High hedges

This fact sheet is aimed primarily at householders who have problems related to high hedges, either on their property or on a neighbour's, and who may be considering making a complaint to the Ombudsman.

I have a problem with my neighbour's hedge which separates our properties, and the council is being unreasonable about the request to do something about it. Can the Ombudsman help me?

Yes, in some circumstances. If you believe the council has made an error in the way it has dealt with a request for action under the high hedges legislation (the Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003), and this has caused problems for you, we may be able to investigate your complaint. But if your complaint concerns one of the following we are unlikely to be able to help.

A decision by a council to serve a notice on you requiring a remedial action to a hedge you own. This is because you will have a right to appeal to the Planning Inspectorate against that notice and we would expect you to appeal if you wished to challenge the notice.
A decision by a council not to serve a remedial notice on your neighbour or to serve a notice which does not require as much work to the hedge as you think is necessary. This is because you will have the right to challenge the council's decision by appeal to the Planning Inspectorate and we would expect you to appeal if you wished to challenge the council's decision.
The amount the council charges for considering a complaint about high hedges. The legislation gives each council the right to set the level of fees it considers appropriate.
Damage to your property by a neighbour's hedge. We would normally consider it appropriate for you to take legal action against your neighbour.

How do I complain?

You should normally complain to the council first. Councils often have more than one stage in their complaints procedure and you will usually have to complete all stages before we will look at your complaint.

Then, if you are unhappy with the outcome, or the council is taking too long to look into the matter – we think 12 weeks is reasonable – you can complain to us.

You should normally make your complaint to us within 12 months of realising that the council has done something wrong.

For more information on how to complain, visit our contact page or complete an online complaint form.

If you consider my complaint what will the Ombudsman look for?

We consider complaints that the council has done something wrong which has caused you problems. So we look at what the council has done, whether there have been any errors or failures, and if so, how this has affected you. Some faults we might find are that the council:

delayed in responding to your request for action in respect of a high hedge that is badly affecting your property
did not keep your informed of action being taken
gave you wrong or misleading advice about the action it could take, or
did not follow up after a remedial notice was confirmed, so that there was delay in getting necessary work done to a hedge causing you a problem.

What happens if the Ombudsman finds that the council was at fault?

Where there has been fault and you have suffered as a result, we can recommend that the council apologises and takes action to put the matter right. Depending on the impact the council's fault has had on you, we could ask the council to:

decide if and what enforcement action should be taken and, if considered appropriate, take action in a reasonable time
provide better and more timely information about what is happening
improve procedures so the same problems do not occur again: for example, to introduce new guidelines to clarify its enforcement priorities.

We may also ask the council to pay compensation to remedy significant injustice which cannot be addressed in other ways.

Examples of some complaints we have considered

Mr A said that, after he complained about his neighbour's hedge some years earlier and paid the required fee, the council had agreed to serve a notice if the hedge reached a height of 12m. He said that the council had agreed that, if he did need to request action by the council again, there would be no further charge for dealing with it. The council had no record of the agreement but accepted that it had been made. Mr A approached the council again when the hedge grew to more than 13m. The council initially said it had to be treated as a new request that would require a fee to be paid and it would not agree to waive the fee. Because of the agreement made some years earlier, it then offered to reduce the fee by 50%. Mr A still felt this was unreasonable and complained to the Ombudsman who recommended that the whole fee should be waived. This was accepted by the council and was considered to be an appropriate remedy for the complaint.

Mr C complained that the council had failed to take action to enforce a remedial notice served on his neighbour. In this case the complaint was about lateral growth from the side of the hedge. The council agreed that the lateral growth had exceeded the area controlled by the remedial notice and had asked the owner to cut it back, but the owner declined. The council took the view that prosecution would not be appropriate, on the grounds that this lateral growth did not affect the light reaching Mr C’s home, so that there was no public interest in pursuing prosecution. While understanding Mr C’s strong disagreement with this view, the Ombudsman concluded that the council did have discretion within the legislation to decide whether or not prosecution would be in the public interest. As there was no evidence of fault in the way the council had reached its view the complaint was not upheld.

Other sources of information

Guidance on this subject can be found at: www.gov.uk/how-to-resolve-neighbour-disputes/high-hedges-trees-and-boundaries or www.gov.uk/government/collections/high-hedges

Our fact sheets give some general information about the most common type of complaints we receive but they cannot cover every situation. If you are not sure whether we can look into your complaint, please contact us.

The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman provides a free, independent and impartial service. We consider complaints about the administrative actions of councils and some other authorities. We cannot question what a council has done simply because someone does not agree with it. If we find something has gone wrong, such as poor service, service failure, delay or bad advice and that a person has suffered as a result the Ombudsman aims to get it put right by recommending a suitable remedy.

June 2014