The High Court has thrown out a contempt application over a bitter houseboat-docking dispute and heavily criticised the London council trying to bring it.
Mr Justice Kerr concluded in The Mayor and Burgesses of the London Borough of Richmond v Trotman that the council’s pursuit of contempt proceedings had been ‘zealous to a fault’.
The local authority was accused of being ‘heavy handed’, addressing defendant Alistair Trotman in court with ‘discursive and aggressive questioning’ in what the judge called a ‘loud and harsh tone’.
Trotman, representing himself, was accused of breaching an injunction granted last summer which prevented him from attaching his boat at or near Richmond’s land.
The defendant was described by the judge as a ‘difficult character with an abrasive and sometimes (not always) discourteous manner’ but it was found the council had failed to take account of how he was an opponent with little legal knowledge.
‘Richmond’s misplaced zeal in its pursuit of him was in inverse proportion to the dwindling merits of its case against him in contempt,’ said Kerr. ‘It has been neglectful of its duties to its unrepresented opponent and to the court to inform both of points that could assist the other side.’
The council had secured an interim order from Mrs Justice Lambert last July preventing trespass on Richmond’s land (the river bank) which included a power of arrest. Trotman was twice arrested by police within three months of the order after Richmond had alleged he was in breach of the injunction.
He states that his rights are being infringed by serial court proceedings, while the council says he has contempt for the law and for court orders, preventing residents from peaceful enjoyment of the river bank.
Richmond had already issued the present contempt application when Lambert’s order was replaced by a different order founded not on trespass but on nuisance, handed down in February by His Honour Judge Blair KC.
Blair decided that Trotman had not trespassed on Richmond’s land but was committing an actionable nuisance by obstructing the bank. The judge had criticised the interim order as ‘verbose, poorly expressed and ungrammatical in a number of its paragraphs’.
Mr Justice Kerr said the order replacing that of Lambert J had been a ‘model of clarity’ and that Blair had ‘excoriated the drafting of Lambert's order, with good reason’ and cast doubt on the power of arrest. Given this, Richmond’s decision to carry on with contempt proceedings was ‘ill-judged’.
The application for a committal order was dismissed, with Kerr suggesting it would be ‘regrettable’ if the parties became mired in further litigious controversy about costs.
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