(b) Here, the Respondent did not even understand the legal argument advanced in the Written Submissions, let alone verify its correctness. In any event, the argument on audi alteram partem that he blindly adopted was misconceived. His submission was that my refusal to take the Rejected Documents into consideration infringed that principle as it “requires equal opportunity”. ⁴⁹ That was plainly wrong because the Respondent was given his right to be heard over two days of trial. Importantly, the right to be heard does not give a party a blank cheque to breach the Assistant Registrar’s directions given at the consultation stage. Those directions are made for a reason, and they bind the parties. The right to be heard also confers no right to conduct litigation by surprise.

(c) Paragraph 5(9)(a)–(b) of the Gen AI Guide provides that the tribunal is entitled to award costs, and to disregard or attribute less evidentiary weight to Gen AI output, where a party fails to comply with the requirements of the Gen AI Guide. In this case, I rejected the Written Submissions because the Respondent did not verify the accuracy of the legal argument advanced in them. I also rejected the Second GA because it was his third attempt to relitigate a matter that had already been dealt with on the first day of trial.

78 The third matter concerned the manner in which the Respondent gave his oral testimony. At the start of both days of trial, parties were specifically told that any answer given under affirmation had to be their confirmed position, and that if they needed time to check or verify an answer before giving it, I would oblige provided the time required was reasonable. The Respondent did not avail himself of that indulgence. He would instead say one thing and change his answer moments later, often reversing himself more than once on the very same point, and sometimes doing so after we had moved on to a different issue altogether. This happened persistently across both days and in relation to each of the 10 Defects. The result was that we had to backtrack repeatedly over ground already traversed, and the trial was unnecessarily protracted. To be clear, what I took into account on costs was not the inconsistency in the Respondent’s evidence, but the disruption his manner of testifying caused to the orderly conduct of the trial.

79 The fourth matter was that, on the second day of trial, at around 10.46 am, I caught the Respondent attending an online course conducted by the National Trades Union Congress (“NTUC”) (the “Course”). Some context is necessary.

(a) The Respondent had earlier filed an application for a change of court date, SCT/APPL/119640/2026, on 27 July 2026 (the “CCD Application”), seeking to move the second day of trial because he had to attend the Course, which ran from 9 am to 6.30 pm. In support of that application, he attached a schedule from NTUC for its courses (“NTUC’s Schedule”). ⁵⁰ I rejected the CCD Application. The second day of trial had been fixed for 1 September 2026 only after both parties had checked and confirmed their availability for that date. Moreover, NTUC’s Schedule showed that the Respondent would have known of the Course’s date from as early as 13 July 2026. Thus, there was no reason why he could not have said, on the first day of trial when I asked parties for their availability, that he was unavailable on 1 September 2026. More fundamentally, he did not obtain the Claimant’s consent to the postponement, or explain why it could not be obtained, both of which are required under paras 46(4) and 46(6) of the State Courts Practice Directions 2021.

(b) Returning to the second day of trial, at around 10.46 am, I heard for the first time a soft background sound that resembled someone else speaking in the same room as the Respondent. When I asked where that sound came from, the Respondent candidly admitted that he was attending the Course on his mobile phone at the same time as the trial. When I told him that his behaviour was absolutely unacceptable and directed him to cease, he then claimed that he had only logged on earlier to take attendance and logged off thereafter, and that the presentation for the Course had somehow appeared on his phone without his knowing how.

(c) I did not accept such a flimsy explanation. I found it to be patently false. NTUC’s Schedule showed that the Course was conducted over Zoom, as a unique meeting number and password were given for it. ⁵¹ A person does not find himself in a Zoom meeting by accident. For the presenter’s voice to have been heard at all, the Respondent must have taken the deliberate step of joining the meeting. On his own account, that was exactly what he had done at the start of the Course in order to take attendance. What he wanted me to believe was that he had thereafter logged off, and that the presentation had somehow reappeared on his phone of its own accord. That could not be so. Even if he had logged off as he claimed, rejoining the meeting would itself have required a deliberate act on his part, which he never suggested he had done. Therefore, it was more likely than not that the Respondent had never logged off at all, and had been attending the Course covertly from when it started at 9 am, while simultaneously attending the trial.

80 I pause to say something about the significance of the Respondent’s conduct in attending the Course, which went beyond the discourtesy of attempting to do two things at once. Attending trial by video-conference is a convenience extended to litigants. It is not an entitlement that may be insisted upon. By rejecting the CCD Application, I had made plain that the trial would proceed on 1 September 2026, and that the Course was not a reason to move it. The Respondent nevertheless attended the Course covertly while the trial was underway, and he was able to do so only because of the very convenience the tribunal had extended to him. He was also no mere bystander, being not only the party defending the Main Claim but the party pursuing the Counterclaim. Yet he was content to give the trial only a part of his attention. That was the measure of how lightly he treated these proceedings.

81 That attitude was not confined to the Course. It ran through the whole of the Respondent’s conduct of these proceedings. He was late for both days of trial, and on the second occasion did not even trouble to inform the tribunal. He gave answers under affirmation without first verifying them, despite having been told that he might take time to do so, and then changed those answers as the trial went along. He made three attempts to relitigate a procedural matter that had already been decided, persisting after each of the two occasions on which he was told that the matter was not open to him to reargue. The last of those attempts was supported by the Written Submissions, which he did not completely comprehend, and which he had not verified. Taken individually, any one of these might have been put down to inexperience. But taken together, they reveal a nonchalant attitude towards judicial proceedings before a court of law.

82 I was conscious throughout that the Respondent was an SRP without any legal training, and that the tribunal is designed to be accessible to lay persons. However, informality in the tribunal’s proceedings is not a licence for conduct of this kind. A want of legal training may at most explain a misconceived argument or an inelegant submission. It does not explain persistent lateness, repeated attempts to relitigate a procedural matter already decided, the advancing of submissions produced by Gen AI that a party did not understand and had not verified, or the covert virtual attendance at the Course while the trial was in progress. None of those things requires any knowledge of the law to avoid. At some point, being a lay person loses all currency as an answer, and this case was well past that point.

83 The consequence of all this was that the proceedings were disrupted and the trial unnecessarily protracted. The Claimant, through no fault of his own, was made to endure it. Therefore, this was a case of the kind at which s 35(1)(f) of the SCTA is directed, where a litigant’s conduct has unfairly burdened the proceedings. In my judgment, it was only just and reasonable that the Claimant be compensated, albeit nominally, by way of costs fixed at $200.

84 For completeness, I add that the modest sum awarded here should not be taken as a benchmark or a ceiling for costs ordered against litigants who conduct themselves in this manner. The quantum in any given case will depend on its own facts and circumstances, and it may well be higher.

85 I turn next to disbursements. I ordered that each party bear his own. The Claimant did not succeed on the bulk of his claim in monetary terms, having recovered $1,785.55 out of the $6,450 he sought under the Main Claim. The Respondent, for his part, failed entirely on the Counterclaim. In those circumstances, it seemed to me that neither party had achieved a measure of success sufficient to justify an order for disbursements in his favour.

86 For the foregoing reasons, I made the following orders:

(a) I allowed $1,785.55 out of the $6,450 claimed under the Main Claim;

(b) I awarded the Claimant costs fixed at $200 under the Main Claim; and

(c) I dismissed the Counterclaim.

87 Accordingly, I ordered the Respondent to pay the Claimant $1,985.55, being $1,785.55 together with $200 in costs, by 22 September 2026.

88 I conclude with three observations. They arise from the manner in which this dispute was fought, and they may be of some use to parties in future tenancy disputes before the tribunal.

89 The first concerns how a landlord puts his case on the condition of the rented premises at the start of a lease. It is not uncommon for a landlord to assert that the premises were in “perfect” or “near-perfect” condition when the tenant moved in, so that any defect found at the end of the lease must have arisen during the tenant’s occupation. That was the Respondent’s position on the curtains in this case. A landlord who adopts such descriptors should appreciate what he takes on by doing so, because the higher the condition he asserts, the more he must prove. Yet a landlord will not infrequently rely on nothing more than the tenant’s own silence, pointing to the absence of any complaint at the start of the lease as establishing that there was nothing to complain of. The difficulty is that a tenant’s omission to complain of a defect at the outset is equivocal. It is consistent with there having been no defect, but equally consistent with a defect being present and going unnoticed, and an equivocal omission will rarely carry a landlord’s case. By contrast, what carries weight is objective evidence of the condition at the commencement of the lease, particularly where it is item-specific, recorded contemporaneously and agreed between the parties.

90 The second concerns the joint inspection at the end of a lease, which is unfortunately often treated as a mere formality. It is not. It is the one occasion on which landlord and tenant are together at the premises and able to record, contemporaneously and by agreement, what is wrong and what is not. This case illustrates, from three directions, the importance of the joint inspection and of taking care to crystallise the defects at that point. Where the Claimant accepted a defect in the Handover Form and agreed to pay for it, he could not afterwards resile from that position. Where he recorded his objection on the Handover Form, the Respondent gained nothing from the fact that the defect had been noted at all, and was left to prove his case as if that form did not exist. And where a defect was never identified at the Joint Inspection or recorded in the Handover Form, that omission was not by itself fatal to the Respondent’s case. What was fatal was that he had nothing else to show what state the item had been in, and that by the time the defect surfaced, weeks or months later, a new tenant had been in occupation. In those circumstances, he could not prove that the defect had arisen during the Claimant’s lease. Therefore, the joint inspection, and whatever document records it, deserves more attention than it is commonly given.

91 My third and final observation concerns the conduct of proceedings before the tribunal. The SCT was designed to be accessible to lay persons, but accessibility is not a dispensation from the standards of conduct expected of those who appear before a court of law, which the SCT is, being one of the subordinate courts constituted under s 3(1) of the State Courts Act 1970 (2020 Rev Ed). I made a similar observation in JFP at [144]. Costs in the tribunal are awarded sparingly, and deliberately so, lest litigants be deterred from bringing genuine claims or from defending themselves. But the power exists, and Parliament conferred it in its present form precisely so that the tribunal would not be left without an answer to a litigant who treats the proceedings lightly and whose conduct unfairly burdens the opposing party. In such cases, the tribunal will not hesitate to exercise that power.