A millionaire property developer and his wife have failed in a bid to secure a court order stopping a group of local pensioners from lodging objections to his planning applications.
Mark and Clare Dyer, who live in a mansion in Brook, near Guildford, have, according to a court judgment, been at odds with their neighbours since they moved to the Surrey village more than 20 years ago.
According to the ruling, handed down last month, the Dyers have made more than 50 planning applications over the years, which have been opposed by a group of four elderly neighbours. At the same time, they allege that they have been the victims of a long-running campaign of harassment and intimidation from the group.
At a court hearing earlier this year, lawyers for the Dyers asked a High Court judge to grant a court order banning the the group from harassing the Dyers and stating that the planning process was being used to “target and oppress” the couple.
If granted, the order could have barred the group from lodging objections to planning applications.
“Village life in England is one of the glories of this country,” judge Dexter Dias KC said in his ruling. “But here a different side to its underbelly has been on view. While it is said that an English person’s home is their castle, here it has become, in a most unedifying way, a battlefield.
“The case raises important questions about the nature, extent and limitations of certain of our fundamental freedoms under the law.”
The judge’s detailed ruling, which is almost 40 pages long, describes and analyses various interactions between the Dyers and their neighbours that they interpret as harassment. One allegation is that a local residents’ association, that they were invited to join, was set up to thwart their development plans.
The judge refused to grant the injunction. He said here was no realistic chance that the Dyers would be able to prove harassment if the legal case continued.
“To fetter the autonomy of individuals in their exercise of free speech rights will require good cause,” he said.
“I judge that this court must be slow indeed to restrain protected and precious Convention rights and freedoms by injuncting genuine and meritorious objections to planning applications, even if they might upset the person applying to develop their property.”
Dyer and another v Webb and others
High Court KBD (Dexter Dias KC) 10 July 2023
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