Communication could have prevented boundary dispute, says appeal court judge

While neighbours can become good friends, if they don’t communicate properly they can also end up as opposing litigants in the Court of Appeal. This is the message spelled out by Court of Appeal judge Lord Justice Peter Jackson in a judgment handed down today. He was commenting on a dispute over the boundary of a £265,000 property that has racked up more than £300,000 in legal costs. The case was brought against the owner of a property called Brook Barn in Leicester, which was bought in May 2020 for £265,000. There is a stream at the bottom of Brook Barn’s garden, and neighbours behind the property thought that the boundary ran the length of the north bank and had behaved as such for decades. They had also built a fence along what they believed the boundary to be. The new owner of Brook Barn, based on her reading of the plans, believed the boundary to be 2m to 5m further south. In today’s ruling, the Court of Appeal found that, while the plans did show a different boundary, those plans were incorrect and the disputed land did not belong to Brook Barn. All of this could have been avoided if the new owner, named as Dee Narga, had communicated better with her prospective neighbours, the judge concluded in his ruling. Narga had visited Brook Barn eight times before buying it, and she had spent time checking the plot and its boundary against the title plan, the judge said. He added: “On 12 May 2020, Ms Narga purchased Brook Barn. A dispute about the extent of the property immediately arose, so that on 11 June 2020 she wrote to [neighbours] the Wrights asking them to confirm their understanding of the boundary. They replied that the fence was the boundary, but Ms Narga did not accept this, and set about doing works on the disputed land. On 9 November 2020, the Claphams and the Wrights issued proceedings. “The purchase of Brook Barn took place during the first Covid lockdown. Even so, the sequence of events described above shows that Ms Narga could have consulted the neighbouring landowners before, rather than after, purchasing Brook Barn. Had she done so, this boundary dispute may not have arisen, and much trouble and expense might have been avoided.” Clapham and others v Narga [2024] EWCA Civ 1388; [2024] PLSCS 197 Court of Appeal (Peter Jackson, Newey and Nugee LJJ) 11 November 2024 Photo © Shutterstock