Jurisdiction of the First-tier Tribunal, AI submissions, and case discoverability — a stark reminder

Mitchell Skilling considers questions of jurisdiction and AI hallucinations, and finds grave shortcomings in the Housing and Property Chamber decisions database.

The background: 'arising from' a tenancy

Five years ago, I wrote a short piece on the University of Aberdeen Law School Blog on the interpretation of the words ‘arising from a tenancy’ in the context of Section 71 of the Private Housing (Tenancies) (Scotland) Act 2016. This provision, as part of the sweeping reforms to Scottish private sector tenancies which took effect in December 2017, awards jurisdiction over non-criminal matters arising from private residential tenancies to the First-tier Tribunal (FtT) for Scotland’s Housing and Property Chamber, to the exclusion of the sheriff.

The aim of this provision was to relieve some of the workload of the sheriff and, in so doing, hopefully facilitate speedier case resolution for private landlords and tenants in cases with no criminality element. However, early disputes arose as to the exact limits of what disputes could be classed as ‘arising from’ a tenancy. In the 2020s, the interpretation of the term has more or less settled around the method of determination proposed by now-Sheriff Principal Nigel Ross (then hearing cases as a member of the Upper Tribunal for Scotland) in Anderson v Stark [2019] UT 48, who said: 

Whether a dispute ‘arises from’ a PRT [private residential tenancy] depends, in my view, on the individual circumstances of each case. It is a matter of fact and degree. It is unlikely to be enough simply to point to a tenuous causal connection, such as bankruptcy arising through the failure to pay rent and which is not covered.

Thus, in that case, a guarantee agreement obliging a third party to a tenancy to cover unpaid rent for the tenant under a separate private residential tenancy contract, and therefore an agreement with no logical purpose absent said tenancy, was enforceable via an application to the FtT. The line of authority used by Sheriff Principal Ross to reach this conclusion, including the sheriff’s decision in Parker v Inkersall Investments Ltd [2018] SC DUM 66, is something I discussed extensively in my PhD thesis.

Debt, dispute and decisions 

Against that background, I now consider the decision of Sheriff John MacRitchie SSC in a recent case submitted under sheriff court simple procedure, Your Home Partners v Michael Kellichan and Michelle Hood [2026] SC KDY 34. In this case, landlords David and Leslie Meek, as partners and trustees of the claimant partnership, sought rent arrears of £5,000 from their former tenants under a private residential tenancy.

While it is abundantly clear that the central dispute involves a core obligation under the tenancy, the claimants nonetheless submitted that it was the sheriff, rather than the FtT, who had jurisdiction to deal with the case on the basis that the tenancy had concluded. This led the sheriff to instruct the sheriff clerk to reject the claim for lack of jurisdiction, but rather than make an application to the FtT, the claimants instead chose to double down on their position, insisting that any remaining arrears were ‘a simple debt’, not a tenancy dispute.

The claimants in this case did not instruct a solicitor, but their case did contain reference to legal authorities. In particular, they submitted that two FtT decisions, with reference numbers of FTS/HPC/CV/19/3145 and FTS/HPC/CV/20/0624, supported their position, being cases where jurisdiction had been expressly declined once the tenancy had ended. I will return to these cases later.

More significantly, the claimants also lodged what they proffered as extracts from the ‘Small Claims (Scotland) Rules – Section 41a’ and the ‘Interest on Debts (Scotland) Act 1985 – Section 1’. I am unable to provide links to these provisions, for the simple reason that they do not exist. Upon further inquiry, the claimants admitted that they had obtained the case references and statutory extracts by use of generative AI and submitted them in good faith, believing them to be real.

The issue of AI hallucinations is not unknown to the courts of the UK and other jurisdictions, and a good few videos can be found online of judges reacting negatively to the use of AI lawyers and submissions. The sheriff in this case ultimately decided against finding the claimants to be in contempt of court for the lodging of false legal references without manually checking their authenticity, for the twin reasons that the claimants had acted in good faith and had withdrawn the submissions upon realising they were false.

This case simply adds to the pile of reminders of the danger of, as Sheriff MacRitchie put it, “a reckless reliance on AI by any party without verifying that the same is genuine”. I would argue, however, that this is not the true issue disclosed by this case.

The cited cases: real or illusion?

I said I would return to the two case citations from past FtT decisions provided by the claimants. Sheriff MacRitchie was unable to locate them himself and instructed the sheriff clerk to contact the FtT to ascertain the authenticity of the decisions. The FtT duly informed the sheriff clerk that there were no cases with the mentioned references. The logical conclusion is that these cases are also hallucinations. However, that is not the case; at least one of these cases does exist.

That case is FTS/HPC/CV/19/3145, an application decided on 25 November 2019 and made by landlord Colin Millar seeking to recover possession of a property let under a short assured tenancy under the Housing (Scotland) Act 1988 from Emma Hazel and the Reverend Martin Hazel. The applicant’s solicitor initially included insufficient information in the form and did not respond to a request from the FtT for further information. As a consequence, the application was rejected as being frivolous or vexatious within the meaning of Rule 8(1)(a) of the Housing and Property Chamber’s Rules of Procedure.

No suggestion appears in this brief sifting decision, one of hundreds in near-identical terms published by the Tribunal, that the FtT did not have jurisdiction (and indeed recovery of possession is a clear-cut example of a matter arising from a tenancy), so the case remains of no use to Mr and Mrs Meek. However, it is indisputably a real decision and not an AI hallucination to that extent.

I was unable to find a decision with the reference number FTS/HPC/CV/20/0624. It is entirely possible that it is buried deep within the 1,500-plus pages of published decisions in the FtT’s Eviction and Civil Proceedings database (‘CV’ being the marker for Rule 111 applications under the Procedure Rules), or it may, as Sheriff MacRitchie speculated, be unreported.

With sufficient time, I could answer this question; however, there is a barrier to accessing this information in the form of the Housing and Property Chamber’s decision search mechanism, which only allows for cases to be filtered by the Rule under which the application is heard or the names of the parties. No filter exists for decision reference numbers. If I narrow it down to Rule 111 applications, there remain 441 pages of applications to sift through and, unlike many other websites, it is impossible to jump to any particular page among those, only to move in multiples of five from the very top or very bottom of the list.

The overriding objective of the FtT, per Rule 2 of the Procedure Rules, includes a duty for the Tribunal to ensure, so far as practicable, that the parties are able to participate fully in the proceedings, with a view to ensuring that litigants in person are not overly disadvantaged by a lack of legal representation. Absent a usable search mechanism, the claimants in Your Home Partners had no way to verify if the tribunal cases cited by their hallucinating genAI program were real, even if they wanted to, and elected to trust the machine, nearly resulting in them being found in contempt of court.

More gravely, a sheriff and other members of the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service were incapable of finding cases decided by another branch of their own service, and the branch responsible for issuing those decisions could not find them either. This should not be considered an acceptable state of affairs.