Unadopted Road

scrivomcdivo

We're currently looking at puchasing a house and the council have just informed us that it is located on an unadopted road.

I am just wondering if people can advice me on whether this puts any further financial bearance on us? If someone gets injured on the paving outside my home, do they sue me or the council given it's unadopted? Who pays for street lighting maintenance etc etc....?

Thanks

heatherw_01

The road in my street is unadopted.

We get a flood a lot because of faulty pipework somewhere under the road. We have to pay for this as the water board and the council will not.

Basically any work that needs doing is at the residents cost.

scrivomcdivo

Thanks Heather. How does this practically work? Do you all pay equal amounts? What if one resident is unwilling to pay? Can you get insurance to cover you for it?

jlj_2

I live on an unadopted road and each house owns up to the middle of the road in front of their home and are responsible for it. I asked my insurance company (Direct Line) and they said I was covered on the buildings insurance if anyone hurt themselves on my bit of pavement/road. We have recently clubbed together and are at present having the road patched up where there are potholes-this has been difficult to arrange as some neighbours are against this as they want to keep the road rough to discourage people who don't live here from racing up and down the hill. I can see their point but as most of the ones who use it but don't live here are in big 4 wheel drive vehicles, the potholes don't actually slow them down at all or put them off using the road. Another thing worth looking into is-do the council grit the road in winter...........ours doesn't but some may. Hope some of this is of help.

heatherw_01

scrivomcdivo wrote:

Thanks Heather. How does this practically work? Do you all pay equal amounts? What if one resident is unwilling to pay? Can you get insurance to cover you for it?

We were all going to pay an equal amount and anyone that did not want to / could not afford to contribute (there were some) did not have to pay as no one can be forced into it.

I cannot find anything about insurance to cover it unfortunately.

I thought that the person who lives in front of a problem with the road has to pay as jlj said, but as we have a huge problem we all need to chip in.

We were supposed to get it sorted ages ago but as someone is having lots of building work done we cannot as yet.

The road can be adopted if it is in good standard of road.

The residents near me do not want that as they think everyone will park on it if they know that it is not private, but it doesn't say it is anyway.

silvercar

we had an unadopted section at the end of our road. when the council sent round people to clean out the drain they had an unofficial arrangement to do the drains in the unadopted road for cash in hand. It was £50 divided by 14 houses; there was one busy body neighbour who would go round collecting precisely £3.57 of each house to pay for it. She was a bit of a dragon so no-one ever said no.