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Pot Hole Claim!!
Hi All,
I managed to go down a dreaded pot hole two months ago. It did £650 worth of damage. I've submitted my claim to the council and received a letter to say it is being investigated. I received the letter two weeks ago. How long could I end up waiting for this to be sorted out and money returned for the inconvenience caused?
Many Thanks
I managed to go down a dreaded pot hole two months ago. It did £650 worth of damage. I've submitted my claim to the council and received a letter to say it is being investigated. I received the letter two weeks ago. How long could I end up waiting for this to be sorted out and money returned for the inconvenience caused?
Many Thanks
0
Comments
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Don't bank on receiving any money as more often than not they are not liable.
Have a look at this website which you may find useful https://www.potholes.com0 -
A lot longer than 2 weeks. It took nearly 2 months to get money from a private company for damage caused by their roadworks, I'd imagine a local authority to be longer.
Have they admitted liability, also what exactly are you looking for in terms of damages?0 -
I'm looking for £450 returned. I needed four new alloy wheels as you couldn't just buy one (£350), new tyre (£50) and tracking.
Who is liable then?0 -
It depends on whether the council have been performing checks on the roads at acceptable regular intervals and / or whether the pothole had been reported to them and if so have they repaired it within a reasonable time.
If they have been doing the checks and / or the pot hole was not reported to them then they are not liable.
Have a read of the website I linked to.0 -
Check http://www.fillthathole.org.uk/ (and a smaller site: http://www.potholes.co.uk/) to see if anyone else reported it via an independent site (i.e. where records can't be covered up or "lost"). If it was reported and reasonable action wasn't taken then they can not rely on a statutory defence.
Also an FOI request to the council for details of all reports of potholes in the area would be useful as many reports will be made directly to the council or by its own highways crews.
Did you get photos of the defects in the road? If not (and if they're still there) try to take one with a measuring tape across the hole and another with the tape indicating the depth of the pothole.0 -
When you say you couldn't buy just one alloy wheel, how hard did you look? Seriously. I don't mean this as a criticism: just be honest with yourself about it. What I've found over the years, is that it's stunning what you can find on the internet if you go looking, and (without actually trying) I would expect I could find single alloys to match an existing set.
Thinking from the council's point of view, if I was in charge of deciding whether to pay out or not, I would be focussing heavily on whether you really truly needed to buy all four.0 -
I cant remember the exact numbers for how many inspections should be carried out on a road but if the road has been inspected regularly you will probably not be successful in your claim. If you travel the road on a regular basis they could argue there was some liability on your part for not reporting the pot hole. Its been quite a long time since I was involved in highway claims.0
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The Council don't generally handle claims in house so the details will be passed on to their insurers who in turn will get the inspection records from the highways department.
Unless they haven't been inspecting or repairing as they should i'm guessing you'll have wished you looked a little harder for that single alloy0 -
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When dealing with alleged negligence the Claimant has the right to be placed in the position that he/she would have been in had the alleged negligence not occurred.Why couldn't you buy a single replacement alloy? With any claim you are under a legal duty to mitigate your losses.
In the event an identical alloy can not be sourced, it is simply not reasonable to expect someone to drive around with an 'odd one out' alloy. Thus the claimed cost would be for a matching set of equal quality to the originals.0
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