Awkward neighbour stopping us getting a phoneline

vet8

I posted on here a couple of weeks ago about our difficulties in getting a landline installed. At that point we had been going around in a sort of groundhog day for 3 months trying to get any sense from BT as to why nothing had happened.

We have finally got somewhere, well sort of! Our house is a converted stable block which is set back from an unadopted road behind other houses. Open Reach are obsessed with getting permission from someone to dig up the road for their cable even though British Gas, the power company and water board just dug it up without any consent. It finally turned out that OR contacted our neighbour who is close to the nearest pole to run the cable under the grass verge outside his front wall. He said no.

It seems he is just being a total a&&ehole as the engineer said they would only peel the turf back, put in the ducting and relay the turf. In 2 weeks no one would even know it had been done. It will not cross his driveway, affect his access at all or even be visible from the house, but he has said no.

Now after 3 months of this he has put his house on the market and he now says he does not want OR digging up the verge when someone comes to view the house, so when he finds a buyer he will allow it to happen then. Great, except his house is so ludicrously overpriced I doubt they will ever find a buyer or not for a long time and meanwhile we have no phone at all. To make matters worse there is no mobile signal at all in our area so if we had an emergency we would be stuffed.

Now I have looked at the Ofcom site and its says there that BT has a universal obligation to provide a landline to any house where it is requested "irrespective of location". When I said this to the OR engineer he said that only applied if the neighbours agree. That is not what the Ofcom site says at all.

moneyistooshorttomention

There must be some overall Ombudsman/woman that customers (or would-be customers in your case) can appeal to that can override one little scaredy-cat jobsworth down at your level.

I'd try investigating if there is such a person and how to contact them.

PasturesNew

Many buyers might be put off by having services for other people running across the land..... and, as he says, if a viewer comes and there's a man with a builder's bum digging a trench ... it won't look good.

Gas/water/electricity probably have "special permission" to do what they like as those are essential services. Telephones are just "lovely to have and important, but houses don't need them to operate as dwellings", which is why they're crossing t's and dotting i's.

iniltous

BT ( so presumably now Openreach ) can apply via the courts for a compulsory wayleave in situations where a third party landowner is stopping BT/OR fulfilling its USO to a customer, but it's rarely used and only after all other avenues have been explored.
The 'irrespective of location' doesn't really mean anything, the USO is a right to service , providing it isn't overly expensive to provide, this is taken to be £3400 in costs to OR to provide service, anything over this amount the customer would be expected to cover..the wording for obtaining a wayleaves is vague , something like 'at a reasonable cost' , I think it used to be the case that a rate agreed with the NFU was used as a guide for wayleaves, so if the NFU rate was £5/m , then if a landowner agreed to having an OR cable in their land , then they got £5/m.....they could ask for more than that, but OR could say that was an unreasonable cost , so wouldn't be held to the USO.

vet8

PasturesNew wrote: »

Many buyers might be put off by having services for other people running across the land..... and, as he says, if a viewer comes and there's a man with a builder's bum digging a trench ... it won't look good.

I can agree with that, but he has only just put his house on the market - like 2 days ago, so he could have agreed to the wayleave at any time over the past 3 months and it would have been over before buyers came around. I also dispute whether he actually owns the grass verge. Verges are part of the highway and I always thought someone's property ended at their front fence.

vet8

moneyistooshorttomention wrote: »

There must be some overall Ombudsman/woman that customers (or would-be customers in your case) can appeal to that can override one little scaredy-cat jobsworth down at your level.

I'd try investigating if there is such a person and how to contact them.

The trouble is we have been pushed about from pillar to post for 3 months now. We have had 2 sets of BT engineers out to install the line when the cable is not ready and OR and BT seem to keep pushing the job back and forth between them. At one stage we were told we would have to contact the neighbour and no-one could even tell us which neighbour it was. It has all been a shambles.

We have now been appointed a case manager, but the OR guy said that the job had been given back to them to do and he could do nothing without the neighbour's permission.

onomatopoeia99

PasturesNew wrote: »

Gas/water/electricity probably have "special permission" to do what they like as those are essential services. Telephones are just "lovely to have and important, but houses don't need them to operate as dwellings", which is why they're crossing t's and dotting i's.

Openreach and other telecoms companies have "code powers" under the communications act 2003 which allow them to install and maintain equipment, even by applying to the court to bypass a landowner's refusal of consent.

Norman_Castle

If he continues to refuse would he have to declare this as a neighbour dispute on his sellers pack?

I also dispute whether he actually owns the grass verge. Verges are part of the highway and I always thought someone's property ended at their front fence.

It ends at the boundary. Can you get that from land registry?

PasturesNew

vet8 wrote: »

... I always thought someone's property ended at their front fence.

No. Fences don't make boundaries - if you want to know what's his/not then for £3 you can download a copy of his deeds tonight and see for yourself the boundaries... of course, that only works if the part outside his fence is on those deeds as there might be a separate title for that bit.

For many reasons, lots of properties aren't fenced right at the border.

bertiewhite

vet8 wrote: »

Verges are part of the highway and I always thought someone's property ended at their front fence.

PasturesNew wrote: »

For many reasons, lots of properties aren't fenced right at the border.

^^^This.

I erected a simple post & rail fence at the front of my property but was told by the highways dept that it had to be at least 0.5m back from the highway (there is no path)

So that part of the verge is mine.

vet8

According to the OR guy, the problem is that it is an unadopted road and they must get consent from the road owner. Now the owner is lost in the mist of time, the original houses were built about 100 years ago as part of the plan to give returning soldiers an acre and a cow. Some firm built the first houses and owned the road then, but that firm has long gone. A neighbour spent a long time trying to track down who actually owns the road and was unsuccessful.

I think OR have decided to ask the neighbour as it is someone concrete they can contact.

I downloaded a document from the House of Commons Library dealing with unadopted roads and it said that public utilities have the absolute right to dig up unadopted or private roads if needed and the "road managers" cannot stop them. They can try to arrange a mutually acceptable date, but cannot refuse permission.

I am not sure though if phone lines are public utilities.