St Martins TRA

A resident recently claimed costs from NHG using the government’s online money claims service. Here is her story.

The government’s online money claims service is worth considering if there is an issue that just affects your household. If you have an issue that affects multiple households please contact us first. We’ve succeeded elsewhere and we may be able to work with you too.

Background

I have a shared garden boundary with an NHG plot and in Spring 2021 NHG agreed to renew it as it was seriously dilapidated and there was a high risk of it being breached. It then took months for NHG to carry out that work and the fence was finally replaced in April 2022 following the threat of legal action.

When the fence was renewed it was not placed on the original boundary as NHG had not instructed their contractors to fully remove the original fence. As a result I lost a strip of land about a foot wide (I informed NHG of this at the time).

The Issue

At the end of November 2022, I heard noise in my garden that turned out to be a new fence being erected on the same boundary on which the fence had been built 7 months prior. I went to speak to the contractor and confirmed that they had been instructed by NHG, that they were building it on the original boundary line and that they had not been instructed to remove the first fence, so the strip of land I lost would be sandwiched between the two fences.

I rang my housing officer to inform them of the situation and sent a follow up email to their manager and their manager’s manager, with photographs and asking for them to instruct a contractor to remove the first fence to return my land to me.

After a week I had received no response so I chased up the matter and stated that I would give them a further week to respond and if they had not resolved the situation I would instruct contractors and bring a money claim against NHG to recover the costs.

I heard nothing from NHG, so I instructed the contractor who built the second fence to remove the first one and instructed separate contractors to remove the waste fence panels and posts. This had a total cost of £460, that I paid myself.

I then used the government’s online Money Claims service to bring a claim against NHG to recover the costs. The application process is fairly straightforward; it needs a timeline of events and details of what the claim is for. There is a fee that varies based on how much money you are claiming, but you can also claim the value of the fee against the person/business the claim is against. In this case the fee was £50, so I was claiming a total of £510 against NHG.

When a claim is launched, the person/business being claimed against is given a two week period to respond. NHG responded very quickly and made no attempt to dispute my claim. They agreed that they owed me the money and that they would pay it in full. The claim system then sets a deadline by which they need to make payment and I had to agree to the settlement (the claim can be re-opened and progressed if they fail to pay).

I was asked to provide bank details (though NHG insisted that they saw a copy of my bank statement header to prove it was my account) and they paid within a few days of me providing my details.