The Duty of Care

It was after suffering one particularly bad weekend of debauchery and over-indulgence, inflicted on me by the neighbours that nobody wanted I decided enough was enough.

I'm not particularly brave neither am I one for confrontation. I'm like most people I just want a quiet life, but these savages had decided no-one in the vicinity was going to have a 'quiet' life and since I was bearing the brunt of their antisocial habits I knew I had to do 'something'.

Not the 'something' that was suggested to me by a leading Parish Councillor to get JF to come down with his couple of Rottweilers as 'he puts the kids straight' or by the son of another Parish Councillor - get BL an ex boxer to come down and sit outside your house with a baseball bat for a few nights to give them a warning.

No, I made my first big mistake in this story, I went to the council and genuinely asked them for help.

BIG MISTAKE.......Councils, council employees and in particular councillors who have been pulling themselves up by their bootstraps to 'better themselves' but who are still encroached in their working class attitudes believe they are Gods and not to be trifled with or approached by the common man or woman.

No, it would seem they have mutated from the working class ethics of 'looking out for one another' only to have climbed the slightly higher echelon of council mentality of 'covering ar$es.'

It's a case of
'We tell you what t'do lad and you tek it and if you want plannin' get a few beers in int'club!
The greasy palm tree is indigenous to the North East.
That's the Code of Ethics I was dealing with.

So you didn't have to knock me down with a feather when the answer to my prayer came back that my council didn't owe me a 'Duty of Care'.

Why not? Because I was an owner occupier and as such was supposed to sort out my own problems even though they knew this family and their history as they had prepared to evict them from one of their council properties and the family jumped before they were pushed leaving the house wrecked!

I was told not to bother the council again but to go to the police.

I protested that the law states noise within the boundaries of a property are the remit of Environmental Health, and that the police would only deal with any fracas on the public thoroughfare.
But the ranks closed and I was out in the cold and certainly
not up for membership of
SEDGEFIELD BOROUGH COUNCIL OLD BOYS CLUB .