Paying for water which you can't access

Nenah12 · 26 November 2020 at 9:39PM

We bought an old school 3.5 years ago which we are converting into a house and which was sold to us as being without services as the services had come into the property via an old boiler house which was demolished when the new school was built. The property had been empty for 12 years when we bought it and we've never had access to water.

We completely stripped it out including all pipework and thought no more about it until we recieved a huge water bill from Wave for standing charges for a meter registered at the property a year and a half after purchase.
I phoned immediately and explained and asked for it to be marked as disconnected being as we had no access to water but the guy on the phone said that they couldn't do that but instead what would happen was he would put a hold on the account for 2 months and when it became a residential property then it would be written off, I just had to phone to put a hold on the account every 2 months.

This went on for months until I spoke to someone else who said that this was wrong and we would need to pay the bill unless we got it transferred over to residential but they wouldn't do this while it was still on the assessors register as "commercial under conversion to residential" so I then contacted the assessors office who came out but they stated that they wouldn't transfer it over to being a residential property until we lived there!
We started getting threatening letters at this point so I asked to speak to a manager and explained again that we physically could not get water and could we have it disconnected. She eventually came back and said we could so we were happy with that until the engineer came out who confirmed that the meter was turned off and pipes capped off but said that to mark it as disconnected then they now have to take out all the pipework back to the main pipeline which would involve digging up the road and he strongly advised that we didn't do that as it would make getting a domestic supply very expensive.
As it stands it seems that our options are paying for a water meter through which it's impossible to actually get water or have it removed and pay a huge amount to reinstate the pipework in a few months time. Has anyone ever experienced a scenario like this and come up with any other solution?