Squatters Rights?

Yes, that’s me serving court proceedings on a group of travellers who had set up camp on a site owned by one of our clients across from Sedbergh School.

Who says solicitors don’t get their hands dirty?

In situations like this, many people think that the law provides some form of squatters rights which prevent the owner from evicting those who have occupied their land. This view is reinforced by tales of travellers remaining on sites for many weeks and sometimes flouting efforts to remove them through the courts. This can often result from a failure of the owner or their advisers to fully understand and comply with the legal procedures that govern this area.

However, where land is owned privately, there should be nothing to prevent the owner from getting a swift possession order from court where the occupant is not, and has not, been a tenant and, has entered or remained on the land without the owner’s permission.

In the case I refer to above, I received instructions from my client on Monday informing me that the travellers had arrived.  The travellers said they would be moving off by Wednesday, but my client and I were somewhat sceptical.  I got the necessary details I required from my client to draft the court documents including evidence of their ownership, which the court requires before it will grant a possession order.

I then travelled to court to issue the court proceedings and asked that we be allowed to have a court hearing the following day, as there had already been some damage to property at the site.  We then travelled to Sedbergh to serve the court papers in the accordance with court rules.

It is important that those in occupation are made fully aware that there will be a court hearing so I entered into some lively conversation with some of the men folk, ending with them telling me and my client that we’d regret going to court and there would be 40 vans there overnight!  We made a swift exit and both lived to tell the tale.

On Wednesday we went before the District Judge in Kendal County Court who agreed that we were in order to request an urgent hearing and granted the possession order there and then.  The order was then handed to bailiffs who served it personally and the travellers had moved on by lunchtime the following day.  The period from instruction to eviction was just over 3 days in total, and the client was very happy that their site had been cleared.

It is not often we can say that the law provides a quick and effective remedy in property cases, but in this area, it certainly does.