Don’t fall foul of a neighbour dispute
I’M OFTEN contacted about neighbour disputes and my advice is always the same, compromise and resolve your differences. It is never advisable to fall out with your neighbour. A court case decided last week demonstrates in gruesome (and expensive) detail why this is sound advice. Antoinette Williams and Barbara Pilcher clashed over a 40ft high apple tree in Ms Williams’s garden. Mrs Pilcher claimed the tree dropped rotten apples into her garden, attracting hordes of wasps to the pile of decomposing fruit. She also complained that the branches were protruding into her garden – a complaint that is very common.
At this point Ms Williams should have cut the branches back and this would have resolved the dispute. Alternatively, Mrs Pilcher would have been within her legal rights to cut the branches back to her boundary line, so long as she did not damage the tree in doing so, and place the cuttings back into Ms Williams’s garden.
However, rather than either party taking these sensible steps, the dispute escalated into something far worse. They fell out!
Ms Williams started a hate campaign against her neighbour which involved staring at her out of the window, placing compost heaps near her garden and a new dispute erupted over parking. The matter then ended up going through the courts which led to a five-day trial.
In passing the ruling, the judge summed up by saying: “There is strong evidence of Mrs Williams behaving in a vindictive way towards Mrs Pilcher deliberately to alarm and distress her and that she is lacking in self-control.” A dispute that could easily have been resolved ended up with Mrs Williams being landed with an order to pay compensation in the sum of £12,000 for harassment, a cost order in the region of £135,000 – £180,000 and a legal bill of more than £100,000.
To be clear, Ms Williams did not lose the case just because of her tree – she lost due to the harassment and what the court found to be unacceptable behaviour. For more information on your legal rights when it comes to neighbour disputes you can visit my YouTube channel TheConsumerLawyer.