Our neighbours legal services team provide advice, consultation, and representation for clients. Problems with anti-social behaviour can be tackled by you, the police, the landlord or the council.
You can sue, prosecute or mediate. There may be a tenants association that can help. Solutions might be eviction, rehousing, ASBO or demotion to a “family intervention tenancy”. Police or councils can shut down drug dens. Even PCSOs can disperse children or take them home after 9pm.
Environmental problems
Councils can usually be forced to remove abandoned cars. They can also clamp down on pollution. Fouling and litter can be dealt with informally or via a bylaw, litter abatement order, litter clearance notice, street litter control notice, designation or dog control order.
Mobile phone masts can often be prevented but usually they pop up down the road or on a shared mast, pumping just as much radiation into you. Noise can be attacked with a noise abatement notice. Pest infestation can be dealt with via the owner and if they refuse you can ask the council to handle it and bill them.
Parties are not only a normal noise problem but if there is an amplifier and over 20 people it is a an illegal rave which the police can shut down under Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 s63 without the usual noise warning.
Rat runs and parking problems can be addressed by councils with calming measures and parking management schemes. Councils can break in to silence car alarms. They can also silence burglar alarms after 20 mins or an hour on and off, and can break in with a warrant.
Neighbours Legal Services - Neighbour problems
Access to neighbouring land
If talking does not work you can apply for an order allowing you on to your neighbour’s land for repairs.
Shared amenities
Who is liable for pipes, etc depends on the deeds or who has allowed what for how long.
Boundaries
These are defined in the deeds or by survey and history. There are few worse investments than spending £100,000 to take back £1,000 worth of land. First you might lose, second if you win your neighbour will not pay all your costs. We can advise you where you stand and suggest a proportionate solution. You do not need a fence unless for the deeds or animals. Owners of party walls have to warn you before working on them. Balls have to be returned but the lawsuit for not doing so would be cancelled out by the trespass.
Parking
There is no right to park but there is a right to enter your driveway.
Trees
You can trim an overhanding tree and throw the trespassing branches into your neighbour’s garden. But you could persuade them that the tree is dangerous in terms of poison or subsidence and so it is better for them to remove it, especially as you have the right to remove the roots on your side, which would make it non-viable or dangerous anyway, allowing you to ask the council to intervene.
Hedges
You might be able to get a hedge reduced according to a formula of direction and distance that gives you a kind of right to light.
