John McLinden KC and Michael Reason acted for the successful local authority in Greer v London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham - a County Court claim arising out of the council granting a commercial lease for nursery premises in West London.
The claimant, trading as One World Montessori Nursery, alleged she had been induced to enter into a 15-year lease of basement premises by a representation that local residents had been consulted and had not objected to the premises being used as a nursery.
The council denied that any such representation had been made. It accepted that, at an early stage, the claimant had been told that residents would be consulted, but denied that she had ever been told that consultation had taken place or that no objections had been raised.
The complaint response
To corroborate her account of the oral misrepresentation, the claimant relied on a Stage 1 complaint response issued by the council, as this included the sentence:
I'm sorry you were incorrectly informed that residents had been consulted.
The administrative context in which the response was given was important as to the question of the document’s admissibility.
The reference to Stage I was not a label unique to the dispute; it described the 1st stage of a local authority complaint-handling process operating within the wider statutory and administrative framework for local-government complaints.
Section 23(12A) of the Local Government Act 1974 permits the Commission for Local Administration in England (commonly known as the Local Government Ombudsman) to give local authorities guidance about good administrative practice.
The ombudsman used that power to issue the Complaint Handling Code, which sets out principles for complaint-handling, including that the person responding should:
- clarify unclear issues
- deal with complaints on their merits
- act independently and with an open mind
- give the complainant a fair chance to set out their position
- address conflicts of interest, and
- consider relevant information and evidence carefully.
Hence the importance the claimant attributed to the document.
HHJ Holmes held the response was admissible against the council according to principles in Hollington v F. Hewthorn & Co. Ltd [1943] 1 KB 587, CA as applied in Evans v Barclays Bank plc [2025] UKSC 48; [2026] Bus. L.R. 328.
However, the judge did not accept that the sentence proved the pleaded representation. He observed that it was not supported by the preceding sentences in the letter and, although on a literal reading it appeared to say that the claimant had been told residents had been consulted, that conclusion did not fit with the other evidence.
Claim dismissed
Following trial, HHJ Holmes dismissed the claim.
The judge held that the contemporaneous documents made it extremely unlikely that the alleged representation that consultation had taken place had been made on or around 12 June 2018.
The judgment also noted that the claimant's earlier complaints to the council did not make the allegation in the form later advanced in the proceedings. Also the allegation as pleaded first appeared in recognisable form more than 4 years after the relevant events.
The court was not satisfied, on the balance of probabilities, that the pleaded claim was correct.
The judge was also far from satisfied that the employee from the council’s commercial property services team had said anything about consultation to induce the claimant to enter into the lease.
Fraud allegation rejected
A central feature of the case was the claimant's allegation that the council's commercial property services team had made the alleged representation fraudulently. That allegation failed.
HHJ Holmes found that the allegation that the council's commercial property services team had made the alleged representation fraudulently was 'wholly unsupported by the evidence and should never have been made'.
The judge observed that the claimant may have believed that a representation had been made, but he did not know why the staff member might have made it, and 'not every false representation was fraudulent'.
The judge did not find that the claimant had deliberately sought to mislead the court. Nevertheless, the decision draws a clear distinction between a possible misunderstanding or later reconstruction on the one hand, and a properly evidenced allegation of fraud on the other.
Significance of the decision
The decision is a useful example of the importance of contemporaneous documents in cases involving disputed oral representations and events said to have occurred many years earlier.
It is also of interest for the way in which the court approached a local authority complaint response produced under the ordinary local-government complaints architecture, including the Ombudsman's Complaint Handling Code. Although the response formed part of the factual history and was admitted in evidence, the court still had to decide at trial, on the primary evidence, whether the alleged words were said and whether the fraud case was made out.
Lastly the case underlines the care required before making allegations of fraud or dishonesty in civil proceedings.
Read the judgment in full in Greer v Hammersmith & Fulham LBC [2026].