Homeowner jailed after repeatedly trying to build house extension without planning permission

Trevor Hadjimina was told by a judge to stop all work at his home in Peckham, South London after ending up in a legal battle with the council over his attempts to build an extension

A man who repeatedly tried to extend his house without planning permission has been jailed for six months.

Trevor Hadjimina was found to have committed contempt of court by restarting work at the property despite being ordered by a judge to stop. It followed years of legal disputes with the local council over work at his home in Peckham, South London, where he has lived since 1991.

Southwark Council first took legal action against Trevor Hadjimina in 2017 over his attempts to build on top of a single-storey extension.

In 2018, the council was granted an injunction barring Mr Hadjimina from carrying out unauthorised works on his property, after he claimed that the construction was a caravan. The council returned to the High Court last year, asking a judge to find that Mr Hadjimina had committed contempt of court by undertaking further work at the property, in breach of the injunction.

Mr Justice Cotter found in March that two allegations of contempt of court against Mr Hadjimina were proven but delayed sentencing after Mr Hadjimina suggested that he was willing to take down the structure.

But at a hearing on Thursday, which Mr Hadjimina did not attend, the same judge sentenced him to six months in prison after the council claimed he had resumed building works. In his ruling, Mr Justice Cotter said there was an “extensive history” of Mr Hadjimina seeking to build on top of the extension.

In 2018, he was ordered to “cease all work” at the site and to remove a “timber frame structure” and “four courses of brickwork” which he had built on top of the single-storey extension.

He removed the structure and complied with the order for several years but began constructing a “large timber-framed structure” last year.

Mr Hadjimina later took this down but then began to “construct a substantial brick structure in its place”, Mr Justice Cotter said.

The judge said that while defending his actions at a hearing in March, Mr Hadjimina “advanced a position, although not expressly describing it as such, that he was a freeman of the land’ and he refused to accept that he was bound by the injunction order or indeed that the court had any power over him”.

He also said that the “idea that Trevor can simply choose to opt out'” of planning laws was “hopelessly misconceived”, adding that some of his arguments were “nonsense”. The judge found that the wooden and brick structures both breached the 2018 injunction and that Mr Hadjimina was in contempt of court, which can result in a sentence of up to two years in prison or a fine.

Handing down a six-month sentence, the judge said: “These were serious breaches. “I am wholly satisfied that Trevor breached the injunction order deliberately rather than inadvertently and was fully aware that he was openly defying a court order.

“This was (a) deliberate and flagrant breach of the order and (in) effect amounted to a challenge to the power and authority of the court.”

Finding that the “gravity” of the contempt meant the sentence could not be suspended, the judge said: “This is the danger of the various freeman of the land theories; they bring the defendants into conflict with the rule of law.

“It is not a conflict that they will win and in the process, they frequently, as with Trevor, act to their own very significant detriment.”