Tom Anderson wrote:
On Wed, 20 Feb 2008, J. Chisholm wrote:

Where I used to live some idiot insisted on parking his (almost)HGV on
the footway. Apart from the damage and difficulty in getting past with
prams/pushchair etc, the water main beneath the path eventually failed.

Now if only it were worth suing such idiots.

Why isn't it? If the damage is worth less than 5000 UKP (which seems
likely), the council could do it via the small claims process. That's
simple and quick, and the court can't award costs, so even if the
council loses, it doesn't cost them anything other than the wasted time.
Being a large organisation who would be launching these cases quite
often, they could run the operation very cheaply, and pretty solidly, so
they should do well at it.

tom

Hopefully someone in a LA will read this and take up your sensible
suggestion. I suspect the problem will be that they'll need to prove (on
the balance of probability-this being a civil matter) that the damage
was caused by the property owner and not some random builder working on
an adjacent property who happened to park his 7 tonne truck on the pavement.

Jim