Neighbour wants to fence off end of shared access driveway

Lorian

There may also be a covenant that seeks to keep the front of the houses as predominantly open plan and not fenced?

YoungBlueEyes

Where's @Section62..? He's normally straight into this kind of thing.

doodling

Hi,

If it is a right of way then it will persist until either all the people who have rights over it agree something else, or a court orders something, no matter what happens on the ground.  This means that someone could come along is 50 years time and insist on using the RoW, probably prompting all kinds of argument (especially if D has build a garage on it!).

To avoid problems in the future, you either need to agree to the RoW over that bit of land ceasing to exist, or object to its obstruction.  Anything else is storing up problems for the future.

If no-one is too fussed then the best approach is to agree to the removal of the RoW on that part subject to D paying all the costs (which may be significant as A, B, C and each of their mortgage lenders will need to agree the change).

bobster2

doodling said:

To avoid problems in the future, you either need to agree to the RoW over that bit of land ceasing to exist, or object to its obstruction.  Anything else is storing up problems for the future.

And presumably getting D to agree to give up their RoW over the drives of A, B & C - which they don't need anymore if they have their own access to the road.

Does anyone have any idea how much modifications to deeds like this would cost?

Doozergirl

We were the equivalent of house D, thought there were only three houses.  

We spoke to our neighbours and agreed to put the fence up.  House C on your plan then ended up with a much bigger drive, so they benefited the most, to be frank.  

Houses A&B at the other end don't miss out on anything.  

There was nothing written into the deeds in our case and no one ever came up to our end so no one cared.  

Jonboy_1984

Around 2012 a colleague at work was house D and put up gates between them and and C to keep their dog in, as the property didn’t have a back garden. 

House C insisted they needed to use the RoW to turn around and kept leaving the gates wide open. 

Ultimately they got to the stage of solicitors writing letters to each other and after the bills hit £10k to each side they finally accepted they were legally in the wrong, and took the gates away and shortly after left the area as they had lost all love for the property (the gates being one of the last stages of a large renovation on the property as their forever home) and the relationship with the neighbours had become toxic.

It hadn’t helped that the neighbours seemingly had a controlling streak and the colleague was an incredibly stubborn individual at times, but it was a ridiculous amount of money that could likely have been discussed and a compromise reached to update the covenants beforehand (or move the gates a few feet in to leave a turning area…).