The owners of seven properties in Bolsover High Street are facing an Appeal Court challenge by the Coal Authority to a Lands Tribunal decision last May, which awarded the landowners compensation for landslip damage to their properties.
The court was told that as a result of a landslip, cracks appeared in garden walls and parts of the rear gardens of the High Street properties subsided, taking with them boundary walls and outbuildings. Further movements in the gardens became widespread in early 1991, and a large-scale displacement occurred in the summer of 1993.
Paul Darling QC, counsel for the authority, has asked the Court of Appeal to reduce the tribunals award to the owners, Mary Langley, Ethel Handley, Kenneth Davison, Jean Hope, Betty Magerisson, Thomas Wragg and Maureen and Michael Aston.
He claims that the tribunal had been wrong to take into account the fact that the value of the properties had been diminished in the minds of prospective purchasers by the fear that further damage might ensue.
He argued that the whole scheme of the Act was “to compensate claimants for the cost of carrying out works to repair subsidence damage or to make payments where, for a number of reasons, that subsidence damage is not repaired”.
There was “no provision for payments for damage that has not yet occurred or in respect of the risk of damage,” he said.
The hearing continues.
Langley and others v Coal Authority Court of Appeal (Peter Gibson and Mance LJJ and Hooper J) 6 February 2003.
Paul Darling QC (instructed by DLA, of Sheffield) appeared for the appellant; John Wardell QC (instructed by Kennedys) appeared for the respondents.
PLS News 7/2/03
