KIDS who kick footballs over garden walls are breaking the law, the High Court has ruled, after a couple sued their next-door neighbours.
Mohamed and Marie-Anne Bakhaty have been awarded damages after complaining that footballs from the neighbouring school were landing in their garden.
from a school into a neighbouring property’s garden were a nuisance, a High judge has found.
While the odd stray ball might be “annoying”;;, the judge deemed the “frequent projection”;; of them onto someone else’s land breaches common law.
Mrs Bakhaty told the court in a witness that over a period of 11 months, some 170 balls fell into their garden.
However, High Court Judge Philip Glen, sitting in Southampton, refused to grant an injunction stopping the use of the all-weather play area at Westgate All Through School in Winchester, .
In his written ruling on Monday, he said: “I recognise that they are extremely fond and proud of what is on any view a beautiful home.
“I fear, however, that they have become from the school in a way which has caused them to become over-invested in their belief that they are victims of a wrong. In short, they have lost perspective.”;;
Judge Glen added that while use of the £36,000 all-weather play area does not give rise to “actionable nuisance”;;, the “frequent projection of balls over the boundary”;; from the play area was a nuisance.
He ordered Hampshire County Council to pay the Bakhatys £1,000 in damages for a period of time when there was “excess use”;; of the all-weather play area, and when “significant numbers of balls were crossing the boundary fence”;;.
Judge Glen continued:”;; I am satisfied that the noise from the school, with or without the all-weather play area, amounts to a substantial, in the sense of not being trivial or transient, interference with the ordinary user by the claimants of St Anns.
“I am also satisfied that the substantial number of balls crossing the boundary fence prior to the 2022 mitigations falls into the same category.”;;
The all-weather play area is parallel to, and about two metres from the boundary of the Bakhatys’s house – St Anns, Links Road in the Fulflood – and the boundary itself is marked by a 1.8m close boarded fence.
It was built in 2021, and in July 2022 the headteacher of the school wrote to the couple to offer to fence off the area to create a buffer zone, to put up a ball net over the area, and restrict use of the area to up until 4.15pm on a school day.
Although the couple did not respond, the measures were put in place.
Judge Glen said in his judgment: “There can also in my judgment be no objection to the use by the school of the area presently fenced off behind the all-weather play area for structured activities such as natural lessons.
“Indeed, if a net was erected to prevent balls, and other objects, from crossing the boundary fence, I cannot necessarily see that there could be any real objection to opening this area up altogether.”;;
He also said: “I do not consider that the defendant ‘threatens and intends’ to continue the nuisance that I have found existed, albeit that they would have liked in other circumstances to have done so.”;;
