What constitutes service of a completion notice for rating purposes?

Liability for non-domestic rates depends on a property being entered as a hereditament in the rating list. So the legislation provides a mechanism that enables rating authorities to bring newly constructed buildings, or buildings that can reasonably be expected to be completed within three months, onto the rating list. UKI (Kingsway) Ltd v Westminster City Council [2018] UKSC 67 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 ratepayer. The company was not authorised to serve notices for the rating authority or to accept service of legal documents for the ratepayer. However, the receptionist scanned the notice and transmitted it electronically to the ratepayer, who appealed against it. The Valuation Tribunal decided that the completion notice was not validly served, but the Upper Tribunal overturned the decision. The case went to the Court of Appeal – which sided with the ratepayer – and made its way to the Supreme Court, which had to decide whether the completion notice was validly served on the ratepayer even though the method of service was indirect, and even though the ratepayer had received the notice in electronic form, rather than on paper. Lord Carnwath, who spoke for the court, accepted that the method of attempted service adopted by the rating authority was far from ideal. However, under general principles, and on the particular facts of this case, the notice had been successfully served. 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”. In other words, it is permissive, not mandatory, and is designed, not to exclude other methods of service, but rather to protect the server from the risk of non-delivery. In the court’s view, all that was needed to establish that the notice had been served was actual receipt of the notice, and a sufficient causal link with the actions of the rating authority. If a notice is correctly addressed but mistakenly delivered to a neighbour who passes it on to the intended recipient, the court could see no reason why that should not be treated as effective service – and that was effectively what had happened here. Furthermore, in Hastie & Jenkerson v McMahon [1990] 1 WLR 1575, the Court of Appeal accepted that service of a list of documents by fax was valid service for the purposes of a consent order in civil proceedings, because what was produced was the document intended to be served. So, service by fax was valid – even before the enactment of the Electronic Communications Act 2000. And the court could not see any good reason for distinguishing transmission by fax from the transmission by email that had occurred in this case. Allyson Colby is a property law consultant