Meet the London lawyer terrorising the leaseholders of Bolton

Andrew Milne couldn’t quite say what he was thinking when he purchased 67 freeholds in Horwich at auction in January 2021. By his own account, he was drunk. All we can say for sure is that it happened and it cost him £8,500.

It could happen to anyone of course. A few light ales, a bit of harmless online bidding and voilà, you’ve woken up with a sore head as the “principal landed proprietor” (his words) in a small town near Bolton. But what happened next was more concerning: from 2021 Milne proceeded to launch a multi-year campaign of demands to make the residents of Horwich buy the freeholds from him for thousands of pounds. If they didn’t comply, the threats would begin. Threats to knock down their conservatories; threats to have the leases on their homes forfeited; threats to take them to court. 

In a small house at the end of a suburban street in Horwich, on a freezing cold November day, Terrence Bennett pulls open his front door. I ask if he recognises the name Andrew Milne. He responds in the same manner that most residents of the surrounding streets have so far: a knowing, pained smile. He invites me inside. Terrence is in his early 80s and has already suffered one heart attack in his life. Milne, he tells me, brought him awfully close to a second.

Terrence got his first letter in 2021 — shortly after Milne bought the freeholds at auction. Milne was demanding £6,000, despite having paid an average of £126 per freehold. Terrence was initially unwilling to pay, but Milne wouldn’t relent. “We got letters, threatening letters, every six months,” he says. Milne eventually threatened to take Terrence to court to settle the matter. Fearing for his health, Terrence settled for around £3,000. “It gets a lot harder to fight these things as you get older,” his wife, Joan, says.

The Mill understands that similar threats were made to most — if not all — of the owners of the 67 homes whose freeholds Milne had purchased. In England, while most homeowners own the freehold on their properties (meaning the land the home sits on), in some cases the home and the land beneath it are sold separately. That means the homeowner owes a ground rent to the landlord. These leases can run for centuries into the future, meaning there is often little incentive to buy them. Moreover, the ground rents are so low the freeholds are practically worthless. To Milne, however, they represented a lucrative opportunity.

What makes this story even more bizarre is the fact that Andrew Milne is actually a City of London solicitor. Many of the residents in Horwich believe he used this status to bully them and present himself as a man of great importance, whose demands they ought to comply with. In a letter seen by The Mill to one resident Milne explains his lofty status: “I am the principal landed proprietor in Horwich people will always touch their caps to me”.

After being contacted by The Mill, Bolton West MP Phil Brickell told us: “If these allegations are true, this is one of the most egregious cases of bullying I have ever seen. The relevant authorities – whether that’s the Solicitor’s Regulation Authority or indeed Greater Manchester Police, need to take a close look at this and determine whether this individual has a case to answer. For my part, I will not see my constituents bullied by spurious legal threats, if that is indeed what they are.” 

Meanwhile, over in Sheffield, where our colleagues at The Tribune have exposed Milne for targeting dozens of leaseholders, Sheffield Hallam MP Olivia Blake has referred the matter to South Yorkshire Police, who now have detectives reviewing it.

Sex slaves and hypersonic missiles

It was midway down the fourth page of his letter that Andrew Milne started talking about hypersonic missiles, the Russia-Ukraine war, and his status as one of the most important land-owners in Horwich. The letter was addressed to a resident of Horwich’s Heather Close, one street in a cluster of five containing most of the 67 houses which were affected. Milne was not happy that the resident was refusing to comply with his demands to purchase the freehold from him and said he would be serving a Section 146 notice to forfeit the lease in five days. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” he wrote.

Milne explained to the resident that they were on thin ice. A local councillor, David Grant, had apparently been in touch to offer him “free legal advice” on the actions he could take against leaseholders. He noted that the advice was proffered at 10:38pm, meaning the councillor “thought it was very important”. This point was evidently key: throughout the rest of the letter Milne felt it necessary to point out that Grant’s correspondence had come “in the middle of the night” on eight more occasions.  

Then Milne deployed an analogy. Grant was like a mediator in the Russia-Ukraine war, but he had “advised Russia privately to use hypersonic missiles to knock out the entire Ukrainian military in a pre-emptive strike”. What he meant here was that councillor Grant had advised him on the action he needed to take to start the process to forfeit the leases for anyone who was in breach of them, so that he could take their homes. He was Russia, they were Ukraine, and he was coming for their land.

There was an issue with this analogy, though. Councillor Grant had done no such thing. In Grant’s actual email to Milne, dated 17 January 2022 and reviewed by The Mill, he had described Milne’s demands as “not lawful”, and the amounts he was offering to sell the leases for as “an exaggerated rate”. He had also outlined several legal areas where his case falls down. Milne had simply selectively quoted a couple of lines to pretend the councillor was on his side. 

In the view of Grant, the misuse of what he said is “dishonest and fraudulent behaviour”. He told us Milne had “misrepresented my email by redacting almost all of it and only leaving one section in which I outline which sections [of the law] he had not followed.” Milne also sent the redacted version to residents to further create the false impression he was being offered legal advice by an elected representative. 

Indeed, Andrew Milne has quite the history of bizarre communications. Someone who knows more than most about them is Daniel Cloake. Cloake runs an online blog, Mouse in the Court, from which he has been reporting on Andrew Milne since before the pandemic; before councillor Grant got involved, and before our colleagues in Sheffield were able to turn Milne into a story garnering national attention.

In August 2024 — a few weeks after sending an email outlining his intention to “examine [Cloake’s] mouse hole properly” — Andrew Milne showed up at Cloake's front door. By this point Cloake had already declined his offer to purchase copyright to material about Milne posted on the blog page (presumably to give himself control over what was being published about him). Cloake was out, but Milne proceeded to scribble a note on a bin, which was then pushed through the door. The note was a threat to have Cloake’s property seized, followed by an even stranger threat: 

AFTER YOU ARE BANKRUPT IF YOU AGREE TO BE MY TOTAL SEX SLAVE I WILL LET YOU LIVE IN THE GARAGE

A few weeks later Milne was charged with stalking — which he has pleaded not guilty to. A three day trial is scheduled to begin in January at Stratford Magistrates’ Court.

‘You just knew it was him again’

“It was the first thing I thought about when I got up in the morning and the last thing I thought about when I went to bed,” says Margaret Wooff, who first received a letter from Andrew Milne on 13 July 2021. It was addressed to her and her husband David. They had bought the home on Abraham Street decades prior, in 1988, as a leasehold. After the first, the letters kept on coming for two years.

“You’d put it out of your mind and it’d arrive in a lovely brown envelope, typed black writing. And you just knew it was him again, you just knew it was going to be from him,” Margaret says. “And you’d open it with dread.” In his very first letter Milne said he was “investigating if grounds exist to start the process to forfeit your lease” — essentially a threat to remove them from their own home.

A few doors down from Margaret, an almost-identical letter dropped through the door of Brian and Pauline’s house, who have asked us not to use their surnames. Panicked, Pauline emailed Milne. He replied saying he would call her at a set time. Then the call came. “He was screaming at me down the phone,” Pauline says. She told Milne he must be a very wealthy man if he owns all this property. “Indeed I am not, I am a working class man,” Pauline recalls him booming back.

Milne told both couples they had made alterations to their properties without the permission of the freeholder. These included fairly major changes like installing a conservatory or minor ones like putting up CCTV cameras. He explained that he knew all about this because he’d flown a drone over their houses. Milne originally told Margaret the freehold to her house was worth £15,000 — despite the fact that buying all 67 freeholds in the area had cost him £8,500, or £127 each. Generously, he said he’d be prepared to sell it for £6,500 plus a contribution to his solicitor’s charges. 

In a series of further letters, he made threats to have the Wooff’s conservatory demolished at their expense, and said that he could walk into the house whenever he liked to make sure it was in good condition. He even offered them a “New Year Special Offer” to pay £3,500 for the freehold. Eventually, they received the most concerning letter of all: Milne said he was planning to take them to court.

Not wanting to risk an expensive legal battle against a practising solicitor, Margaret and David agreed to pay Milne £3,500, plus his costs, taking it up to about £5,000. Brian and Pauline agreed to pay £3,000 all in. It was what they had to do to end a two year nightmare.

These are just two cases of many. Another resident, a single mother who has asked not to be named, was contacted by Milne asking for £1,500 for her freehold, not long after she moved into the property. He then proceeded to falsely accuse her of renting the property out without her permission, demand sums of money as high as £146,000 (the property was only bought for £66,000) and pulled out of an agreement for her to buy the freehold when she couldn’t find the money in 24 hours. At one stage he said he was coming round to change the locks, meaning she sat indoors all day in fear that he might show up at any minute. The process has meant she is unable to sell, trapping her in a small property with her son. “I feel like a prisoner,” she told me.

Christine Appiah, a solicitor at the firm Fieldings Porter, is currently representing a number of people who still have legal proceedings open with Milne. She provided us with this statement: 

“Fieldings Porter are currently representing several clients who have been sued by Mr Milne for alleged breaches of lease agreements and we are instructed by those clients in ongoing litigation which means we are restricted in what we are able to say at present. However, we understand that this is a wider issue in the community and would be interested to hear from anyone who might be facing similar difficulties with this individual.”

Pastures new for Mr Milne

For most of the residents of Horwich, Andrew Milne and his letters are thankfully a thing of the past. Many settled their cases with him, generally for sums between £3,000 and £6,000. In other cases, he eventually gave up. 

According to councillor Grant, who has been dealing with this for years, “roughly 15” residents eventually settled, and at a minimum he made “the best part of £100,000” from his £8,500 investment. Brian and Pauline told us they were saving the money up to have their bathroom done. It was worth paying the money to Milne though, given what they’d endured. 

It seems that after the success of his scheme in Horwich, Milne decided he could repeat the trick. In August 2022, 17 freeholds were put out to auction in Southport. While there were no takers at first, Milne must have found about them after the auction and came to an agreement to buy them for £4,000. The following month, an 88-year-old woman called Anne, now living alone after the death of her husband, was disturbed by the sound of envelopes being pushed through her post-box. Among them was a letter from Andrew Milne. He was asking for £6,000.

But Milne’s most audacious approach has been in Sheffield, where this summer he bought up almost 300 freeholds, and is demanding sums as high as £25,000 for them. The tactics he first honed in Horwich — such as sending residents the “draft particulars of claim” for a High Court case against them — have been even more lucrative than before. Our colleagues at The Tribune have spoken to several residents who have paid Milne the full £25,000, plus Milne’s legal fees.

The question of the legality of Milne’s actions hangs over all of this. In Sheffield, Olivia Blake MP has now reported Milne to South Yorkshire Police, on the basis of advice that his actions may amount to fraud by falsely representing the position of leaseholds, as well as causing intentional harassment, alarm or distress. South Yorkshire Police gave this short statement: “We are aware and have detectives reviewing the matter.”

Meanwhile, it turns out the Solicitor’s Regulation Authority — the body that regulates solicitors in England — have been looking at Milne since 2016. In his latest blog post, Daniel Cloake revealed that Milne has been able to thwart their investigations for much of that time by bringing his own cases against them — including threatening an injunction in 2021.

Before publishing, we contacted Andrew Milne with a series of questions. We received a response from "solicitors" apparently acting on behalf of Milne, who said:

The comments you make are completely untrue and we will issue proceedings for defamation if you repeat them

“You were anxious all the time,” Pauline tells me as our chat comes to an end. “You weren’t sleeping, you weren’t eating, you were frightened of coming home”. One time she came home to find a car with the registration MILNE parked on her road, sending her into a panic. (The car turned out to belong to a woman who worked in the local shop.) During our chat she begins to almost tear up, recalling the state of paranoia Milne induced in her. “I’m sorry,” she says. “But this is what it did to us”.