contract-law england-and-wales tenancy-rules
Statutorily prescribed terms supersede meeting of the minds?
<p>Let’s take as an instantive fantasy a tenancy lease in which a tenant, secretly knowing their rights, deceptively enters into a contract with a greedy landlord who is hopelessly ignorant and apathetic of the laws that contains terms favouring the landlord but which are statutorily unfair and unenforceable. The landlord may well not have agreed to the contract at all without these terms to entice them, and yet tenants rights laws apparently exist to protect certain supposed fundamental rights and dignities of tenants with regards to their very homes.</p>
<p>In this case there was a genuine meeting of the minds on an illegal, statutory unfair basis, but the tenant then asserts their statutory rights to contravene the meeting of the minds and reverting to the statutorily prescribed terms.</p>
<p>It seems that in contracts a meeting of the minds, or sincerely held mutual understanding of the terms on which the pair are entering into a contract, is somehow fundamentally important.</p>
<p>Actually what if the tenant doesn’t know their rights coming  into the contract but takes advice later on to learn their statutory rights.</p>
<p>Is meeting of the minds unequivocally subordinate to statutorily mandated contract terms?</p>

<h2>The landlord knows the law</h2>
<p>When the tenant and the landlord made their agreement, both parties <em>legally</em> knew what the law was even if one or both of them (the landlord in this case) was actually ignorant of it. If the landlord failed to inform themselves of the law, how is that the tenants fault? Particularly since the landlord is knowingly in the <em>business</em> of renting out accommodation and the tenant isn’t.</p>
<p>When the “meeting of the minds” occurred, the actual law was legally known to both of them irrespective of if it was actually known, and was therefore part of that “meeting”.</p>
