HOMES Scents of the season
A festive fragrance works wonders for conjuring Christmas spirit. GABRIELLE FAGAN sources some super smells for your home
WE have maintained and improved the fence at the bottom of our garden since we moved in in 1992. Now the housing association which owns the properties behind says the fence is on its land and has threatened legal action. Our solicitor advised them to get the boundary measured, but they declined to do this. ASSUMING your house wasn’t new when you bought it, and you haven’t moved the line of the fence in the meantime, then it’s likely that the fence will have been there for 12 years prior to October 2003. In that case you will now be deemed to own the land it stands on by adverse possession – whether or not you owned it in the first place. Take your solicitor’s advice, but I think it’s unlikely that the housing association will take this further if you point this out to them. I BOUGHT a flat in a shared ownership scheme for the elderly, whose leases in 1982 were for 99 years. Now only 67 years remain, and the properties will lose value the more time goes by. Although it is possible to extend the leases, this seems pointless since the landlord, a housing trust run by the council, only has a 99-year lease on the land. What will happen to the properties if the landlord doesn’t extend its own lease? I imagine that the council has set up the trust in order to provide housing for the elderly on a leasehold basis (and probably to benefit from a government subsidy). That being the case, since there will always be elderly people in the borough, it will probably own the land and be able to extend the lease for the trust as required. You could ask the trustees about this. Offering the properties for sale on a leasehold basis gives the council more control over their use than if they had been sold freehold. THE neighbour next door-but-one has grown a conifer hedge to hide the overgrown garden belonging to the house between us. However he only cuts his half of the hedge, and the half on my side is currently six metres tall. Is there anything I can do about this? Probably not. In order to take action under the ‘high hedges’ legislation the offending hedge must be higher than two metres, present a barrier to light or access and adversely affect your enjoyment of your property. A hedge on the other side of next door’s garden is likely to be too far away to be deemed to affect your property under any of the above headings. You can get a booklet from the council explaining the formula, which takes into account the distance of the hedge from your house, the slope of the garden, and its orientation.
Call SAS Daniels LLP Solicitors on 0161 475 7676 or 01625 442 100. Visit www.sasdaniels. co.uk. If you have any legal questions, write to Weekly Law and You, MEN Media, Mitchell Henry House, Hollinwood Avenue, Chadderton OL9 8EF, or email legalline@ btconnect.com.