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	England and Wales Court of Appeal (Civil Division) Decisions
You are here: BAILII >> Databases >> England and Wales Court of Appeal (Civil Division) Decisions >> Bello, R (on the application of) v London Borough Of Lewisham [2001] EWCA Civ 49 (23 January 2001) URL: http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2001/49.html Cite as: [2001] EWCA Civ 49

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IN THE SUPREME COURT OF JUDICATURE
COURT OF APPEAL (CIVIL DIVISION)
ON APPEAL FROM THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
QUEEN'S BENCH DIVISION
THE ADMINISTRATIVE COURT
(Mr Justice Turner)

		Royal Courts of Justice Strand London WC2 Tuesday, 23rd January 2001

1. LORD JUSTICE MAY: This is an application for permission to appeal against a decision of Mr Justice Turner in the Administrative Court on 9th October 2000.
2. Mr Bello has appeared in court this morning to support his application and, incidentally, very kindly agreed to have his application dealt with early because he arrived in very good time and somebody else who was supposed to be here has not arrived.
3. The respondent to the application for judicial review before Mr Justice Turner was the London Borough of Lewisham. Mr Bello had applied for judicial review on 22nd July 1999, naming the London Borough of Lewisham as respondent, following an order made by Greenwich Magistrates' Court on 13th July 1999. That order was that he should pay £410.39 within 28 days or be committed to prison for 90 days. The Greenwich Magistrates' Court order was made to enforce a liability order made on 28th May 1996 for unpaid council tax.
4. For a period between 1st April 1993 and 1st June 1994 there was liability to pay in total £439.33 council tax for premises (I think a flat) at 140 New Cross Road, Lewisham. The respondent council concluded on information available to it (including, on the evidence, verbal communications with Mr Bello) that he was the person whom it should charge, and on 28th May 1996 a liability order was made against him. In due course a bailiff was instructed to levy distress in respect of this order but, in September 1997, the bailiff was unable to find any sufficient goods for that purpose.
5. On 19th March 1998 Mr Bello was summoned to appear at Greenwich Magistrates' Court, and he did so on 7th April 1998 for a means inquiry. It appears that an agreement was reached that he would pay £100 a month. The matter was then adjourned to 6th October 1998. When the matter returned to court, he did not attend and a warrant was issued. The respondent council, the London Borough of Lewisham, believed that he had paid one £100 instalment, but he challenges this and it may be that his understanding was that the payment was made for different premises.
6. However that may be, on 13th July 1999 Mr Bello was appearing at Greenwich Magistrates' Court in connection with other matters concerning council tax. The representative of the London Borough of Lewisham who was there saw and recognised him and applied for an order against him in relation to the premises which are the subject matter of the present application. The court was apparently satisfied that the liability order had been made against him and, as I have said, ordered him to pay £410.39 within 28 days or be committed to prison for 90 days.
7. The application which Mr Bellow made for judicial review was dated 22nd July 1999, about 9 days after the Magistrates' Court hearing. It named the London Borough of Lewisham as respondent but, curiously, did not also include the Greenwich Magistrates whose order he sought to challenge.
8. The grounds of his application essentially were these. The first was that he was not the person properly chargeable with the council tax. That person should have been his daughter, Miss A Bello. He says that he himself is Mr T A Bello. However, he appears to state in his skeleton argument to this court that the correct person may have been a Miss Jackie Lesley who, he has told me today, was there unlawfully and was later, so he says, evicted. His second ground for applying was that he is not Mr A Bello but Mr T A Bello and that he did not own the property. He was not in control of it, only of a Nigerian community concerned with the area generally. The third ground of the application was that the court should not have made the order because he did not have notice of the application before arriving at the Magistrates' Court for other matters.
9. On 17th December 1999 Mr Justice Latham adjourned the application to be renewed on notice to the respondent. On 11th February 2000 Mr Justice Richards gave permission to apply for judicial review.
10. The application was, as I have said, heard by Mr Justice Turner on 9th October 2000. He refused the application. He did so essentially on two grounds. First, he held that Mr Bello's main ground of objection was not available to him in the Magistrates' Court. Section 16 of the Local Government Finance Act 1992 provides that a person may appeal not to the Magistrates' Court but to a valuation tribunal if he is aggrieved by any decision of a billing authority that he is liable to pay council tax in respect of a dwelling. Further, Part VI of the Council Tax (Administration and Enforcement) Regulations 1992 contains an elaborate procedure for enforcement of payment in a Magistrates' Court; but, by regulation 57, it is provided that any matter which could be the subject of an appeal under section 16 of the 1992 Act may not be raised in proceedings under that Part. Mr Justice Turner held that the main question of identity and responsibility for the payment of council tax which Mr Bello was raising was an issue of fact which it was not competent for the Magistrates' Court to investigate. Secondly, Mr Justice Turner held that, even if Mr Bello had succeeded in effectively challenging the substance of the order, he would have failed in his application because he was, as Mr Justice Turner said, some 15 months out of time in raising the challenge and that, he held, was much too late.
11. As to this second point, the application for judicial review was made shortly after the decision of the Greenwich Magistrates' Court and was, as such, it seems to me, in time. But as to a challenge to the liability order made on 28th May 1996, it was in fact some three years out of time, and no doubt that is what Mr Justice Turner was in essence referring to.
12. Mr Bello's proposed grounds of appeal to this court are essentially as follows. First, he is not, for reasons equivalent to those advanced in the court below, the correct person to be charged with this liability for council tax. Second, the proceedings before Mr Justice Turner were procedurally unfair because the respondents produced over 50 pages of faxed documents at a very late stage. Mr Bello says that there should have been an adjournment for at least two hours or to a different day. Third, even if he were liable for the council tax, it should have been referred to his trustee in bankruptcy.
13. This last ground of appeal refers, as Mr Bello has explained this morning, to the fact that at some time between 18th November 1992 and 17th November 1995 he was an undischarged bankrupt. He has produced details of that which he has obtained from the Official Receiver's Office of the Insolvency Service. But in any event it seems to me that that would have had no direct bearing on an order made in the Greenwich Magistrates' Court in 1999 or a liability order made in 1996.
14. Having considered the papers carefully and listened to Mr Bello this morning, in my judgment there is no merit in this proposed appeal and it has no reasonable prospect of success. Mr Justice Turner was plainly right to hold that any challenge to the liability order should have been made, under section 16 of the 1992 Act, to a valuation tribunal and that a challenge based on identity and consequent liability to pay the tax was not available in the Magistrates' Court. In these circumstances, although the application for judicial review was in time by reference to the order of the Magistrates' Court, it was hopelessly out of time in so far as it sought to challenge the basis of the original liability. In this context the late receipt of documents cannot be regarded as material. There is the additional problem, not mentioned by Mr Justice Turner, that any challenge to the order of the Greenwich Magistrates' Court should have included those Magistrates as respondent to the application.
15. For these reasons in my judgment this is a proposed appeal which has no reasonable prospect of success and the application for permission to launch it is refused.
Order: application for permission to appeal dismissed.