The Lord Mayor and the Citizens of the City of Westminster v Addbins Ltd and Others
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | The Hon. Mr Justice Males,The Honourable Mr Justice Males |
| Judgment Date | 20 December 2012 |
| Neutral Citation | [2012] EWHC 3716 (QB) |
| Court | Queen's Bench Division |
| Docket Number | Case No: HQ1ZX01835 |
| Date | 20 December 2012 |
[2012] EWHC 3716 (QB)
IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
QUEEN'S BENCH DIVISION
Royal Courts of Justice
Strand, London, WC2A 2LL
The Hon. Mr Justice Males
Case No: HQ1ZX01835
Saira Kabir Sheikh (instructed by Westminster City Council Legal & Democratic Services) for the Claimant
Nicholas Trompeter (instructed by Forsters LLP) for the Defendant
Hearing date: 10 th December 2012
Approved Judgment
I direct that pursuant to CPR PD 39A para 6.1 no official shorthand note shall be taken of this Judgment and that copies of this version as handed down may be treated as authentic.
Introduction
This is an application by Westminster City Council for an order that the defendants, Addbins Ltd and Addison Lee Plc, be fined and that Mr John Griffin, the founder and chairman of Addison Lee Plc and a director of both companies, be committed to prison for contempt of court. Westminster contends that the defendants and Mr Griffin wilfully failed to comply with an order of this court requiring the removal of advertisements from cigarette bins erected without advertisement consent. The defendants contend that Westminster's application notice is too vague and general to hold them liable for contempt, that any failure to comply with the court's order was unintentional and that in any event compliance was impossible, and that the application to commit is disproportionate and an abuse of process because they had informed Westminster that they intended to comply and were in the process of complying with the order. In addition Mr Griffin says that, whatever the position of the companies, there was no failure on his part such as to render him personally liable for contempt, and that the proceedings against him should be struck out because the court's order was not served on him personally.
The order of Edwards-Stuart J
The order of which it is said that the defendants were in contempt was made by Edwards-Stuart J on 15 June 2012.
It was endorsed with a penal notice in the following terms:
"PENAL NOTICE
IF YOU THE WITHIN NAMED ADDBINS LIMITED OR ADDISON LEE PLC WITHOUT THE GRANT OF EXPRESS ADVERTISEMENT CONSENT DISOBEY THIS ORDER YOU MAY BE HELD TO BE IN CONTEMPT OF COURT AND LIABLE TO IMPRISONMENT OR YOUR ASSETS SEIZED
IMPORTANT
Notice to the Defendants
You should read the terms of this Order and the Guidance Notes very carefully.
You are advised to consult a solicitor as soon as possible.
If you disobey this Order you may be found guilty of Contempt of Court and may be sent to prison or fined. In the case of a Corporate Defendant, it may be fined, its Directors may be sent to prison or fined or its assets may be seized."
The order itself provided:
" IT IS ORDERED that:
The Defendants shall no later than 14 days from the date of this Order:
(1) remove from the City of Westminster's area all cigarette bins erected without advertisement consent in breach of section 224 of the Town and County Planning Act 1990 and the Town and Country Planning (Control of Advertisements) (England) Regulations 2007 and displaying either the logo of the 1 st or 2 nd Defendant.
The Defendants are forbidden from:
(2) erecting or displaying any advertisements requiring express consent without obtaining such consent in accordance with Town and Country Planning (Control of Advertisements) (England) Regulations 2007."
Fourteen days from the date of the order was 29 June 2012.
Background
Addison Lee is a public company that provides minicab and vehicle rental services. Addbins is a subsidiary of Addison Lee. Mr Griffin is the chairman of Addison Lee, which he founded, and is a director of both companies. His evidence was that the companies employ some 5,000 people.
This case is concerned with metal cigarette bins affixed by Addison Lee and/or Addbins to the outside of various buildings within the City of Westminster. The bins were intended to be used by smokers who needed somewhere to put their cigarette stubs. They were designed so that they could display advertisements and they were employed, among other things, for the purpose of advertising the services of Addison Lee. The advertisements took two forms. One set out Addison Lee's telephone booking number and the other provided what is known as a "Quick Response Code".
The bins were provided by the defendants at their own cost, with no charge to the owners of the premises to which they were attached. Mr Griffin's evidence in the Westminster Magistrates Court proceedings referred to below was that the bins provided valuable publicity for Addison Lee's minicab services, and that in addition they represented a source of considerable potential advertising revenue, with numerous enquiries received from interested advertisers. In the event, however, as he explained in his evidence to me, that advertising revenue did not materialise. It is Mr Griffin's strongly held view that in addition to providing his companies with valuable but unquantifiable publicity, the provision of these bins provides a benefit to the public in the form of cleaner pavements, and indeed to Westminster which would otherwise be faced with the cost of cleaning up millions of cigarette stubs dropped on the pavements each year. It appears that this view is shared by the owners of the premises where the bins are erected and by other local councils within London, a total of some 19,000 bins having been erected across 6,500 locations in London as a whole.
Westminster, however, takes a radically different view. Mrs Chidiebele Freeman is a senior planning officer in Westminster's Planning Enforcement Team which is responsible for investigating breaches of planning control. According to her witness statement dated 8 May 2012 made in support of Westminster's application for the injunction with which this application is concerned, the council considers that the advertisements "were unacceptable on the grounds of the negative visual impact that they had on the buildings on which they were displayed and the surrounding conservation areas" and that they caused "substantial harm to visual amenity by reason of their prevalence and their undue prominence on the street scene causing visual clutter".
It is no part of the court's function on this application to decide between these conflicting views of the utility or desirability of the bins.
Because the cigarette bins displayed advertisements for the services of Addison Lee, they constituted advertisements for the purposes of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 and the Town and Country Planning (Control of Advertisements) (England) Regulations 2007 and, as such, they required express advertisement consent from Westminster. However, no such express consent was sought when the bins were erected, with the consequence that the display of the advertisements constituted an offence under section 224 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. It was so held in criminal proceedings against Addbins and Addison Lee in the Westminster Magistrates Court on 21 April 2010 and an appeal by way of case stated was dismissed by the Divisional Court on 12 January 2012 ( [2012] EWHC 152 (Admin)). Those proceedings related to 21 specified locations, but it has not been suggested that there is any material difference so far as criminal liability is concerned between those specified locations and the many hundreds of other locations throughout Westminster at which the bins have been erected.
The conclusion of the criminal proceedings in January 2012 might have been expected to end the long running dispute between Westminster and the defendants, going back to June 2008, by removing any doubt as to whether the display of the advertisements on the bins constituted a criminal offence. It might also have been expected that, having been found guilty, the defendants would take prompt steps to ensure that they were no longer committing an offence by removing the remaining unlawful advertisements. However, despite repeated pressure from Westminster in correspondence to the defendants' solicitors, Forsters LLP, for the advertisements to be removed, the defendants took no steps to do so.
Mr Griffin told me that he decided that the bins displaying the advertisements should not be removed because he had arranged a meeting with the council for 24 April 2012 at which he hoped to find an amicable solution. That may have been Mr Griffin's hope, but in view of the council's long-standing determination to have the advertisements removed and its repeated insistence in correspondence after the decision of the Divisional Court that this should happen, any such hope was not likely to prove well founded. Although not directly relevant to the issue of contempt because there was at this stage no injunction in place, the deliberate and sustained failure of the defendants to remove the advertisements, display of which had been established to be a criminal offence, forms a relevant part of the background to Westminster's application to commit the defendants for contempt, and in particular bears on the question whether that application is an abuse.
The meeting of 24 April 2012 did not produce any agreed solution. Mr Griffin offered to enter into negotiations with a view to replacing the existing advertisements on the bins with advertisements for Cancer Research or a similar charity, together with a small logo indicating that the bins were sponsored by Addison Lee, but this proposal was unacceptable to Westminster and the meeting ended abruptly after the Westminster representatives advised that unless the advertisements were removed the council would commence further...
To continue reading
Request your trial
-
Sports Direct International Plc v Rangers International Football Club Plc David King (Additional Respondent)
...in support. That has long been established and I refer for example to the summary of Males J in the decision of The Lord Mayor and Citizens of Westminster v Addbins & ors [2012] EWHC 3716 (QB) at paragraphs [40] – [44] as follows:- "The need for particulars of the conduct alleged to constit......
-
Deutsche Bank AG v Sebastian Holdings Inc.
...also evident in the judgment of Males J in The Lord Mayor and the Citizens of the City of Westminster v Addbins Limited, Addison Lee plc [2012] EWHC 3716 where he stated at [43]: “ In summary, therefore, the application notice must contain sufficient detail of what is alleged to enable the ......
-
Perkier Foods Ltd v Halo Foods Ltd
...may therefore be a breach of the order, but not, in my judgment, a contempt of court.’ 11 In Westminster City Council v Addbins Ltd [2012] EWHC 3716 (QB), Males J set out this passage and went on to consider at [48] ‘ whether this principle of impossibility should be extended to a case whe......
-
Ipartner Pte Shipping Ltd and Others (Claimant/Applicants) v Panacore Resources DMCC and Others (Defendant/Respondents) (4) Vikram Kashyap and Others
...to take reasonable steps to ensure that the order or undertaking is obeyed." 26 This approach was cited and applied by Males J. in Westminster v Addbins [2012] EWHC 3716 (QB). 27 It was submitted by the Claimants that the issue of whether a failure to take reasonable steps is "wilful" only ......