An Ealing couple are appealing against a county court decision rejecting their £66,000 claim against their local council over damage allegedly caused by trees owned by the authority.
Rupert and Suzanne St John Loftus-Brigham claimed that three lime trees and a plane tree, which the council removed in 1999, had damaged the structure of their house. As a result, they maintained that they had incurred substantial expenses for the cost of repair and for alternative accommodation while the repairs were carried out.
On 19 May, a county court judge dismissed their claim on the basis that there was a “real possibility that a range of vegetation contributed to a greater or lesser degree to what occurred”, and that the claimants “needed to show that the defendants’ trees were probably the dominant cause”.
Challenging the judge’s finding in the Court of Appeal, Deborah Taylor, counsel for the claimants, said that, having found that a range of vegetation could have contributed to the damage, the judge then “failed to consider whether each should be discarded as a cause or whether two or more jointly contributed to the damage”.
However Simon Brown QC, counsel for Ealing, contended that before the claimants could succeed they had to show that the council “knew, or ought, upon reasonable inspection, to have known, that the roots of the trees were liable to cause subsidence damage to the claimants’ property”.
The hearing continues.
Loftus-Brigham and another v Ealing London Borough Council Court of Appeal (Chadwick and Buxton LJJ) 14 October 2003.
Deborah Taylor (instructed by Gaston Whybrew, of Colchester) appeared for the appellants; Simon Brown and Kim Franklin (instructed by Vizards Wyeth) appeared for the respondents.
References: EGi Legal News 15/10/03
