Valentine, the third licensee to go through the Pubs Independent Conciliation and Arbitration Service and the first to lose a PICA-Service case, accused Enterprise of not assessing her rent properly and misleading her into signing a rent review during the appeal hearing on 9 and 10 April.
The court heard that when a rent review took place in 2007, Valentine was led to believe that the rent calculations had taken into account a disregard of £9,000pa, equating to a net annual difference of £4,500pa.
A disregard means that physical developments of the property should be taken off the rent — Valentine had spent £90,000 making improvements to the pub.
Valentine was seeking damages resulting from Enterprise’s alleged failure to ‘set-off’ the disregard against rent. Enterprise said that Valentine had been underpaying rent for a “significant amount of time”.
In a judgement that took almost an hour-and-a-half, Judge Donald Cryan cited several cases — inside and outside the trade — where set-offs had been argued.
He concluded by saying that the language used to explain the anti set-off clause in the contract between Valentine and Enterprise Inns was “as simple as possible: to pay rent without any set-off”.
Judge Cryan said: “It is argued, by Tony Verduyn [Valentine’s barrister], that in a landlord and tenant case one has to look at the complete matrix and disparity between the parties and interpret the [set-off] clause accordingly.
“Here, the lease avoided temptation of using multiple phrases which resulted in the language being as simple as possible — to pay rent without any set-off.
“It is a large category but being a simple phrase, it is easy to understand. I’m satisfied that the language precludes any set-off of any type, including that of fraud.”
Valentine had also lodged a counter claim with her defence saying that Enterprise breached its code of practice, and that her legal rights had been compromised by the PICA-Service decision — claims that will be considered at a later date.