Unadopted road

moneyistooshorttomention

That I can believe and I know well how cash-strapped (or they believe they are.....) many Councils are these days and hence have sussed that they won't "adopt" roads unless and until they are satisfied with the standard of them not putting the Council funds at risk of any foreseeable expenditure.:cool:

I've worked in the public sector for many a (too) long year and know that financial management boils down often to "Who can we pass the buck to for paying for that?" bar a particular "high up" official Other wanting some money to blow on luxuries to suit themselves....cynical....moi?;):rotfl:

I get your earlier point too re cables maybe having been done to Poor Standard, but am reckoning that expenditure on that would boil down to "maintenance" expenditure (and therefore no attempt to come a-knocking on householders doors for the money), rather than "upgrading" expenditure (at which point there might be a knock on the door). I guess its down to basic level TV channels are considered a "necessity" these days and therefore it would be "maintenance" expenditure to keep them going and "upgrading" (therefore we might come a knocking) expenditure would be down to "If you want MORE channels then you currently have, then that counts as "upgrading" and a bill that might be yours personally to meet.

Therefore, as long as you are okay with the "basic TV channels" and the like level of service you currently have with public utilities = no (potential) problem then...

suebfg

We had a good solicitor when we bought our house on a private road but this cannot account for the issues that can arise between neighbours where there is a shared responsibility for something. Having been through that, I'd run a mile in the opposite direction of shared drives, private roads etc, however perfect the property. Once bitten twice shy!

phoebe1989seb

We used to have friends that lived on an unadopted road. Their house was formerly a pub that had previously been converted to residential use and the *road* only lead to a handful of new builds (erected after our friends bought their house) at the rear with our friends Victorian building and a similarly aged house the other side of the entrance.

The (small) road was a mass of pot holes and on the occasions we visited we would avoid parking to the side of their house for that reason. IIRC they had issues with the neighbouring property on the opposite corner, concerning upkeep of said road, but I'm afraid we lost contact and I'm unaware of the outcome......suffice to say though it did put us off ever contemplating buying a similarly situated property

Strapped

It's a bit of a sore point around here. We live on an idyllic, no-through lane (unless you're a quad bike going up through the fields) in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in the South Devon countryside. A perfectly ordinary lane. Except that apparently one side of it was unadopted. Four of our lovely neighbours decided to buy this bit (and I mean half the width ie "their side") and then decided to have it resurfaced. Long story short, their contractor made a real botch job, a lovely wavy, crumbly uneven "join" with the rest of the lane and they also decided to put in a very inappropriate curb - which would be fine in a town but not in a country lane - with the end result being an unsightly mess, a trip hazard especially in snow/ice, and some very unhappy neighbours who didn't anticipate that ownership of, and control over the use of, land were two different things. (They started to try to stop people driving over it and parking there. They failed.)

BTW - this wasn't flagged up when we moved here. Even the council didn't seem to know that they they didn't have responsibility for that part. It was only because of the mindset of the 4 neighbours that it ever became an issue, a couple of years after we moved in. (For them - we have carried on as normal lol).

suebfg

Yes, when we bought our house there were only a couple of properties on the private road. Then, a number of houses were built and the road couldn't cope with the additional traffic.

moneyistooshorttomention

Fortunately, there literally isn't any room available to build extra properties on this particular road....well bar the site to the right-hand side of the road getting bought up and the houses there (with entrances elsewhere to this road) getting developed anyway. Its not a part of the country where developers are "grabbing for everything they can get their hands on" (unlike my present area:() so should be safe from that.

My head hurts. I've been googling away till I'm pie-eyed. My solicitor (legal executive to be exact....) that is dealing with the "legals" for me feels I'm worrying unduly about liability for any third party injuring themselves and heading for us residents with a claim. She seems to feel that its only the owner of the road that would be liable and I'm not going to be an owner (only someone with a Right of Way in the road) and that therefore they wouldn't be suing us householders anyway (even though we are responsible for maintaining the road surface and any potholes from lack of maintenance would have been caused by our not doing this).

As far as I can see googling, if the owner of the road cant be traced, then there is basically a legal presumption that the "frontagers" (ie those people with houses fronting onto the road) would be deemed to own only the section immediately in front of their own house and then only out to the halfway point on that section of road. From that, I am assuming that that particular section of road (if "deemed" to be theirs only in lieu of the actual owner being traceable) would fall under their normal household insurance (ie what we all have anyway for Third Party Liability in case of something like a slate flying off the road onto the head of a pedestrian walking along the pavement immediately outside the house).

So, am I worrying for nothing, ie because worry is something I do so well?:(

Maybe it's all a case of "all will be well" and all I have to bother my little head with is paying my share of road surface maintenance costs if need be ever and think "What the heck?" and be glad of the fact I'd live in a road that was much quieter and more private than most and that no-one was likely to come into without good reason (ie business with one of us householders in the road).?

useless

hi there,

I just wondered what you decided to do in the end?
did you take the insurance even though the solicitor thought it isn't needed?

was following this thread with interest...

moneyistooshorttomention

I've been doing absolutely loads of googling and my overall impression is the law is a right mess on this and pretty impenetrable.

As far as I can work out the position from all that googling it seems to boil down to:

1. In the case of larger private roads there is likely to be a Residents Association and this is probably one of the things they will deal with (ie getting the road as a whole insured at a likely cost of around £250 per road per year) and then sharing the cost between the residents in that road. Thus 25 houses would (well...should..) mean £10 per house per year for insurance. Minimal cost. This function of an RA would be more to reassure home-owners in that road, rather than because it really would be necessary by the look of it.

2. In the case of a smaller road, then there are fewer houses available to share this cost and there probably isn't an RA in existence anyway and road insurance simply isn't going to happen.

3. It looks as if any potential claimant for an injury has to head for the owner of the road basically with that claim (and that still applies even if the owner is unknown, which is often the case). There is the concept of frontagers here in the case of unknown owner (ie being deemed to own the section of road in front of your house out to the halfway point on the road). So, playing safe in the event of an unknown owner would mean making sure the section of road immediately in front of your own particular house to that halfway mark should mean accidents couldn't happen anyway in front of your own house.

4. People living in an unadopted road can get their local Council to adopt the road if a majority of the road residents agree BUT the Council will expect the road to be brought up to standard first (which could cost thousands of £s) and there are one or two non-financial side issues why road adoption may not necessarily be a good idea anyway.

5. If someone wanted to bring a claim they would face a huge series of obstacles to doing so anyway. Like first and foremost being how they would prove the accident had happened in the road (rather than somewhere else) and this would rule out the vast majority of potential claims anyway.

6. If someone is so concerned about the state of the road that they think it might create an accident for them (and no we don't just mean a few potholes. This means MAJOR damage to road surface) then they "might" be able to persuade the Highway Authority to get the residents to bring the road up to scratch and, if this were the case, then the HA would have to give suitable notice to those residents to do so and then there wouldn't be an accident happening in the first place anyway. It does look rather like "no notification to HA of major risk = no claim possible anyway". Ha's are highly unlikely to bother their heads about a road, even if notified, anyway unless the road is MAJORLY bad bad bad.

7. "Contributory negligence" comes into play. As in the very first questions to ask of an accident claimant would be:
a. Just why didn't you just walk around that pothole, rather than right through it? You could see it = claimants fault.
b. Just why did you drive down the road anyway when you could see it needed maintenance? Why didn't you drive down some other road instead or walk down the road? = claimants fault.

So, I personally came to the conclusion that an accident would be highly highly unlikely in my road-to-be and, if it happened, the total barrage of obstacles put in front of any would-be claimant would be so huge they probably wouldn't even try to put in a claim anyway. There is no way a reasonably careful person wouldn't walk around a pothole. If a car-owner had decided to drive in that road then their car insurance would cover any damage to their car anyway.

It looked as if there simply isn't a way that a potential claimant could have an accident other than being pretty careless themselves and it would be their own fault from what I could see, thence followed by that huge and impenetrable series of obstacles in trying to bring a claim.

That was my personal overall conclusion to all that googling from what I could make out...but I would add that I'm not a solicitor (just reasonably competent at googling).

A solicitor may come along and say "Got that all wrong Money and the position actually is......" but the above is based on what I came across (on goodness only knows how many sites I looked for info. on this).

I even had an insurance broker say to me "People only take out insurance on these roads anyway because they've believed scare stories of what might (but couldn't) happen to them if they don't. Don't waste your money" or words to that effect.

So CAUTIONARY NOTE is that I would advise doing your own research to check the position for yourself, as the above is just my personal summing-up of all the googling I did.

bouicca21

Apologies for resuscitating this but have just been looking at a flat in a block on an unadopted road. The road is full of potholes, though I was told this was down to the bad weather and that it would shortly be repaired. "Repair" = hiring a JCB to dump some sort of filler into the holes and tamp it down. The road surface is more or less dirt and gravel. The arrangements are that residents (and this is no country lane, it's in London so there are a lot of them) pony up about £40 a year for regular visits from the JCB. The advantage seems to be that this particular road has exceptionally low traffic. Paying to bring it up to standard would be a fortune, which is presumably why the residents have somehow voted against it.

I need to pin the vendors down on precisely how formal the arrangements are - and how anyone can be sure that those who ought to pay do.