‘He can’t have died for nothing’

This month marks seven years since the death of James Mitchell, a Glasgow Council tenant killed by his next door neighbour following a six-year feud.

The 72-year-old died in hospital days after his head was stoved in with a stick during a savage attack at the hands of James Drummond. It’s a story that hit headlines across Scotland at the time and still lingers in the minds of Glaswegians. ‘I hear he was hit on the head with a spade’ is how a cabbie sums up the story on overhearing mention of the family name.

The Mitchell story could soon become known beyond Scotland when a civil action, brought against Glasgow Council by Mr Mitchell’s family, reaches the House of Lords in December. The court will consider whether the Scottish city and former landlord had a duty of care to Mr Mitchell when handling the two tenants’ tempestuous relationship. No such duty currently exists, a point likely to form the council’s main defence.

Crucially, the family’s lawyers accuse the council of failing to warn Mr Mitchell of its meeting with his estranged neighbour at 2pm on 31 July 2001. It was then that council officials told Drummond – who was in his mid-60s – that he risked being evicted because of his anti-social behaviour. One hour later he attacked Mr Mitchell outside his front gate, inflicting the injuries that would ultimately lead to the older man’s death.

The Mitchells have hired a lawyer well-versed in the art of scaffolding legal arguments. At law firm Ross Harper, a patchwork of newspaper cuttings pinned to a corkboard pays testament to the work of Cameron Fyfe. ‘Dad can’t have died for nothing,’ is one headline which seems particularly pertinent.

Mr Fyfe concedes that the case breaks new ground. ‘When the family first came to me I said this is going to be a difficult case. There is no precedent. It is uncharted waters.’

The case was initially thrown out by a senior judge in the Court of Session, where civil cases are heard in Scotland. ‘He said the council’s duty of care didn’t extend to these circumstances,’ Mr Fyfe explains.

That decision was overturned by two out of three of the judges who heard an appeal in February this year. ‘The defenders [Glasgow Council], knew of the violent propensities of Mr Drummond, and were well aware from repeated reports both of the actual violence and anti-social behaviour,’ one said in his judgement.

The authority could be considered to have, ‘by their own actions, bought about a situation which “exposed [the deceased] to the risk of his life”’, another said.

The judgement stunned the council, which is unable to comment on the case while its appeal is pending. Mr Fyfe says a positive decision in the Lords would almost certainly open the doors for similar claims. ‘I thought that the council had been incredibly slow to take action against Drummond. It was reprehensible of the council not to do anything,’ he says. ‘When they did take action they must’ve known the likely reaction and obviously could have warned Mr Mitchell and failed to do so.’

The Mitchells’ legal team expects Glasgow’s lawyers to return to the argument that they had no obligation to warn tenants and hence no duty of care. A win for the Mitchells would act as a legal cattle prod for landlords which dither over anti-social behaviour complaints, Mr Fyfe warns. ‘If the House of Lords says that Glasgow has a duty of care in this case then there is an argument that if you have an unruly neighbour or, worse still, a violent neighbour, the council has more to do to protect you than it does at the moment. It may lead to councils taking quicker and firmer action against bad tenants.’

The case has been brought by Karin and Anne Mitchell, Mr Mitchell’s daughter and widow. They stand to win £150,000 if successful but insist that their legal aid-funded battle has nothing to do with the money.

Karin Mitchell says she found her motivation to take on the council while sorting through her father’s things after his death. ‘There was a letter sent to the housing [department]; my dad put in that if anything happened to him or his family he would take legal action. How he died was absolutely horrific. Someone has got be responsible for that.’ The council saw the feud as a row between ‘two grumpy old men’, she says.

Anne Mitchell still lives in the pebble- dashed home on the Moss Park estate where her husband was attacked. The houses on her side of the road line up two-by-two, looking down on to a tree-lined street from elevated gardens. Neighbours describe the area as peaceful, except when Rangers fans surge to and from the nearby Ibrox stadium on match days.

Mrs Mitchell says the days of her husband’s feud with Drummond were absolutely awful. ‘I never got a minute’s peace. It was the terrible language, coming up the hill and as soon as he saw him, his effing and c-ing. He said he was going to torch our house, “I will cave your effing head in”.’

Her husband kept a careful diary of Drummond’s aggressions. ‘He wrote everything down. He was up and down to the housing,’ she adds.

Ms Mitchell hopes that the case will give some meaning to her father’s death: ‘He can’t have died for nothing. Landlords can’t allow people to suffer even if that means that people change the way deal with things.’

Duty of care

The Mitchells are not the only family to take legal action against a landlord for its alleged failure to act. South of the border in London, lawyers working for Hounslow Council are preparing to challenge a landmark High Court decision where a judge agreed that landlords had a duty of care.

The details of the case are horrific. It centres on a couple with learning difficulties who had applied to move out of their two-bedroom tower block flat in which they were being preyed on by a group of youths.

The couple lived there with the woman’s two daughters, aged 11 and eight at the time. But despite pressure from the council’s own social workers an alternative home was not found for the family.

‘They are intimidated and harassed by certain residents and youths,’ one social worker warned the housing department in a letter in March 2000, according to court papers.

The following November, the family was subjected to an inhumane ordeal after being taken hostage by a gang of youths. ‘During the relevant weekend the claimants were effectively imprisoned in their own home and repeatedly assaulted and abused,’ court papers state.

The couple were made to perform sexual acts, saw their possessions tossed over a balcony and had pepper and fluid forced into their eyes.’

Hounslow denied that it owed the family a duty of care but Justice Maddison, who heard the case, disagreed.

The west London authority’s social services and housing departments failed to appreciate the ‘gravity and urgency’ of the situation, his judgement says. Hounslow Council is appealing the case, according to a spokesperson.

Delays in dealing with complaints of anti-social behaviour are wide spread, a study by one of the government’s local authority watchdogs indicates. ‘Nearly every complaint we receive includes reference to lengthy delays by councils in investigating complaints of neighbourhood nuisance and anti-social behaviour,’ a report by the Local Government Ombudsman said in 2005.

The study was prompted by a 40 per cent surge in complaints about authorities’ handling of anti-social behaviour reports – from 500 to 700 over two years.

The sudden increase, the report states, was down to the prominence the Labour government gave to tackling anti-social behaviour under the banner of its Respect agenda. Although the number of complaints has flattened since Gordon Brown became prime minister, the fight against neighbourhood nuisance and crimes continues to outstrip housing as a priority in the public’s mind, an Ipsos Mori poll shows.

The aim of the ombudsman’s report was to encourage councils to up their game. But two years on things have not improved, ombudsman Tony Redmond concedes: ‘There is no evidence that we have a significant reduction of findings of maladministration. In fact, there has been an increase in the sort of cases we are still getting. It’s a shame.’

Although the number of annual complaints about poor handling of anti-social behaviour and neighbourhood nuisance dipped to 686 in 2005, the figure has risen since to 744.

Councils have got better at handling complaints but are failing to working alongside other public sector agencies in the way that they should, Mr Redmond adds. ‘They haven’t joined up with police and other agencies and made sure they do it quickly and in a timely fashion.’

One consequence of delays outlined in the 2005 report, which Mr Redmond says applies equally today, has particular resonance for the Mitchells. It reads: ‘One of our concerns is that neighbourhood disputes, if not addressed in a timely and robust manner, can escalate and lead to more serious anti-social behaviour. If not resolved at an early stage [they] can move more from a minor irritation to violent disturbance.’

Do landlords should have a duty to halt such an escalation? The courts will now decide.

Have your say

You must sign in to make a comment