You have probably seen a pop-up offering you the chance of a telephone call at an extra cost. It is up to you whether you have a telephone call or not but do bear in mind that a 15-30 minute telephone call covers an awful lot of ground and you can get an awful lot of information in that time. So you can ignore it or go ahead or go ahead later. It’s your choice.
Meanwhile, we can carry on on here.
You are allowed to cut off anything which overhangs the boundary but you cannot pieces because they do not belong to you so you should give them back to the landowner.
If you are unable or don’t want to do the work you would be entitled to get contractors and take the landowner to court for the costs if they don’t reimburse you those costs.
I agree with you it is down to sanctuary housing to pay for all the remedial work in addition.
You have a claim trespass and nuisance and negligence.
Trespass because their plants are on your land. Nuisance because this is, on an ordinary English dictionary definition of the word “nuisance” and negligence because they have been negligent in letting this grow.
It will help if I explain how claims in negligence arise.
There needs to be
1. a duty of care
2. the duty of care needs to be breached
3. as a result of the breach there needs to be loss or injury
4. the loss or injury resulting from the breach must be reasonably foreseeable.
In order for there to be a claim in negligence, all 4 heads have to be satisfied.
There is a potential partial defence from the neighbouring land masses that you have contributed to this yourself. You have done that by simply standing by and letting this happen without doing anything about it before now. That would only be a partial defence to any claim which you may bring against the neighbouring landowner. However it would be for them to raise, not you.
I don’t how you contacted sanctuary housing but you need to put your letter in writing so that communication doesn’t get lost.
Ultimately they don’t do anything about it, you are faced with getting the work done and taking them to court.
The new Moneyclaim beta system is easy to use: https://www.gov.uk/make-money-claim
the new system is much better than the old government Gateway system.
You can prepare the proceedings now, at your leisure, save them, and then just pay the fee and press the button when the deadline in your letter before action, expires.
It's then just a case of following the court process and responding to any emails that you receive.
Thank you for letting me assist you with your legal question. I am glad that I was able to help.
I am not certain whether that answers the question for you or not, but I am happy to answer any specific points arising from this.
It will be my pleasure to help you again either further with this or any future questions you have
Kind regards
Stuart