Solicitor recommendations for neighbour complaint

blurmoth69

What do you mean by making things more "official"? do you neighbourhood housing association is intentionally trying to come across as official? or that the neighbour is deliberately continuing to contact the likes of the neighbourhood housing association knowing that they will contact us, is deliberately to make their unofficial complaint look more official than it would be coming directly from them? The neighbourhood housing association, counsil andpolice have all said that the nature of the complaints really should be dealt with directly first with us, but as happened previously, they do it once maybe twice, then send 100 complaints to everyone that will listen without trying to resolve it directly.

I make this very clear, I am very diplomatic and have made no accusations or agression towards them. My partner has been mentioned as reasons to avoid contacting us as they are not a civil and diplomatic as myself, but more than one note through the door in the current climate iswhat was agreed, to which we amicably complied promptly. We suspect that something else is happening, is there perhaps a legal loophole that states if somebody make 1000 complaints, then the defendant gives them whatever they want? It feels like some kind of social reality show.

blurmoth69

davidmcn said:

I wouldn't treat the involvement of the housing association as ... "official" or requiring legal intervention, if all they're doing is passing on complaints from the neighbours.

Re-reading that, I hope you are right. If I can find a solicitor with 30 mins consultation, I think showing them the letters from the neighbourhood housing association, counsil and police report, they could see whether or not any of this has legal traction (it just all looks so official).

davidmcn

blurmoth69 said:

What do you mean by making things more "official"? do you neighbourhood housing association is intentionally trying to come across as official? or that the neighbour is deliberately continuing to contact the likes of the neighbourhood housing association knowing that they will contact us, is deliberately to make their unofficial complaint look more official than it would be coming directly from them?

It was you who used the word "official". I get the impression you feel that because the housing association is involved that somehow means the complaints carry more legal significance than they actually do, or at least means that you have to respond to them. If the crazy neighbour is being crazy, you could just ignore them, difficult though that may be.

anselld

blurmoth69 said:

 they do it once maybe twice, then send 100 complaints to everyone that will listen without trying to resolve it directly.

I make this very clear, I am very diplomatic and have made no accusations or agression towards them. My partner has been mentioned as reasons to avoid contacting us as they are not a civil and diplomatic as myself, but more than one note through the door in the current climate iswhat was agreed, to which we amicably complied promptly. 

If this is a repeated behaviour on your part which they are complaining about (eg noise) then they should not be expected to put note through the door every time it happens.  The bottom line is that it should not be happening repeatedly in the first place. 

I am not condoning their tactics, but clearly you are doing something which upsets them.  If the complaint is completely without substance then fair enough, they may be crazy, but you have been evasive about your part in this which gives some suspicion that there might be some substance.  The mere fact that the authorities don't wish to get involved initially does not necessarily mean there is no substance.

Petriix

While it's possible that your neighbour is making it up or hypersensitive to the point of insanity, it is probable that they have a genuine grievance.

There's a large 'grey area' with noise where you might technically be acting within the law but still making someone's life a misery. Some people are quite sensitive to sound and, once something starts to agitate them, they will become particularly sensitive to it. Dripping taps aren't especially noisy but they are incredibly annoying.

While you should be able to live your life how you want, you need to be respectful of the people around you. If there is something in particular that is bothering your neighbour then you should seriously consider changing your behaviour to eliminate the cause of their issue. Continuing to do the same thing (maybe at a slightly reduced volume) will not be sufficient.

What are they actually complaining about? Loud music? Noisy sex? Shouting? Banging doors? Footsteps? Vehicles? Do you stay up late or get up early?

There are lots of things you can change to address these issues rather than defending yourself - move furniture, swap bedrooms, reposition equipment, park in a different location, close windows etc. Maybe they are making repeated complaints because you keep doing the same thing and they really want you to stop. Would it be so hard to do things differently?

blurmoth69

anselld said:

you have been evasive about your part in this which gives some suspicion that there might be some substance.  The mere fact that the authorities don't wish to get involved initially does [NOT] necessarily mean there is no substance.

If I understand you correctly (made an assumed amend in UPPERCASE), the neighbourhood housing association had a third party mediator get us together. We owned up to all the complaints that the neighbour cited, which the mediators wrote up an agreement that the nature of the sound complaints were themselves not unreasonable and part of everyday life. That said, some of it was possible to negotiate albeit no problem to other neighbours to warrant a disturbance or police involvement, agreeing to be considerate of this particualr neighbour (assuming we knew it was needed to be adjusted to them of course, as cited by the mediator). For this to work, it was agreed that those complaints needed to be brought to our attention (so as to be aware we could accomodate their tolerances), this was cited by the police who also cited that the council themselves recommend this as the first course of action.

So we have not been evasive, quite the opposite, this was complaints at us directly. We owned it. We had mediators summary to this affect. Our key understanding was that with these agreements and understandings, because the nature of the complaints was more a personal preference of this neighbour, our evidence of being singled out amongst other neighbours making noise at the sime time in a calculated and discriminatory manner and embaressing my partner in front of other neighbours whom no similar complaints have been made to our knowledge were put to one side. As the nature of this discrimination comes after long vexatious claim regarding unrelated complaint they had with the neighbourhood housing association that was proven not our fault, this complaint was basd on false claim made to them which we had to prove as fasle (which is speculated by a source as possible false insurance claim).

Due to some friends having experience with troublsome neighbours that logged everything under the sun to get moved to another property by the housing associating, this pattern seems very similar. We already have a pattern of inappropriate use of police time and reporting whatever they can without politely helping us to help them, along with proven history of lying about facts used to blame us for their own problems, it still leaves us with the delicate fact that we trusted the mediators and police advice that the neighbour is inapprpriate and the complaints are exaggeration and driven by some alterior motive, yet we know that any complaint has to be taken seriously by any party. This is where we feel fearful of so much as laughing or listening to the radio ... we are all in lockdown, they broke our trusted agreement, we have evidence of some of the complaints being in-line with our neighbours sharing the same accusation yet no other neighbours have had complaints made making us feel discriminated against, we understand that we have to deal with any complaint made to whoever they complain to.

We were told by the neighbourhood housing association that when they complained to the council they recorded us. Whatever they recorded/logged was not followed up, instead they agreed to mediations.We have been told the same recording/logging of complaints is happening again, this time I se no point of follow-up mediation, which is leaving us feeling that the neighbour is trying to control what we do and when in our house. This contrasting with the neighbourhood housing association, mediators, council and police telling us that the nature of the complaints is such that should be dealt with as small matter of negotiating a balance beetween us, but with them contacting us once (to which they got their desired result immediately) makes no sense to us to then make a barrage of 100 complaints against us during/after this pretend attempt to work together on this. How are we expected to even try to come to an understanding that we can find a balance, if they are allegedly recording and logging all thses instances yet conveniently not recording attempts to contact us. It is this latter part that seems odd to me, but been advised by a friend that legally the complaintant has favour in making complaint first and that this point would be overlooked in favour of having a defence, which we frankly are sick of having to do.

Does this make sense? I hope it is clear that we are not being evasive of our part in the complaints. It is just the delicate particulars and what it inolved from us previously, and then the lack of effort to do their part that we are so tired of, that we feel the advice to get a solictor seems to make sense to us, but we have no experience hence we are looking for some advice and recommendation.

onwards&upwards

You haven't actually told us what it is that they complained about, just noise, which could mean a lot of things.  You are being a little bit evasive!

Is your neighbour's home owned by the Housing Association too?  

You mention discrimination, which grounds do you feel this is happening on? Race/religion/sexuality/disability etc?

blurmoth69

I get the impression you feel that because the housing association is involved that somehow means the complaints carry more legal significance than they actually do, or at least means that you have to respond to them.

That is how we feel each time, even though we know if we complained enough to the housing association enouhg about something, that they would have to follow up with a letter too.

If the crazy neighbour is being crazy, you could just ignore them, difficult though that may be.

Crazy maybe, struggling to find work perhaps, but they seem to have enough time to log 100s of complaints and it is difficult to ignore as we are not deceased; we live in our home and we make noise; but this seems to be a grey area with government/council guidelines and that seems to require some advanced understanding that I frankly cannot tell where the balance is. We have removed the loudest complaint completely, even though the mediator and police said it was theoretically within noise guidelines. But still the complaints come, mention of recording us and logging us, it feels like we are puppets expected to live per the nighbours house rules. Very odd, very much starting to stress us again.

kazwookie

Well if they are moaning about the noise you are making, and you have owned up to it, then I suggest you tone it down, or stop doing it (what ever is causing the noise)

Have you been round and chatted to the neighbour who is complaining?.

blurmoth69

anselld said:

If this is a repeated behaviour on your part which they are complaining about (eg noise) then they should not be expected to put note through the door every time it happens.  The bottom line is that it should not be happening repeatedly in the first place.

Understood, agreed and was summarised in mediations. However it was agreed that all of the complaints were common and unreasonably sourced; as in, not only do other neighbours experience the same exposure to some of them without complaint, there was a main one that happened for less than an hour every fortnight before 10pm on a saturday. We were open about this and although the neighbour didn't like it, we since put effort into reducing this which was accepted as part of mediation. The 'it should not be happening repeatedly in the first place' of course I agree with, but the 'it' was actually agreed as not unreasonable by all other parties mentioned thus far, and yet we opened ourselves up to adjusting our reasonable 'it' for the neighbour. But they shut this civil opportunity down almost immediately, going by the reported timeline of the letter.