Public Sewer Advice!! Help!

castell2000

Hi

The searches have come back to the solicitor from my new house purchase and it turn out that there is a welsh water public sewer running within the boundary fence of our new house.
The mortgage providor is insisting that we determine whether or not this pipe is within 3m of the property. (closest building being the detached garage). The solicitor tells me to get dyno rod, drain doctor out to do a cctv survey but as far as im concearned the pipe runs in a straight line from one manhole to the other and we can measure this from the surface? we dont need a homebuyers condition survey as any future maintenance will be undertaken by welsh water as it is adopted by them.
My question is, should i be paying for this survey (if it is needed) and should i be paying for the imdemnity policy if the pipe is within 3m of the garage? i fully believe that the sellers should be paying for these things and am uncertain whether my solicitor is being a bit soft.

thanks

john:eek:

Richard_Webster

Get chapter and verse as to where lender says that you must determine if the sewer is within 3m of the property. The only likely place is that lender's surveyor said that this should be checked. Very unlikely that lender would have put an express condition in its offer to that effect. Might be solicitor being silly.

Another possibility is that the house has been extended in recent years so that it is now within 3m whereas at one time it wasn't.

Water companies get funny about new building within 3m of sewers but they rather stuck with sewers that were put in pre 1937 wherever they are. They are often a lot closer than 3m so if it is an older house in a town or city that had mains drainage in 1936 they really are being exceedingly silly and the solicitor should tell the lender not to be daft. Are they going to decide not to lend on thousands of older houses that have sewers a lot closer than 3m?

For instance my daughter has a house in Sheffield where a sewer runs under the ginnel that provides rear access to between every 4th house. The pipes then separate to provide connections at the back to each house. So as the ginnel is less than 1m wide the sewer must be less than 0.5m from the houses and similarly at the back it will be not much further away when it spreads out to provide connections to the individual houses. (Any pipe taking drainage from more than one house that existed in 1936 is almost always a public sewer.)