact opened (and which were still trading) were different from the one it had told the County Court it intended to open and that there had been a delay in opening them but said it had genuinely changed its mind as to what it wanted to do and that the delay was largely down to COVID restrictions.’
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Landmark Chambers, 13th May 2024
Source: www.landmarkchambers.co.uk
