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Housing association loses appeal in tenant harassment case
A large housing association has lost a Court of Appeal challenge to a finding that it unlawfully harassed two tenants.
Metropolitan Housing Trust was taken to Nottingham County Court in 2016 for harassment by Chesterfield residents Colin Worthington and Lynda Parkin, who it had sought to evict after a dispute originally about anti-social behaviour in their area.
Ms Parkin installed CCTV cameras on her home – with Metropolitan’s consent – while Mr Worthington took photographs intended to show anti-social behaviour, which he published on a website.
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Hearing the appeal, Lord Justice Kitchin said these “generated a considerable amount of hostility from their neighbours”, with complaints to Metropolitan that Ms Parkin’s CCTV recordings were causing nuisance and that both she and Mr Worthington were taking inappropriate photographs of residents.
A long dispute saw Metropolitan notifying them that it would serve notices to seek possession in 2007.
The county court said both notices contained serious inaccuracies and found in favour the two residents. Lord Justice Kitchin, hearing Worthington & Anor v Metropolitan Housing Trust in the Court of Appeal, dismissed Metropolitan’s arguments that the county court judge had been wrong, both to find it harassed the pair and in his conclusion that Metropolitan’s actions were unreasonable.
The judge said the harassment “took the form of correspondence over a period of time between [Metropolitan] and Mr Worthington and Ms Parkin”.
A Metropolitan spokesperson said: “In 2016, a Nottingham County Court judge upheld two residents’ claims that we had harassed them by threatening to evict them.
“The threat of eviction related to instances of alleged misuse of CCTV and photography in 2007 and 2008. We appealed the judgement as we did not accept its findings, and believed it could limit the capacity of us and other housing associations to address alleged anti-social behaviour.”
Metropolitan would now “carefully consider what can be learned from this case,” the spokesperson said, noting that policies, procedures and training related to anti-social behaviour had changed significantly since the original events.
Update, at 15.15 on 30.5.2018
This story was updated to make it clear that Metropolitan notified the tenants of its plan to serve notice to seek possession in 2007, rather than actually serving a possession notice as originally stated
