A landlord normally has a responsibility to a tenant for certain aspects of the safety of the let premises. Commonly, the terms of the lease specify that the landlord is responsible for the external and common areas of the building except for damage caused by a tenant or any areas for which the tenant is made responsible under the lease. In general, a landlord’s responsibilities are set out in the Occupiers’ Liability Act 1957 (OLA).

Recently, when a tenant of a terraced house was injured when she fell down steps leading to the basement level, she alleged that the steps were ‘unduly slippery’ due to being wet and dirty. She claimed damages from the landlord. She also alleged that the landlord had failed to maintain the steps in a safe condition because they lacked a guard rail.

Her claim was therefore based on both the OLA and the Defective Premises Act 1972 (DPA), which also governs the maintenance of premises in a safe condition generally.

The court considered that the section of the OLA that dealt with keeping premises safe for visitors could not apply and that the section which dealt with a landlord’s duty to tenants had been superseded by the DPA.

In the assessment of the judge, where a personal injury to a tenant results from a landlord failing to repair a property, the DPA applies and the landlord’s responsibilities with regard to the safety of the tenant are limited to those arising under the DPA. This requires a landlord to ‘take such care as is reasonable in all the circumstances’ to ensure that the tenant is ‘reasonably safe from personal injury or from damage to their property caused by a relevant defect’. However, the Act also states that the landlord does not owe the tenant ‘any duty...in respect of any defect in the state of the premises arising from, or continuing because of, a failure to carry out an obligation expressly imposed on the tenant by the tenancy’.

On the particular facts of the case, the court found that the landlord was not liable to the tenant.