County council and covenants

sheramber

Someone may have contacted the highways department with an enquiry , without making an official complaint.

Regardless, it does not make any difference to the current situation now that the council are aware of the situation.



My sister has a strip at the edge of her front garden which she cannot plant on, only have grass, as it is a service strip.

All the house in the street have the same restriction.

So, she owns the land but is restricted as to what she can do with it. As it is her front garden she maintains the grass.

mscroft

When the guy first came to our house, he said he was responding to a complaint. It has never made much sense. Even his first visit, it was so unprofessional that I doubted it was real. It was only when I googled him that I found he was genuine. I understand what you are saying about the service strip, that was why we contacted the council about it before doing any work. That dept said we could move the fence, leaving a 1m strip on the outside that we could plant up, as it was accessible. So the fence was moved 80cm. Our service strip runs along our back garden, as we are on a corner. They are now saying, owing to a formal complaint we have to undo it all. Yet the council have no record of this complaint. It just doesn’t add up, and never has!

RAS

Have you spoken to your local councillors? They might be able to get some sense out of the council.

TheJP

mscroft said:

When the guy first came to our house, he said he was responding to a complaint. It has never made much sense. Even his first visit, it was so unprofessional that I doubted it was real. It was only when I googled him that I found he was genuine. I understand what you are saying about the service strip, that was why we contacted the council about it before doing any work. That dept said we could move the fence, leaving a 1m strip on the outside that we could plant up, as it was accessible. So the fence was moved 80cm. Our service strip runs along our back garden, as we are on a corner. They are now saying, owing to a formal complaint we have to undo it all. Yet the council have no record of this complaint. It just doesn’t add up, and never has!

Sounds like the council were tipped off, and they are the party with the complaint. The fact that a council member of staff came and told you to rectify it is in itself a complaint?

mscroft

I’m considering writing to my MP and see if they can make any sense of it. How can we get permission to do something then get told by the same council, 2 years later that we have to undo it. The whole garden has now been landscaped and cost thousands of pounds. And that’s no exaggeration, probably about £15,000 and we’ve just completed it this year. They want us to spend thousands more, removing everything and moving the fence by 80cm! All the neighbours, and everyone who lives locally always stop us and say the house and garden, as well as the surrounding area has never looked so good. It’s a huge improvement on the dirty, overgrown dog toilet that used to be here. It makes no sense!

TheJP

mscroft said:

I’m considering writing to my MP and see if they can make any sense of it. How can we get permission to do something then get told by the same council, 2 years later that we have to undo it. The whole garden has now been landscaped and cost thousands of pounds. And that’s no exaggeration, probably about £15,000 and we’ve just completed it this year. They want us to spend thousands more, removing everything and moving the fence by 80cm! All the neighbours, and everyone who lives locally always stop us and say the house and garden, as well as the surrounding area has never looked so good. It’s a huge improvement on the dirty, overgrown dog toilet that used to be here. It makes no sense!

Was the permission in writing?

mscroft

Well, we put in a written enquiry stating we had just moved in and the whole garden/surrounding area required work and we needed to know about this service area. A few weeks later someone came out. We showed them what we wanted to do - move the fence then landscape the area like the property opposite. There was a lamp post on the land and he said he would go away and see what they could do. The next we heard, he rang and said yes..they will move the lamp post so we could move the fence. The work we did was exactly as we discussed. The next contact was email with a date for the lamp post to be moved. The other contact was phone calls. So, no we don’t have it in writing but we do have the agreement to move the lamp post. And the only reason to move that was so we could move the fence.