I have Japanese knotweed growing in my garden and it is preventing the sale of a neighbouring property. I have no intention of doing anything about it.
This is a cautionary tale with resonance for many in the Mumsnet community. It concerns the sale and the purchase of property, fraudulent misrepresentation, professional negligence, the indifference & irresponsibility of county court judges, neighbourliness, litigation, and Japanese knotweed. The action takes place in a shared-freehold Victorian-built house converted in the 1970s into four flats in an upcoming suburb of South London.
The current owners of Flat A moved in to the property in October 2010, and 18 months later they took action to sue their neighbours at Flats B, C, & D.
The previous owner of Flat A had neglected the property causing a problem with damp, and further exacerbated that problem by covering the front garden with a 7-inch high brick patio thus preventing proper drainage away from the building. He put the flat on the market, and he alone filled out the Landlord’s Information Questionnaire when required to by the current owners’ solicitor. He agreed that there was a damp problem and said that he had consulted his neighbours who all knew about the extent of the problem and had agreed to share the cost of putting it right. Not a word of this was true. In fact, he actively withheld the Landlord’s Information Questionnaire from us all knowing that he’d have a row on his hands. In fact he said just what the buyers wanted to hear in order to get them to exchange contracts. So the new owners move in to the flat and when they raise the question of the damp and start asking for money from us all they meet with resistance. Instead of believing us and instead of going after the vendor for fraud, they accuse us of reneging on promises we were never even asked to make in the first place and issue a costs claim against us.
But how could this possibly have been allowed to happen? Surely the buyers had a solicitor acting for them in the purchase of Flat A? Surely fraudulent misrepresentation must be impossible to get past a competent solicitor? Don’t you hire a solicitor precisely to guard against this sort of thing? Well, they did have the services of a solicitor and, in short, he didn’t bother to check the vendor’s representations and make sure that we all knew about the damp and had all agreed to pay a share of putting it right before advising his clients to exchange contracts and buy the flat. This is a shared freehold property where we are all landlord to one another as well as tenants so we should all have been given sight of the questionnaire. The buyers’ solicitor just did not think it was important to protect his clients’ interests. So could they not have sued him for negligence? Well yes they could have done that but they chose not to because their solicitor is a family member and might strike their names from his Xmas card list. So to avoid such catastrophic social embarrassment, the new owners of Flat A chose instead to sue their neighbours.
Although the claim had no merits, our defence in the county court failed and we were forced to agree to an odious settlement. Legal aid is not available in cases like this and we had to act on our own behalf as litigants in person. As compensation for their conveyancor’s negligence, the owners of Flat A were offered the services of a litigator on tap by the same firm who mishandled their conveyancing, while we had no choice but to represent ourselves. The court is always dismissive of self-representing litigants, and the vendor’s fraud and the solicitor’s negligence counted for nothing in our defence.
Recently, flush with their success in the county court and having roundly defeated their opponents, the owners of Flat A, now the proud parents of a one-year old, put their flat on the market. Their buyer’s survey identified Japanese Knotweed growing in the garden next door and also in my portion of the back garden. A further report obtained by & paid for by the owners of Flat A showed that the Japanese Knotweed is at such a distance from the building as to pose no present or future threat to its structural integrity, but their buyer was still unable to obtain a mortgage and was forced to pull out. The price was dropped by £45K but this in itself did not make the Japanese Knotweed go away nor did it change the policy of any mortgage lender and the flat has now been withdrawn from sale.
Their Japanese Knotweed “expert” (i.e. the bloke from the fast-failing garden centre down the road) who wrote their report was heard to tell the owner of Flat A to have a solicitor’s letter sent to his neighbours and so intimidate them into taking action to remove the Knotweed. The upshot being that he would get the contract to remove it. However, he must have known that the Japanese Knotweed was no threat to the building and that the presence of Japanese Knotweed in a garden is not in itself illegal. He was banking on our assumed ignorance of the law. You are liable only if you have caused it to spread into the wider environment or if the Japanese Knotweed in a neighbouring garden can be shown to stem from any Japanese Knotweed that may be in your garden. Neither scenario is applicable in my case. Removing the Japanese Knotweed from my garden would be costly & inconvenient and would serve only to allow my hated neighbours downstairs to sell their flat. They are now getting a well-deserved comeuppance for their dishonest claim and for the stress they inflicted on us all, and there is not a thing they can do about it. They must now live for the foreseeable future in a pokey flat too small for them and a growing child, surrounded by neighbours they have actively alienated for the past three years, and with the prospect of having to shell out for their share of the cost of repairs to an ageing building they do not want to live in and which they cannot sell. Japanese Knotweed truly is our friend.