Tracking Down Milne and Future Reporting

Hello and welcome back to page 94. This is the Paul Foot 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. I'm Daniel Timms uh at the Sheffield Tribune. And what is the story that's brought you to the Pool Foot Awards this year? We covered a story about Andrew Milne, a solicitor who uh threatened homeowners with legal action, in some cases extracting over twenty five thousand pounds out of them. Okay. Now I'm gonna 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, um, has been qualified for many years, and we came across him when he started sending letters to home owners in Sheffield and this happened because he had bought the freeholds to their homes. Yeah. So Sheffield is a bit unusual. Normally when people think of leasehold, they think of flats. Yeah. Um but actually in Sheffield , in some areas over two thirds of houses are owned leasehold and another company owns the freehold. Okay. So it's it's a company that owns the freehold, it may be an individual and they're on the much longer those are the nine hundred and ninety-inen 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 and normally there might be an element of uh you know ground rent, it might be a a small sum paid 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 uh 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. Um and people don't really understand the freehold leasehold system completely. Um Yes. I understand that he would write to people either offering to sell them their own It was actually two letters at the same time to the same people. So they would get both on 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 uh get damages from them. That would include a mock-up of High Court papers with his name versus their name in the high court as you can imagine what it was like to receive those. And then on the same day people get a letter saying I'm offering so you the freehold for twenty five thousand pounds. Right. Do you know how many people of the three hundred 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. Um most didn't want to go on the record, understandably . Uh one 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 twentys six thousand pound 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 ha I mean in some cases there were breaches of the lease. There been been changes to the property. Wha what kind of things are we talking? We might be talking about um a small porch or a loft extension or yeah a minor alteration. And within the lease it's stated that you're supposed to have got the consent of the freeholder to do this. Okay. Uh 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 ground 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 mm twenty five thousand pounds. In some cases that's the 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 communication That I believe is the same as uh what he said to Private Eye when Private Eye asked him questions about it. Okay. So normally I would ask people who are on the short list what legal challenges came up along the way. It sounds like that was the principal problem. Yes, it was a big problem. We knew that there was a credible threat of legal action. He's a solicitor. Um 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 uh that we thought there were issues with his letters and then we were confident to publish. What happened next? Uh there was big reaction within Sheffield, um 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 eye and I thought this is the kind of story you guys would would would suit you really well. So I spoke to Rachel Clare, your housing editor, and she commissioned me to write the first piece in the eye about it, which many of your readers will have encountered Milne there. Yeah. And then uh 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, uh where a lot of our properties are, and Phil Brickell, who's an MP in Bolton West, uh, got in touch. So after we spoken to homeowners, um, and I should note this is a sort of joint application uh joint submission. So my colleagues, uh 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 Bolton 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. There there is an organisation called the Solicitors Regulatory Authority, is that right? The SRA? Where were they in all this ? Um absent. Uh they had heard about Milne many years prior, at least twenty eighteen, we know they'd heard about Milne, with connection in connection with other other matters. Uh he had taken out a sort of injunction against them, they'd backed out against the re against his own regulatory authority? Yes, and he made various complaints about them, including not having been awarded employ a solicitor of the month and sort of things like this. Right. So that sort of appeared to have led to them sort of stepping back. Which was a huge problem because they're there to, you know, protect people who use solicitors and 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 eight hundred people at the SRA. Yes. Many of whom are solicitors, yeah. Yeah. Has anything changed about the state of Mr. Milne's license to practice? Yes, he now has to have uh permission or work under someone else. So he's more limited in what he what he can do as a solicitor, yeah. Uh but he is still trading. Uh yes. Yeah. 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, Ah yes, we well my I was working with editors on this and you know it's kind of an overlook bit of the process. Yeah, um 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 don't want to do that. Is that a resource thing that uh local news is is sometimes doing that, do you think? Or yeah, for sure. I mean the 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. Um our cit izen 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 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? Possibly, yeah. We have slightly deeper pockets, I don't know, with one organisation. 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 Milne 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 uh pub in North Wales, which we almost thought must be some sort of false address or something. It seemed 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. Okay. Um I spoke to 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 Liverpo ol. We'd seen him the night before his car outside the drive. He'd left by the next morning. So we thought ah he's probably gone to London. But then I thought well he might have just gone to his Welsh pub. So I called up people in the village and they were like, yeah he's here. So we went we went over to Wales, yeah, he was inside, there was one light on, um he wouldn't come to the door, we knocked and knocked. However, he was then he then had a date in court for an unrelated case, uh in Stratford, East London.