Landowner’s breach of contract

[kerrish09]

Have previously posted in Legal but had no joy unfortunately. I’m a long term lurker though. I manage a licensed premises whose building adjoins & makes use of another landowner’s carpark. For many many years we’ve paid an annual fee for staff spaces, access to our stairway, storage of bins etc. The landowner has changed the layout & our car parking spaces are no longer available but they are still expecting this year’s annual fee. Does anyone know if we have any legal right to challenge the new layout &/or the fee, especially since we’ve had this arrangement in place for approximately 40+ years?

What does the contract say?

Without more details, I can only say they have the right to change their land. However, you are paying for a service (the right to use the land) and if you are not getting that service then you have the right to change also.
Have you spoken about it with the landowner?

Key questions -

• was the agreement in writing/can you produce witnesses about what the agreement was?
• were the car parking spaces available for your use some of the time, or was the space permanently reserved for your use? Did you have the right to prevent the landowner from using those spaces when you weren’t using them/to walk through them etc?
• have you told the landowner that the fee included parking and objected to paying the same fee?

Yes there’s a written contract which details the terms & plans. They’ve been breached since the parking spaces became unavailable though. Is it likely we’d have a strong enough legal argument to refuse to pay do you think?
Does anyone also know if there’s a legal term or regulation regarding our historical use of the land?

Nobody can really advise you without seeing the actual contract. It may have terms saying that the landowner can terminate the agreement or decide to only provide part of the services at any time. It may say they can stop you parking if you’ve breached site regulations or something.

If it doesn’t contain any right for the landowner to terminate then you would tell them they are in breach of contract and ultimately you could claim against them for damages.

If you had a written agreement setting out the terms of use, then your use is governed by that agreement. You can’t claim some kind of historical use allows you to carry on using the parking spaces.

As a first step, surely you’ve told the landowner that you don’t want to pay the same now you don’t have the parking spaces?