How the squatter who ‘stole’ a pensioner’s house cost YOU £250,000
Keith Best lives in a spacious, three-bedroom semi in east London. it has a big garden and much sought-after garage. the tree-lined street is, to quote one local estate agent, in an ‘up-andcoming area’ with good transport links. Newbury Park tube station is a short stroll away.
An identical house down the road went for nearly £400,000 in 2014. if Mr Best were to add an extension, like other neighbours (over the garage, for example, or at the back), his home could be worth more than £600,000.
how much did Mr Best actually pay for the property? Absolutely nothing. Not a penny.
What extraordinary good fortune, you might think. Was the house a legacy from a parent or relative? An enormously generous gift from a frail pensioner for whom he’d cared in their declining years? how about first prize in a big competition?
No. the answer is far more disturbing. those with high blood pressure should perhaps stop reading.
Because one day several years ago, when the son of the late owner moved out, leaving the house empty, Mr Best simply walked in off the street and began treating the place as his own.
Years later, he applied to become the legal owner of the house — and Colin Curtis, son of the original owner, launched a counter-claim.
this was dismissed on a technicality: as Mr Curtis had never applied to be an administrator of his late mother’s estate when she died without making a will, it wasn’t his house to defend.
the ruling in Mr Best’s favour is being hailed as a victory for squatters’ rights. the decision, many would argue, epitomises the old saying that law and justice are not always the same.
indeed, the more you delve into the case, the more apparent the injustice becomes.
For, apart from anything else, Keith Best is a very unusual kind of squatter. he has never been in need of immediate shelter — an argument often used by homeless charities, sometimes justifiably, to defend the occupation of vacant buildings. Far from it. Mr Best, 51, has a good job as a Virgin Media engineer. Parked out- side his (mortgage-free) home yesterday was a silver Mercedes convertible. the woman he lives with is often seen at the wheel.
in the past, Mr Best also drove a Mercedes, with a personalised number plate. Neighbours say that he owns another property in the area, too.
eighty-year- old Colin Curtis, on the other hand, lives on £261 a week from his state pension and tax credits in a modest warden-assisted flat a few miles away in Romford. the house at the centre of the controversy belonged to his late mother, Doris.
the precise ins and outs of how, after moving out, Mr Curtis lost the property — which had been in his family since World War ii — are not important for the moment. But Mr Curtis, who is in poor health, also faces losing his flat because he has learned that he will have to pay Mr Best’s most recent legal costs of £37,000, as well as his own.
‘it does keep me awake at night,’
he told the Mail this week. ‘I would never do what he [Mr Best] has done. Never. And I don’t know anyone who would.’
Mr Curtis’s predicament has struck a chord with many across the country. A fundraising campaign on the internet, organised by friends to help him pay his legal bill, has brought donations from well-wishers around Britain.
Mr Curtis’s son and daughter died at tragically young ages. He is divorced. But what is not widely known is that he has a granddaughter. A photograph of him standing proudly next to her on her wedding day a few years ago is on display in his living room.
His mother’s old home should eventually have passed to her.
What is more, Keith Best’s relentless determination to establish ownership of the property, which has ended in success at Mr Curtis’s expense, cost the taxpayer more than a quarter of a million pounds.
His tactics may have enriched him, but they have won him few friends on the street. ‘I won’t speak to him because he stole the house,’ said one neighbour.
Colin Curtis is fondly remembered in this corner of North-East London. His family ran a kiosk selling cigarettes and confectionery at Newbury Park Tube station on the Central Line.
He served behind the counter for 30 years before becoming a liveried commissar at the Dorchester Hotel.
Mr Curtis moved in with his elderly widowed mother in the Newbury house to care for her in the late Eighties. She died not long afterwards. Her son remained there for another decade until he went to live in Gidea Park in the suburbs of Romford, in a property he had recently inherited from an aunt.
Most people in his position would no doubt have put the Newbury home up for sale. But Mr Curtis is from a different generation. He didn’t want to sell the house, which his parents (his father died in the Seventies) had bought in 1942. Instead, he locked up and began a new life in Gidea Park. Enter Keith Best. Back then, he was a builder. He found out about the house — and that Mr Curtis had not been seen for some time — when he was doing some work in the neighbourhood.
Most of us are unfamiliar with the concept of adverse possession. This is a law under which a trespasser can win rights to somewhere they do not legally own if they can demonstrate they had ‘control’ over the building or land for a considerable period of time.
Keith Best certainly knew all about it, which is why he began quietly and calculatingly renovating the house before eventually moving in and making an application for adverse possession in 2012.
He was initially turned down by the Chief Land Registrar, as his claim came just a few weeks after residential squatting was criminalised after a spate of incidents in which anarchists and Eastern European gangs targeted family homes.
But Mr Best hired a high-powered City law firm on a no-win, no-fee basis to challenge the decision in the High Court. And he won.
THE 2014 judgment said the criminalisation of residential squatting was intended to combat the scandal of lawabiding owners being barred from their own properties and had no bearing on adverse possession in these circumstances, even though Mr Best was guilty of criminal trespass in a residential property.
The Registrar was ordered to make an interim cost payment of £100,000 to Mr Best’s legal team, a figure that has risen to £265,000.
What all this effectively means, to paraphrase that angry neighbour, is that Mr Best ‘stole’ Mr Curtis’s house with taxpayers’ money and the blessing of the law. So much for the criminalisation of squatting, which would ‘ tip the scales of justice’ back in favour of the homeowner, as then housing minister Grant Shapps assured us.
‘No longer,’ he said, ‘will there be so-called squatters’ rights.’
Unless, that is, you are someone like Keith Best.
‘Victim’ is not a word used in civil law. But it is almost impossible to view Mr Curtis in any other way. Astonishingly, he was not even aware of the High Court action.
Any official correspondence to do with the case was sent to the house in question. Mr Curtis found out the property had been lost only when he was contacted by the Press.
‘I thought I’d just be able to get him [Mr Best] removed,’ he said.
When he realised how difficult that would be, he made an offer, through a local firm of solicitors, to let Mr Best have the semi for 70 per cent of the agreed value, to take into account any improvements he had made to the property, which had fallen into disrepair.
Mr Curtis didn’t even receive the courtesy of a reply.
‘It’s outrageous, isn’t it?’ said friend Chris Kehoe, who set up the fund-raising page for Mr Curtis.
‘Up until then, I might have thought “Good luck to him” [Mr Best]. He’s an East End boy, ducking and diving. He saw the main chance and went for it.
‘But not after Colin had offered to compensate him. It was sheer greed on his part and he seems prepared to see Colin on the street.’
That prospect is one step closer after Mr Curtis’s counter- claim for the house was rejected last month and costs were awarded against him.
His complaint was lodged with the Property Chamber at the Land Registration First Tier Tribunal. Judge Elizabeth Cooke denied Mr Curtis’s application to take back control of the property.
‘Mr Best has done a great deal of work on the property that Mr Curtis abandoned for a quarter for a century,’ she said.
In fact, Mr Curtis was living in the house until 1996 and continued to pay council tax on it. He says he had a new porch and front windows installed and the garden cleared in 2000. Why this was not spelt out by his legal team is unclear.
Mr Curtis now has a copy of Mr Best’s statement supporting his original application for adverse possession.
‘In 1997, I began work on the property,’ he wrote. ‘I then invested time and money into looking after the property. Since 2001, I have treated the house as my own.’
Was Mr Best required to provide any proof of work undertaken? He did not answer the door to us, but a statement from his lawyers, Neumans LLP, pointed out:
‘In the tribunal, Mr Curtis did not advance any proposition challenging Mr Best’s factual possession and an intention to possess or Mr Best’s time period of possession of the property.’
Perhaps his lawyers should have done so.
For neighbours we spoke to have no recollection of Mr Best starting work on the house in 1997.
It is quite possible that he did. But no one can remember him even being there then — and the timing is crucial.
YoU have to occupy or be in control of a property for at least ten years to obtain adverse possession.
‘I started seeing the Virgin Media van coming and going from about 2010 onwards and it was regularly parked on the driveway of the house from about three years ago,’ said one long- standing resident.
‘In about 2011, from memory, he [Mr Best] asked my husband and a few other people in the street to sign a letter he had written himself confirming he’d been looking after the property since 2001. My husband politely refused.’
other people in the street tell a similar story.
Again, it is possible that Mr Best went unnoticed. He wouldn’t have been driving a distinctive Virgin Media van in the Nineties because the company was founded in 2006.
Either way, Mr Best’s acquisition of the property has created bad feeling in the street.
‘Colin’s mother would have been heartbroken,’ said someone who knew her well.
Some issues highlighted in this article are being cited in a fresh appeal drafted by barrister George Hepburne Scott, who is representing Mr Curtis free of charge.
one of the grounds for that appeal is that when the Tribunal concluded that Mr Best had done a lot of work on the property, it failed to acknowledge the work was done purely to strengthen his case.
The house, it is worth repeating, is worth more than £400,000.
Mr Curtis’s niece, Carron Brown, 50, said: ‘ There has been a lot of tragedy in my uncle’s life. We always knew him to be a hard-working man. He does not deserve this.
‘He’s very happy in his home in Romford, but someone who has worked hard all their life doesn’t deserve this.’
In 2015, the Land Registry handled 700 cases of adverse possession.
‘This [latest] case illustrates why it is perhaps time to look again at the law of adverse possession,’ said David Haines, a partner in the law firm Charles Russell Speechlys.
‘There must be questions as to whether today it is right that those who rightfully own land can be deprived of it as a result of the opportunistic actions of others.’
Could there be anyone more opportunistic than Keith Best?