A development or clarification of Hudson v Hathway?

Ashtons Legal was previously instructed in the landmark case of Hudson v Hathway, which concerned a constructive trust over a family home. In 2022, the Court of Appeal found that email communication, where signed by the sender, may be sufficient to meet the statutory requirements of s.53(1)(c) Law of Property Act 1925.

The January 2026 judgement of Maxine Reid-Roberts & Anor v Hsiao Mei-Lin & Anor has sought to test the Hudson v Hathway principle.

The recent case centres on a divorced couple, in which a week before the final hearing in the Family Court, the husband was made bankrupt and was deemed to owe some £2.5 million.

The wife sought to challenge the High Court’s 2024 hearing, which declared that she owned only 50% of the family home and ordered her to sell it in 2032 once her children were adults. This would enable part of the sale proceeds to be freed up for her husband’s creditors.

The wife attempted to rely on an exchange of WhatsApp messages that occurred prior to the bankruptcy proceedings as evidence that she was the sole owner of the property and that it should not be considered in her husband’s bankruptcy proceedings.

Upon consideration of the messages, the Court held that even if the content was sufficiently clear to be read as the husband transferring interest, which it was not, the WhatsApp messages themselves did not meet the statutory requirements of s.53(1)(a) or (c) of the Law of Property Act 1925. In contrast to Hudson v Hathway, where an email signed by the sender was found to be sufficient, the Court found here that the name in the header of the WhatsApp message was merely incidental to the message and only enabled the sender to be identified. It could not be said that the name within the header amounted to a signature. The wife was ordered to vacate the property by July 2027.

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