[2001] 1 AC 27; [1999] 3 WLR 1113; [1999] 4 All ER 705; [2000] UKHRR 25; (2000) 32 HLR 178; [2000] L&TR 44; (1999) Times 4 November, HL
Gay partners could not live as ‘husband and wife’ but were family members on facts
Mr Thompson was the statutory tenant of premises. Mr Fitzpatrick lived with him from 1976 in a ‘long-standing, close, loving and faithful monogamous, homosexual relationship’. In 1986 Mr Thompson suffered severe head injuries and, as a result, Mr Fitzpatrick nursed him until his death in 1994. HHJ Colin Smith QC found that Mr Fitzpatrick was outside the statutory definition of a person entitled to succeed on the death of the statutory tenant since he was not a person who was a member of the orig-inal tenant’s family residing with him for six months immediately before his death. The Court of Appeal, after a detailed consideration of various statutes and authorities, both from British and North American courts, by a majority, dismissed Mr Fitzpatrick’s appeal.
His further appeal was, however, allowed by a majority of the House of Lords. Although gay partners could not live together as husband and wife, they could be members of the same family for the purposes of Rent Act succession. Since a man and a woman living together in a stable and permanent sexual relationship were capable of being members of a family, it could not make sense to say that a gay partnership of the same character could not. Lord Slynn of Hadley said:
The hallmarks of the relationship were essentially that there should be a degree of mutual inter-dependence, of the sharing of lives, of caring and love, of commitment and support. In respect of legal relationships these are presumed, though evidently are not always present as the family law and criminal courts know only too well. In de facto relationships these are capable, if proved, of creating membership of the tenant’s family.
A person claiming that he or she was a member of the same-sex original tenant’s family had to establish, rather than merely assert, the necessary hallmarks of the relationship. All the cases stress the need for a perman-ent and stable relationship. A transient superficial relationship does not suffice if it was intimate. Mere cohabitation by friends as a matter of convenience is not sufficient either. In other statutes, in other contexts, the words may have a wider or a narrower meaning.
See now Rent Act 1977 Schedule 1, which has been amended by the Civil Partnership Act 2004 to give rights of succession to civil partners.