Issue with neighbours and plumbing

SarahMartin · 29 December 2018 at 4:12PM

Hi everyone, I'm new so if this is in the wrong place please let me know!

I'm looking for some advice on behalf of my Mum. She owns a semi-detached property (Scotland) and we're having some bother with the neighbours and the plumbing, apologies in advance for the long post.

My Mum and late Father bought the house about 25 years ago, and there have been lots of issues with the neighbours tbh. My parents didn't realise that all the waste pipes are connected between the properties, so all their waste comes over my Mum's property (the houses had been owned by the same family who live next door, and built by one of the relatives). The plumbing is poorly done, my Dad did a bit of work but in order to fix it completely they needed the neighbours to agree and they refused. The water pressure is also very poor due to the set-up, around 0.5 bar (half the mains value).

Whenever there is a blockage, it always ends up on my Mums side of the property (that's where the majority of the pipework is) as it get's pushed along. We know for a fact that they put far too much paper down the toilet, and cleaning towels etc that they shouldn't. The last blockage we had a few years ago ended up with our toilet getting broken (because they didn't tell us there was an issue and just kept plunging the toilet with a mop to move the blockage onto our side so that we'd be responsible for fixing it - resulting in water coming up our toilet). They ended up getting a plumber in who was useless and damaged pipework on our property (duct-taped pipes he cut!!!).
A couple of years ago, literally the day of my father's funeral, they put a downstairs toilet in. Obviously we were preoccupied and didn't really know what was going on. My Mum said to them that she was happy for them to dig up the front of the house to connect waste pipes (as my Dad had done years previously) to plumb-in their toilet. We later found out that instead of doing this, they had installed a Saniflo. Ever since, we have had issues with banging pipes and gurgling up sink/bath plug holes which coincide with them flushing the Saniflo (we can hear it). Now both our toilets are blocked, as are theirs but they didn't tell us hoping we would end up with problems and sort it. We tried to be reasonable and have spoken to them about the issues we've been having for 2 years, but they basically said that they didn't care because it's not affecting them (which has been the party line forever - we had water gushing into one of the bedrooms because they removed their down pipe and they refused to reinstate it until my Dad put in a restriction to reduce the flow of water, they then got it sorted straight away because they were "worried their house would flood").

I know people have much worse neighbours, but it's wearing my Mum, and myself, down. They are totally inconsiderate and rude when you speak to them. They hung up on my Mum twice today when she phoned to say the toilets were blocked.
I'm really looking for some advice on what our options are? We don't have the money for lawyers and they know that. Things have been worse since my Dad died, as they take advantage of my Mum and can be quite aggressive sounding at times.
Should they have put the Saniflo in without my Mum's permission since the plumbing is all joined? And since the water pressure is so low?

Any advice would be very much appreciated!

Thanks in advance