Landlord and tenant – Harassment – Injunctive relief – Claimants seeking injunctive relief against defendants alleging various alleged acts of harassment – Whether claimants establishing defendants’ conduct crossed threshold for criminal liability under Protection from Harassment Act 1997 – Whether defendants’ conduct satisfying test for harassment – Application granted
Albert Court was an imposing and prestigious mansion block adjacent to the Royal Albert Hall in London comprising 107 apartments. The first claimant was the management company that managed the property on behalf of the freehold owner and the lessees of the apartments. Two of the apartments were occupied respectively by the fourth claimant (the resident maintenance manager) and the head porter. They were both employed by the first claimant. Apartment 5A was occupied by the defendants.
The claimants applied for injunctive relief against the defendants pursuant to the Protection from Harassment Act 1997. The claim arose from various alleged acts of harassment which it was said the defendants had undertaken against the first claimant, its directors, employees, contractors, other leaseholders and legal representatives between November 2019 and February 2022.
The claimants’ case was based on a number of actions on the part of the defendants which they alleged amounted to conduct which the defendants knew, or ought to have known, amounted to harassment when they were said to have acted in a threatening and intimidating way towards the officers, staff and contractors of the first claimant. They included making threats towards the claimants, acting in an offensive, aggressive and threatening way towards the cleaning and porterage staff, and making false allegations of bribery, fraud, theft and corruption against the directors of the first claimant to the directors, other residents of Albert Court and the staff of the first claimant on unspecified dates.
Held: The application was granted.
(1) The test for harassment was whether the course of conduct, taken as a whole, crossed the threshold for criminal liability under the 1997 Act. It was not a requirement that each incident was a substantive criminal offence in itself. Harassment was a persistent and deliberate course of unreasonable and oppressive conduct, targeted at another person, which was calculated to and did cause that person alarm, fear or distress: Majrowski v Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Trust [2006] UKHL 34 and Hayes v Willoughby [2013] UKSC 17 applied.
An actual breach of the 1997 Act only required harassment on two occasions in respect of a single person: section 7(3)(a); or in the case of two or more persons at least one occasion in relation to each of those persons: section 7(3)(b).
(2) An injunction might be granted in respect of an actual or apprehended breach. There was no requirement for multiple occasions in respect of an apprehended breach. The terms of a civil injunction should not be confused with the criminal offence. An injunction was prospective, and its purpose was to prevent harassment. Furthermore, the courts had the power to grant injunctions in wide terms to prevent the harassment of a class of persons – for example, the employees of contractors or sub-contractors. There was no need for consent to be obtained from all persons within the class of persons to be protected from harassment under the 1997 Act: University of Oxford v Broughton [2004] EWHC 2543, EDO MBM Technology Ltd v Campaign to Smash EDO [2005] EWHC 837 (QB) and Law Society v Kordowski [2011] EWHC 3185 (QB) considered.
In any fact-finding exercise, the burden of proving any allegation lay on the party seeking to prove the allegations. In this case that meant that the claimants carried the burden of proof. Those against whom allegations were made did not themselves have to provide an explanation or context for any disputed allegation or to prove that any allegation was false. Particular care had to be taken not to reverse the burden of proof inadvertently.
(3) The court acted on evidence, not speculation or assumption. The standard of proof was the balance of probabilities: whether it was more likely than not that the event occurred. Neither the seriousness of the allegation, nor the seriousness of the consequences, nor the inherent probabilities altered that.
Where an allegation was serious, there was no requirement that the evidence had to be of a special quality. The court would consider grave allegations with proper care, but evidence was evidence and the approach to analysing it remained the same in every case.
The court took account of any inherent probability or improbability of an event having occurred as part of a natural process of reasoning. The fact that an event was very uncommon or infrequent did not raise the standard of proof that had to be satisfied before it could be said to have occurred: Re BR (Proof of Facts) [2015] EWFC 41 applied.
(4) The evidence of lay parties and the explanations given by them were important, and a clear assessment of their credibility and reliability had to be made by the court. The human capacity for honestly believing something which bore no relation to what actually happened was unlimited. Therefore, contemporary documents were always of the utmost importance.
In the present case, the evidence from the claimants was consistent and overwhelming. The relief that they sought was an injunction and the terms of the draft injunction proposed by the claimants was reasonable in its terms. It did not seek to silence the defendants or prevent them from raising legitimate complaints through the proper legal channels if they chose to do so.
(5) Applying the tests set out in the 1997 Act and the case law, the totality of the matters relied upon by the claimants, and found by the court, amounted to a course of conduct for the purposes of section 1(1) of the 1997 Act which amounted to harassment. The court was satisfied that the defendants knew that their actions amounted to harassment. Moreover, a reasonable person in possession of the same information would think that the course of conduct embarked upon by the defendants amounted to harassment. On the findings of fact made, no reasonable person would think otherwise.
Those findings and application of the law were more than sufficient in themselves to justify the making of an injunction. Furthermore, by their course of conduct, which amounted to harassment, the defendants also intended to persuade another person not to do something they were entitled to do and/or to do something they were not under any obligation to do.
Thomas Daniel (instructed by Russell-Cooke LLP) appeared for the claimants; the defendants appeared in person.
Eileen O’Grady, barrister