Receipt of a scanned copy of a document from a third party did not constitute service of a completion notice for rating purposes

Rating authorities can issue a completion notice when it comes to their attention that a newly constructed building has been completed or can reasonably be expected to be completed within three months. UKI (Kingsway) Ltd v Westminster City Council [2017] EWCA Civ 430; [2017] PLSCS 130 concerned the service of a completion notice purporting to bring office space with a rateable value of £2.75m onto the rating list. The notice was taken by hand to the property and given to a receptionist employed by the facilities management company that managed the building for the owner. The company did not have actual or ostensible authority to accept service of legal documents for the owner. But the receptionist scanned the notice and transmitted it electronically to the owner, who appealed against it. The Valuation Tribunal decided that the completion notice had not been validly served. This resulted in the removal of the premises from the rating list, but the Upper Tribunal overturned the decision. The issue for the Court of Appeal was whether the Upper Tribunal had been right to do so. Lady Justice Gloster, who spoke for the court, noted that sub-paragraph 8 of Schedule 4A of the Local Government Finance Act 1988, which deals with the permissible methods of serving a completion notice, opens with the words “without prejudice to any other mode of service”. She accepted, therefore, that the methods of service described in paragraph 8 are permissive and do not provide a complete or mandatory code for service. Her Ladyship compared paragraph 8 with section 23(1) of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1927; they both enable the giver of a notice to shift the risk of non-receipt to the recipient by adopting one of the specified methods of service. But that did not mean that any form of indirect transmission of a completion notice constitutes “service” for the purposes of the 1988 Act . The statute, which imposes liability for tax on a property owner on an assumed basis and strict deadlines for appeals, requires a “billing authority” to “serve” a completion notice on “the owner of the building”. And, for the billing authority merely to leave its notice with a third party, who was not authorised to accept service of the notice on the landowner’s behalf, or to effect service on behalf of the authority, in the hope that the notice would be brought to the attention of the landowner, did not, on any natural or normal usage of the words, constitute “service” on “the owner of the building”. The court did not need to decide the point and chose not to decide whether transmission of a scanned copy of the completion notice would have negated what might otherwise have been valid “service”.  But Lady Justice Gloster suggested that, in circumstances where detailed regulations have been made governing the use of electronic communications in other areas of non—domestic rating law, where use of electronic methods of communication appears to be predicated on the agreement of both parties, it would be surprising, to say the least, if electronic communication of a completion notice would constitute valid service (unless the parties had agreed otherwise). Allyson Colby is a property law consultant