We acted for a residential accommodation operator which held an underlease of the third and fourth floors of a mixed-use building in Camden, London, comprising nine separately occupied flats. Its immediate landlord, the head tenant, held a 10-year lease of the floors at an initial rent of £300,000 per annum. The freehold, and with it the reversion to the head lease, had been bought by a new owner in October 2023, and our client took its underlease from the head tenant on 1 April 2025 for 12 months (extendable by a further 36 months) at £27,500 per month.
A dispute arose between the freeholder and the head tenant over rent arrears. The head tenant said it had paid substantial sums under a payment plan, and around £75,000 in overpayments to the previous landlord, which had never been credited. The freeholder took the view that payments to the previous owner were irrelevant to it and, in July 2025, issued forfeiture proceedings in the County Court for non-payment of rent, stating that no underlessee was entitled to claim relief. Our client was never served. It learned of the hearing only the day before, its representative arrived about twenty minutes after the case had been dealt with and the judge declined to hear from her, and a possession order was made on 9 September 2025 for arrears of £118,428.59, with use and occupation charges of £863.67 per day.
The claim was then transferred to the High Court for enforcement, a writ of possession was issued and notices of eviction were fixed to the flats, giving an eviction date of 15 December 2025 at 8am. Our client only discovered that a possession order had been made when the notices appeared around 1 December 2025, and it instructed us immediately. By then the head tenant had gone into liquidation.
Challenges
The challenges to be addressed included:
Time pressure - the eviction of nine occupied flats was due to be carried out by High Court Enforcement Officers within two weeks of our instruction.
Our client was not a party to the proceedings - a final possession order had been made without its rights as a lawful underlessee ever being considered, the landlord had pleaded that there was no underlessee entitled to relief, and the court had been told the landlord was unsure whether any of the flats were occupied.
The head tenant was in liquidation - so our client could not rely on it to challenge the arrears or seek relief, and obtaining bank statements and proof of payment was very difficult.
The rent account was disputed and had never been reconciled - the head lease required rent to be paid without deduction or set-off, which made the true sum due hard to establish.
The procedure was complex - the possession claim had moved from the County Court to the King’s Bench Division of the High Court for enforcement, while a claim for relief from forfeiture belonged in the County Court.
Solutions
We prepared and issued an urgent application in the High Court on 10 December 2025, supported by witness evidence, counsel’s skeleton argument, a draft order and a paginated hearing bundle of more than 260 pages including the relevant statutory provisions, and secured a hearing on 12 December 2025, three days before the scheduled eviction. The application asked the court to stay or suspend execution of the writ.
We based the application on CPR 40.9 (the right of a person directly affected by an order to apply to set it aside or vary it), CPR 19.2(2) (adding a party) and the court’s case management powers under CPR 3.1(2)(g) and (p). Our central argument was simple: our client’s right to possession had never been determined, and it would be unjust to put it and its occupiers out of the flats only for them to be reinstated if relief were later granted. We put the timeline in evidence, including our client’s emails to the landlord’s solicitors and to the court the day before the original hearing, enclosing the underlease and confirming that every flat was occupied.
On the liquidation issue, rather than depend on the head tenant, we put our client forward in its own right as an underlessee under section 146(2) and (4) of the Law of Property Act 1925. We drafted a claim for relief from forfeiture and, in the alternative, a vesting order for the term of the underlease, and exhibited it to the evidence with a proposed direction in the draft order that it be issued within seven days. This showed the court that our client was serious and ready to act, and gave the court a clear route to resolve its position.
Our solution to the rent issue was to gather and present the payment history in a witness statement: payments of £461,315.03 to the freeholder from October 2023 and £480,141.74 to the previous landlord, together with the email exchanges showing that the head tenant’s requests for a reconciled account had been dismissed. This shifted the focus from a headline arrears figure to the landlord’s failure to account properly, a weakness already apparent at the possession hearing, where the district judge had declined to give judgment for further arrears without a copy of the account, and supported our client’s case for staying enforcement until the sums actually due could be established.
On the procedural issue, we brought the application in the High Court, where the writ was being enforced, so that enforcement could be stopped in the court with control over it, while preparing the relief claim for the County Court at Central London.
Impact
At the hearing on 12 December 2025, three days before the eviction, the Master stayed enforcement of the writ of possession. The stay was granted on terms that our client file its application in the County Court to set aside the possession order and be added as a party, and pay into court mesne profits, followed by monthly payments of the rent. Provided those terms are met, the writ cannot be enforced until our client’s application has been decided.
This outcome created real value for our client. The eviction of nine occupied flats was stopped, protecting our client’s occupiers and its rental business at the property. Importantly, our client gained the opportunity to have its right to relief from forfeiture decided on its merits, rather than losing its underlease by default in proceedings to which it had never been a party.
