Ground stability identified on searches. (Infilled land)

Troy_af

Hello.

I have just had the environmental searches back for a property that I'm buying.  One thing that has came up as a possible complication is the ground stability section. Details are:

"Maps suggest the property is located near a previous pond, quarry, mine, landfill or other hole in the land. These land cavities are often filled with various materials, and this can cause structural problems. Groundsure's experts recommend that you check whether your structural surveys have taken this into account."

The map shows an unidentified pit around 24 meters from the property which has been filled in. The property itself is not directly over any infilled land, yet some properties on the site are. The site is a new development of roughly 500 homes, started around 5 years ago and not yet finished. Before this the site was an industrial site where they extracted magnesium from sea water, where they had huge tanks. I'm assuming it is these tanks that have been filled in.

Now since this is a big development from a major housing company I am expecting any sort of risks with the land or possible subsidence would have been looked into before building there? Is this sort of thing covered under planning permission or some kind of construction regulations? Is this something that a structural survey would look at, or would they only look at the current condition of the property?

I'm fairly sure it is not going to be a problem, we have already had the mortgage offer and there were no issues with that. I just wanted to some other opinions?

Thanks.

weeg

Yes, the housebuilder will have taken this into account. One of the upside of large new build estates is that they do comprehensive ground investigation, so the foundations are properly designed.

And I know this because I'm a person that designs foundations for several major house builders.

user1977

As above, there'll almost certainly be a much more useful geotechnical report among the planning papers on the council website - bit of a waste of time/money getting your own desktop reports for newbuilds.

ProDave

You will probably find at least some of the houses on the development have piled foundations.  The only issue that would cause if this was one of them, is it would make building an extension harder as that too would need to be piled.