176: PAUL FOOT 2026: A PROVEN LAWYER

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0:47You got any good facts, Andy? Yes, how about this one? Anteaters have evolved on 12 separate occasions. Wow. Mysterious, wonderful. The world really wants them to exist. What about this one? When Ronald Reagan left office, he left a note on the White House lawn for the squirrels, warning them to beware of George Bush's dogs. So there you go. If you like fascinating facts and much more besides, we are no such thing as a fish. Hello and welcome back to page 94. This is the Paul Foote Award mini-series. Let's find out who is the second of the shortlisted journalists for this year's award. Page 94, the Private Eye podcast.

1:25I'm Daniel Timms at the Sheffield Tribune. And what is the story that's brought you to the Poolfoot Awards this year? We covered a story about Andrew Milne, a solicitor who threatened homeowners with legal action, in some cases extracting over£25 ,000 out of them. Okay, now I'm going to say, first of all, there are legal proceedings ongoing at the moment, so we are slightly limited in what we can say. Yeah. If you're watching and there's a sudden cut, I've said something I shouldn't have said. There we go. So I'll start off by asking you, who is Andrew Milne? Okay, so Milne is a solicitor, has been qualified for many years, and we came across him when he started sending letters to homeowners in Sheffield.

2:07And this happened because he had bought the freeholds to their homes. So Sheffield is a bit unusual. Normally when people think of leasehold, they think of flats. But actually in Sheffield, in some areas, over two-thirds of houses own leasehold, and another company owns the freehold. Okay, so it's a company that owns the freehold. It may be an individual. and they're on the much longer, those are the 999 year leases that when you buy the place, that's what you're actually buying. You're not buying the land it's sitting on. That's right. Okay. Yeah. And normally there might be an element of ground rent.

2:42It might be a small sum paid to the freeholder. Right. So when they were set up, the ground rent was a significant sum of money, maybe five, six pounds a year. Back then, a lot of money. It's still five or six pounds a year, essentially worthless. And so one company in Sheffield was flogging a load of them off. And this guy, Andrew Milne, bought them at auction. Why would you buy several hundred freeholds as Mr. Milne did? It's a good question because we worked out if you did it just as an investment for ground rent, it would take about 30 years to get your money back. But if you own the freehold, you have a legal position of power over someone or a relationship, perhaps.

3:19And people don't really understand the freehold leasehold system completely. And in those leases, there are terms and conditions. and in his letters to some homeowners Milne said that those had been breached. Yes I understand that he would write to people either offering to sell them their own freehold at a fairly high price or he would say that there was a problem there might have been some breach of the terms and conditions. It was actually two letters at the same time to the same people so they would get both from the doormat and one would say exactly that you've breached the terms of your lease and then he would threaten in some cases to take people to the high court to try to get damages from them.

3:57That would include a mock-up of High Court papers with his name versus their name in the High Court, so you can imagine what it was like to receive those. And then on the same day, people would get a letter saying, I'm offering to sell you the freehold for£25 ,000. Right. Do you know how many people of the 300-ish Freehold Study Board received those letters? It's kind of continued to roll as it's gone. We think most people have now. Some of them haven't been as overtly threatening they've just been an offer to sell um accompanied sometimes by stuff about how no one wants leaseholds anymore your house is kind of not really saleable if you don't have the freehold underneath it um which isn't really true i can imagine that would be extremely scary getting a letter saying you're in breach of the terms and you might be taken to the high court have you spoken to some of the people who received those letters yeah we spoke to several Most didn't want to go on the record, understandably.

4:53One woman, Denise, has now chosen to go on the record. We wrote up her story recently. For her, she's still paying off her legal bills to go through the case. She's on a payment plan. It wiped out her savings. She's paid him just over£26 ,000 now. I mean, people felt terrified. They felt a lot of stress, you know, when you receive that kind of legal letter. And they hadn't done anything wrong? No, they hadn't. I mean, in some cases, there were breaches of the lease. There have been changes to the property. What kind of things are we talking? We might be talking about a small porch or a loft extension or a minor alteration.

5:26And within the lease, it's stated that you're supposed to have got the consent of the freeholder to do this. Okay. And in some cases they hadn't. But the issue is Milne implied that he would be owed damages because of this. But actually, as someone who owns the land, you haven't suffered any kind of loss. You're still entitled to your grand rent year after year. You've still got the same investment. Because someone's improved the value of their property by making a small change, you aren't owed any money but he implied that he was okay and several people have paid up 25 000 pounds in some cases that's their life savings yes yeah how did mr milne react when i presume you went to him for comment um very negatively uh he said he would uh pursue us for defamation and malicious communications if we published anything um he did respond to some of our questions uh but not quite a lot of the detail that we put to him that i believe is the same as uh what he said to private eye when private eye asked him questions about it yes but i don't know if you recognize these words the allegations you make are wholly false and simply lies that you have invented we have instructed leading counsel and will shortly be pursuing a claim a variant of that yeah something similar okay so normally i would ask people who are on the shortlist what legal challenges came up along the way it sounds like that was the principal problem.

6:42Yes it was a big problem we knew that there was a credible threat of legal action he's a solicitor we took an extra week on the story we made sure we got lots of letters we took more advice from property solicitors we really knew that we thought there were issues with his letters and then we were confident to publish. What happened next? There was a big reaction within Sheffield and beyond particularly among solicitors actually who were sort of quite concerned that a solicitor was acting in this way we then thought well we should probably try and take this story national it's really important so at that point I actually got in touch with your good selves at the I and I thought this is the kind of story you guys would would would suit you really well and so I spoke to Rachel Clay your housing editor and she commissioned me to write the first piece in the I about it which many of your readers will have encountered Milne there and then that's obviously been followed up and it's made it to the House of Commons the story yes that's right both Olivia Blake MP in Sheffield Hallam where a lot of our properties are and Phil Brickle who's an MP in Bolton West got in touch so after we've spoken to homeowners and I should note this is a sort of joint application so joint submission so my colleagues Dan Hayes and Molly Simpson spoke to lots of homeowners in Sheffield people got in touch with us from other places where Milne had previously sent letters to leaseholders so Bolton was one my colleague Jack Walton followed that story Horwich was another my colleague Abby Wistons followed that story we have sister titles in different cities so we were able to follow that up.

8:06There is an organisation called the Solicitors Regulatory Authority, is that right? That's right, the SRA, yeah. Where were they in all this? Absent. They had heard about Milne many years prior, at least 2018 we know they'd heard about Milne, in connection with other matters. He had taken out a sort of injunction against them. Against his own regulatory authority? Yes, and he made various complaints about them, including not having been awarded a Solicitor of the Month and sort of things like this. So that sort of appeared to have led to them sort of stepping back, which was a huge problem because they're there to protect people who use solicitors.

8:53And they themselves seemed unable to deal with threats they'd received. Yeah. And I mean, I think we've said either in the eye, I mean, I don't know if you wrote this, that there are 800 people at the SRA. Yes, many Fumar solicitors. Yeah. Has anything changed about the state of Mr. Milne's license to practice? Yes, he now has to have permission or work under someone else. So he's more limited in what he can do as a solicitor. But he is still trading? Yes. How was the editorial support on this story? I'm always interested in that because, you know, whenever you talk to a reporter, they say, oh, yes, I was working with editors on this.

9:29And, you know, it's kind of an overlooked bit of the process. Yeah, great. I mean, we have a good team. We've got Cameron Barr from the Washington Post has now joined us as one of our investigations editors. So yeah, it was really helpful. We double-checked, triple-checked everything. We did know we were taking a bit of a risk, but I think our view is that a lot of local news has become quite cautious and doesn't really take these risks and does back down in the face of threats, and we didn't want to do that. Is that a resource thing, that local news is sometimes doing that, do you think? or yeah for sure i mean resources have been hit and court cases are of course incredibly expensive if you fight them even if it's totally baseless you still have to go through a lot and our sister title in london's just had to deal with one of these and we spent you know tens of thousands of pounds on a completely baseless legal claim so so i'm very interested in the structure you say you've got these sister organizations around the country does that help spread the risk as it were uh possibly yeah we have slightly deeper pockets i don't know with one organization so yeah i suppose it does but it was also it was helpful in this story because the follow-up that we wanted to do after we published was we also wanted to find andrew mill because he hadn't answered several of our questions and in particular you know we asked yeah how do you feel about how people have been made to feel by your letters and and what would you like to say to them we then heard from various people we heard one address that he had in london we went there um no one really knew the guy the address he was sending his letters from was a pub in north wales which we almost thought must be some sort of false address or something it seems kind of strange but sure enough i went there and it's this sort of derelict pub it's been closed for at least 10 years it still has its uh zero out of five food hygiene certificate in the window um i suppose people in local shops and they said yeah he does turn up occasionally and like just moves a load of furniture in and every now and then he'll buy a shirt in the charity shop and so on then we heard his main address was on the wirral so we went there um with my colleagues from from liverpool we'd seen him the night before his car outside the drive he left by the next morning so he thought oh he's probably gone to london but then i thought well he might have just gone to his welsh pub so So I called up people in the village and they were like, yeah, he's here.

11:44So we went over to Wales. He was inside. There was one light on. He wouldn't come to the door. We knocked and knocked. However, he then had a date in court for an unrelated case in Stratford, East London. So I went down there and waited outside. And I finally got to ask him some questions, which he didn't answer. Okay, there we go. We went for a nice walk through the Stratford shopping centre together. That's nice. that's very nice to hear yeah i guess we'll be hearing more about the story soon sure once the legal proceedings allow indeed well it's a fantastic story congratulations thank you thanks so that's it for today's shortlist eat we'll be back with another one tomorrow we'll see you then andy and anna here from your new favorite podcast no such thing as a fish yes we are two of the four hosts of the podcast that stuffs fascinating, amazing, weird, mad facts into your ears on a weekly basis.

12:42You got any good facts, Andy? Yes. How about this one? Anteaters have evolved on 12 separate occasions. Wow. Mysterious. Wonderful. The world really wants them to exist. What about this one? When Ronald Reagan left office, he left a note on the White House lawn for the squirrels, warning them to beware of George Bush's dogs. So there you go. If you like fascinating facts, and much more besides, we are No Such Thing As A Fish.