The tragic irrationality of CPNs
For the past year, we have been in touch with an elderly lady in north London who has received a series of council CPNs for Japanese knotweed. Her case is tragic and perverse – and shows perhaps better than any the counterproductive nature of Community Protection Notices, and why they badly need to be reformed. The justification for CPNs was that these provide quick and easy redress for ‘victims’ of anti-social behaviour. However, the extremely low standards of evidence and procedure (requiring no production of evidence, and no formal process or proof of guilt) have yielded instead a system that is arbitrary,…